Following Friends Across Walled Gardens

Phil Gyford makes his plea for a single social network sign-on or as it was stated last week by Jeremy Keith on Twitter, "portable social network with XFN"  [Jeremy posted his
More thoughts on portable social networks
on his blog.
]

The single sign-on is an often heard request these days. Nearly as much as a dashboard, er central interface to monitor all one’s friends across the various walled social gardens.

I have been watching ClaimID and Marc’s People Aggregator to make huge strides on this front.  Some recent conversations seem to point to others possibly providing this solution.  So far it is the early adopters that are needing these tools, but a recent post by Scott Andrew about people moving from MySpace to Facebook makes me think the cross-garden social tools will have a mainstream appeal in the very near future.  Well, those of us that are veterans of the on-line services of the early 90s will recognize the need as our friends jumped from one closed service to another when there was a 5 dollar a month fee hike.  Your buddies left Prodigy and went where? AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, usenet groups, etc.?

The current web environment makes the keeping up with your friends (if they grant you permission – this really should be the case) easier across closed social services.  Digital identity will be essential as will our trusted list (or grouped list) of friends we want to keep in they loop with our life (lives).



5 responses to “Following Friends Across Walled Gardens”

  1. moatazb1@yahoo.com Avatar

    We’ve been building the type of site you’re requesting. Your comment ” the cross-garden social tools will have a mainstream appeal in the very near future” is very true and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Check it out at http://iceflake.com

  2. personalinfocloud@factorycity.net Avatar

    Iceflake doesn’t actually help, from what I can tell. It’s just *yet another* place to aggregate your friends to — it doesn’t help with the transmission of data or connections from one service to another.

    What we really need is for greater adoption of publishing and consuming XFN+hCard across the social networks!

  3. fred@metalab.unc.edu Avatar

    +1 to this. I’m hoping that the OpenID 2.0 namespace will have robust support for these types of movements across services. I want to be able to easily move things like my friend network or tagcloud from service to service.

    There isn’t really any win in the walled-garden play, so I wish that more industry entrants would adopt OpenID off the bat. It is a wise investment in the future.

  4. siteinfo@icite.net Avatar

    There are a bunch of ideas mixed up in this that are somewhat alien to the web, which has only the URI as its native identifier.

    On one level, all of the ID / profile tech out there is convoluted in the sense that it has a non-native semantic and/or interaction that is supposed to work in many web-native (or, otherwise, closed-system) contexts. This tech imposes its semantic and/or interaction on other contexts.

    This can make sense sometimes, e.g., the ID / profile tech serves to unify different contexts (sites, social networks, etc.).

    But, I think the ID / profile tech, being convoluted, offers almost no way in itself to understand the implications of unifying different contexts. So, closed system developers and individuals both have good reason to wonder if ID / profile tech is going to create more problems than it solves.

    IMHO, I think we’d be better off focusing on a purely URI-based approach. And, as more convoluted solutions are out there, we should look to be sure that they degrade gracefully to the purely URI level.

    For example, if, given a bunch of people, each has at least one URI that is unique to themself, other stuff (single sign-on, profiles, contacts / social networks) can be always optional on a per-user / per-context basis. And, it’s easier to implement each option in a variety of ways (e.g., a vCard profile is perfectly good for lots of stuff, but an hCard profile might work better for other things).

  5. freemyfriends@freemyfriends.com Avatar

    We’re also working on making our social graphs to be portable. Our service http://freemyfriends.com allows users to automatically rebuild their social networks on any site. Thoughts?

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