Pffft! Social Graph, We Need the Portable Social Network

Thomas,

I agree. We need this. I sent you an email with some questions.

rashmi

austin.govella@gmail.com

Eh… Having been an active member of online social networks since 1993, moving from one network to another has never really been a big issue for any of the communities I’ve been a part of.

On the personal level, moving networks is like moving real world residences: you lose contact with some people, maintain it with others, and find entirely new people to hang out with.

At the network level, I think Andrew Hinton’s “communities of interest” explains it well. The community doesn’t really care what interface is used to share interest. The object is the interest, the medium is irrelevant.

A lot of the recent discussion about portable social networks seems terribly analogous to how England began enclosing the commons in the 1600s. This might seem like a reach, but the PSN is like encircling your personal commons, and the assumption is that by encircling the connections (not the actual interface) you can extract specific value. And although it’s not a dollars and sense value, in today’s experience economy, requiring capitalistic value to be in hard cash seems silly.

The real value of a SN isn’t in your connections, but in your connections’s connections. LinkedIn and Facebook and MySpace definitely don’t own those connections, but neither do you.

Making your SN portable is really about controlling the data representations of your connections, in the hopes of having leverage to your connections’s connections.

Your SN is already portable, losing people when you change residences is a part of everyday life, you have no real need to permanently remember every connection you’ve ever had, so you have to ask yourself, why?

Why do we need to be able to export (own, control) a limited data representation of our social network? What real-world problem are we trying to address? What’s the real point of pain? The real opportunity?

I really doubt it’s the ability to not lose contact info. I really feel like we’re missing an important “aha” moment here.

austin.govella@gmail.com

And…

(Not sure my precious comment went through, but…)

The other hidden, conflated issue has to do with identity. Your identity is as much your interest (potential connections with communities) as it is your connections.

I think the real question behind PSNs is how do you make digital representations of your identities — your interests and connections — portable.

For the bizarre with only one identity, it’s the same problem, but for most people, it’s a huge problem. In fact, I bet research would show that most people take advantage of the walled gardens to help segment their different identities.

In this light, controlling your connections’s connections is just as important as controlling your connections. If you don’t want anyone to know you like knitting, you have to be reasonably sure that when you connect with Bob that he won’t then tell other people about your dirty secret, or that the people he would tell would be cool enough to understand how yarn makes you feel.

This is what we’re talking about when we talk about wicked problems. It’s taken the human organism thousands of years to evolve a tool to manage multiple identities across multiple social networks across multiple communities. It’s called the brain.

I would love to see that replicated in two dimensions.

siteinfo@icite.net

I totally agree with what you are getting at, and maybe “portability” is the right way to think about the next step. But, I personally have trouble seeing these social networking sites as actually embodying my social networks, and I react to their offerings as being mismatched to my needs.

I actually think that these social networking sites are successful in part because of the novelty of finding one’s social network in a closed and constrained system. In other words, the mismatch in general and the lack of portability / openness specifically are core novelties / features of these sites.

So, I wonder if the “portable people aggregators” are just very different applications altogether.

Or maybe we could actually, y’know, *have relationships* with the people whose company and concourse we enjoyed, and not waste even a moment worrying about representations thereof, portability thereof, ownership thereof, etc.

Just a thought. : . )

Austin, I agree with communities of interest as that is what most of my social interactions on the internet (other than e-mail) have been since 1992. But, the venue does make a difference and have been an many groups on various services that either up and moved to another or started a new group (some reasons were the platform (restrictions, functionality, or price driven move) other related to human social dynamics. The technology/service adds a layer to the conversation.

On the front of people moving in physical life and losing connection I know many people who do not see the same thing having to happen in the digital realm. They may move services but still expect their friends to be there or have access to them from their new service. Many have been using SMS, IM, e-mail, etc. and the service does not matter the people do. It is important for many people to keep their friends and contacts (hopefully holding on to contextual interest, this was a trigger for my granular social network post years ago) and they expect that to happen. I agree there is value in the connections of connections, but the first thing most people do on a new social service is track down their friends and contacts to connect to the conversation and interact.

Jay, I think the portable people aggregators are a different beast. While the novelty of looking around for friends is a past time for some it is the cost that keeps people from switching services. This is not really many people’s interest until their friends have moved on to another service.

rob@robfay.com

edward.vielmetti@gmail.com

From the little I’ve read, it seems the idea of a Portable Social Network is really more about Personal Information Portability. Is it just about bringing your contacts with you? For me, it is important to be able to also take my conversations, or at least my comments, with me.

I think of the blog platform I use – WordPress. WordPress allows me to import my posts and comments for a variety of platforms and standards.

It would be great for these services to allow me to choose what I want to take with me, it spits it out in a given format, and then I can simply plug it in anywhere. But again, more than just contacts.

Perhaps the discussion should move towards what to take with you and define standard elements of each of these traits.

7 December 2007

the sane strategy would appear to be to have some redundancy in your frending behavior. when you add someone to your network via these social networks, add them in multiple places. then if any of those goes casters up (or you abandon it for some other reason) it’s not a total loss.

this is also the argument for loosely coupled systems that are a pain to manage but that are robust in times of failure – why you have a phone book with similar but not exactly the same data in 3 places that’s always a little out of date but always there even if you’re offline and the power goes out.

if the community is strong enough it will outlast whatever temporary software scaffolding holds it together.

7 December 2007

“The sane strategy would appear to be to have some redundancy in your fr[i]ending behavior.”

I’m sorry, Ed: the “sane” strategy is to keep your “friending” (ugh) behavior from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

At what point do we realize that “social” networking, at least as currently manifested, puts the cart rather before the horse – that it demonstrably causes social awkwardness, discomfort and hurt that would not otherwise exist? That it’s simply incapable of modeling, let alone responding to, the nuance and dynamism of real social interaction? That even the most refined offerings in the space could accurately be described as near-autistic?

It saddens me more than I can properly express to see intelligent people falling for the idea that “what we *need*” is portable social networks, or open social-networking standards. We don’t actually *need* any of these things. In fact it’s quite possible to enjoy a vivid, rewarding, even an over-full social life without a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, let alone an account on one of those loathsome “premium” private YASNS.

Ask yourself: how much time and effort do you put into maintaining these awkward, clumsy frameworks, redundantly or otherwise? How much time have you invested in massaging the odd and occasionally uncomfortable situations social networking gives rise to, feeling explicitly excluded from the inner circle of someone you thought of as a friend or hurt that someone hasn’t reciprocated your gesture of friendship? Just how much is your time worth, anyway – do you *really* receive value for value given?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’m sure some people will find that the benefits do outweigh the hassles, in some cases by quite a large margin. But let’s not fool ourselves that social networking on the current model is inevitable, necessary, particularly well thought through, or even a good idea to begin with.

mail@L-Ludwig.com

9 December 2007

The portable social graph is only a special case of portable profile data as dealed with (to some extent) in FOAF. Portable profile data is only a special case of any user-generated content locked in Web 2.0 applications. What is needed is a private content system that hosts any of the information. Why should a social application own user generated content at all. I am developing a personal knowledge store (called ArtificialMemory at http://www.artificialmemory.net) which is aiming at tackling this problem in a broader sense.

dirk.olbertz@gmail.com

I completely agree with you and started a solution for this a couple of month ago. It is called NoseRub and is a protocol for distributed social networks. Right now, we are working on enhancing the protocol, but on http://identoo.com you can see an example implementation of this.The goal is, that you can install NoseRub on your own server and there manage your profile and contacts. And of course you should be able to move your contact and profile from one server to another.

This all is built on top of XFN, FOAF, RSS and OpenID, because we don’t want to invent any things new.

askrom@graphpaper.com

I’m with AG in asking that we try not to mistake our social networking apps with our social networks. Our social networks should be allowed to exist without the apps.

Social networking apps are like trendy nightclubs or stylish clothing or popular brand names. People go to them, hang out, make the scene, and move on. The frustration you feel when they die and new ones come up is the same frustration you feel when you realize that your shoes are out of fashion and you have to go shopping for new ones, or the bar you’ve been going to for years no longer draws an attractive or interesting crowd but you don’t know how to make the scene in a new bar.

Basically what I am saying is that the desire to make your social network data portable is a desire to make your social *life* completely automated. It’s like saying “I wish when I went to a new bar it would be automatically filled with all my friends whenever I go there”. Sorry, but you have to actually look around and find your friends, invite them, make plans with them, or walk up to strangers and introduce yourself.

Maybe the real trick would be to make a social networking tool that you never want to leave (the equivalent of getting a haircut you will feel comfortable with for years). One you can keep locally. Like, I dunno, in an address book?

askrom@graphpaper.com

Allow me to also posit this:

For the vast majority of social network users, if not all of them, the act of accumulating friends from scratch, trolling through friend lists to find friends and potential friends, and building up one’s own profile page to reflect who you are in this new network, is the primary thing they really enjoy about the social network in the first place.

Put simply, if you make migrating to a new network as easy as pressing a button, you will remove everything that is fun about social networking in the first place. Nobody, including the people who said they wanted the portability, will want to do it.

This whole “portable social network” idea is a fool’s errand that profoundly misunderstands the Web-based social networking phenomenon. It’s a cure that will kill the patient. Which is why none of them will ever listen to the complainers.

On the other hand, though, making the social graph part of a PIM or an Address Book is an interesting and promising idea. Don’t include the social networking platforms at all.

Mr. Fahey, oh do I disagree. You have lumped all people into one pile. There are many people (quite a few researchers are finding that it is a majority) who feel their platform for social interaction on the web is not serving themselves well and the biggest thing holding them back is not having ease to find and reconnect with those whom they have already connected. The services that provide easy means to connect with those your connections on other services are finding they are getting good adoption and many people are staying and trying the real social interaction their services provide.

Much of the research around people only wanting to friend people is largely based on services that offer little else and/or their social offerings are not enticing enough to do anything but just “friend” people. There may be those that just want to friend (I do believe there are), but the majority of the people are not in that category.

I do agree that the address book or PIM should manage much of this, or could be central in this approach.

I am not a fan of the term social network as it is only part of what happens in social software. The social network is the connection between people, hopefully to a granular level so that the person can have the services work as a proxy for them, if they trust the service enough.

The digital representation, or capture of the relationship status is the social network and the connection’s connections are also relevant in the social network. But, social software should be a lot more than just these statements.

I agree with AG in part, but the social interaction with social software researchers was my sole reason for joining Facebook. The only interaction I had with them was a conferences and occasional e-mails. The social software researchers are discovering things that have been missed by the designers and developers of the social software tools, which when understood and accounted for are making for improved services. It allows for people who are geographically disparate to find people near in thought and share ideas and interact (on rudimentary levels compared to face-to-face communication, but distance puts those restrictions in place).

AG you said, “Or maybe we could actually, y’know, *have relationships* with the people whose company and concourse we enjoyed, and not waste even a moment worrying about representations thereof, portability thereof, ownership thereof, etc.”

Ding, ding, ding. You are the winner! This is exactly the point.

When people lose trust, faith that their wishes for privacy, or degradation of service happens (real or perceived) they move away from a service. When these people whose company or concourse is not available do to physical location many move to the next best, technology. When the services in the technology fail, they try other services, and from there they try different technologies.

For many the social software is their means to have conversation and interaction with people they enjoy the conversation and company of, not everybody is afforded the luxury to live in Silicon Valley, New York, San Francisco, etc. where ease of direct physical company or concourse is available. But, many of us do the the luxury of having a resemblance of this through the internet and social software.

askrom@graphpaper.com

My contention is that users *say* they are frustrated by having to recreate their profiles every few months or years, but that if we give them what they want we will both destroy whatever fun they get from social networking *and* we will undermine the business models of the social networks themselves.

You are also lumping people into one pile: people who create lots of social networks that are difficult to recreate. Skim through the social networks today and I think you’ll see most people only have a handful of friends. They’re hardly invested in the same way you and I might be.

And what, praytell, are the “real social interactions their services provide” besides, ultimately, “friending”? If you mean the blogs and photo postings and such, well, you don’t need a social network for those and I wonder how many (%) of social network users actually do go beyond the friending stage? 5%? 1%?

The sites whose services are valuable are those whose social networks are secondary — far, far secondary — to the services themselves. Flickr, for example. Social networks work best as glue for services, building community around a tool. The networks that result from this are tool- or service-dependent, and for many people this is is what they want. They want to control who gets to be part of their social graph *in a certain context* — blogging, their resume, their photos, twittering, whatever. It’s not the same network on all services. Social networks will, in the future IMHO, be seen as features, not products.

The desire for a portable social graph seems to be linked to the ongoing existence of web-based social networks where the networking is the product. I don’t think that model will persist. Facebook, in fact, may prove to be the death of it insofar as the “app platform” has proven so distasteful to many, and so incompatible with entrepreneurship that people would rather build tools and services elsewhere, thank you.

Again, the PIM based approach seems fine to me. Don’t even think of it as a portable social graph for use by social networks, just think of it as an address book with link information and some ability to share information across the net. But then again, when was the last time PIM data evolved in a standardized way? Email, ical, vcf, these are all a complete mess of ancient standards, competing open standards, and proprietary junk.

I am being a little deliberately contrarian here, but honestly I find it hard to swallow that this idea will ever catch on since friendship is so dependent on context and is not a template.

Mr. Fahey, I agree completely that interests for all people that a person connects with on one service will easily move to another service. I have been ranting on the granular social network for years and should reflect in any social portability, but that is a tougher nut to crack.

Related to what people do in social software (I roll the web services into social software, but it can also me mobile based like Jaiku or Radar (from Tiny Pitures)) are a larger set of actions and patterns around social software and related services, see http://flickr.com/photos/vanderwal/2049590133/ (a blog post will be coming on this at some point).

I am finding that (stereotype follows) those under 30 are actually using the services that those over 30 are just using for friending. The size of the groups seems to depend on where people are geographically and their culture. But, the highest levels of service use are with groups that are 6 to 15 people, but many individuals belong to more than just one group and service. Those with over 100 connections are not the norm, which are those most interested in social group portability. But, many who have far fewer connections in their social groups are also stating and prefering to use services that allow them to interact with their friends and connections. Many of the 30 and under set say they know who their friends are that they want to keep and have with them on a service. Services finding that they can lower the rebuilding those connections and let the people try and use their service find greater adoption and longer lasting use of the service than before they had those capabilities.

Saying people like friending, but people are not staying with services that adhere to that view.

One, interesting side note relating to blogging. In talking to University students and those just out of University the last two years or so, they look at blogs as something “old people” do. Many of these people are looking at the social software to be their activity status and social interface to others.

There are many people (quite a few researchers are finding that it is a majority) who feel their platform for social interaction on the web is not serving themselves well and the biggest thing holding them back is not having ease to find and reconnect with those whom they have already connected.

Which researchers? What research?

but the social interaction with social software researchers was my sole reason for joining Facebook.

I think that here you get closer to the core of what’s actually going on than you realize. In your use of these services, you’re dealing almost exclusively with people self-consciously being “social,” which strikes me as a practice bound to produce bizarre and statistically aberrant artifacts. (As Rem Koolhaas once said – and it was clearly one of his more coherent days: “If you want spontaneity or everyday life, you should keep architects as far away as possible.”)

But everything is social, really. Most all of our artifacts are, in the end, social performances of one kind or another. The truly bizarre thing to me is somehow demarcating some subset of the things we do and calling that social-with-a-capital-S.

12 December 2007

AG, the odd thing is darn near every social web service has been doing research on this and been finding similar results (I am finding this at conferences where the people heading these services or researchers have been talking about this stuff in the hallways. But the owners of the services are getting told flat out to their face that people who have an interest in possibly trying their site are not wanting to go through the pain of finding their friends and contacts on that service. I do not know of anybody that has been talking about their research publicly (blogs or journals), but many are finding it funny that there are so many researching this and finding the same problem and responses to the current solutions are strong.

I think where you think I am going – people use services where their friends are (as well as where their is conversation of interest or activities they enjoy) – I have been for quite a few years. Ironically, this is the starting point for this post. You have people you like chatting with and sharing with, but the service/platform (what ever you want to call it) does something that drives a negative impact (sells user information, charges more money, has security/privacy leaks, etc.) and people you like interacting with leave. This has been happening with Facebook the past few weeks with 40 or so people I know deactivating their accounts, or doing all of the work needed to completely remove all traces of their use to then have Facebook fully remove them. Some have stated the services they have been using instead, so to keep conversation going, but others just say they will surface somewhere at sometime online.

The problem stated was the difficulty with which people have finding their friends and contacts on various social services. People use services where their friends are. The tools to easily discover who is where and reconnect easily while respecting privacy (as well as the ability to not automatically connect as services are not fungible) and easily connect to the people you wish to keep contact with in that context. This is what the people thinking about portable social network have been thinking about and working through.

12 December 2007

Thomas, you misunderstand me: I come not to fix social networking, but to bury it.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe it to be a radically bad idea, bound to create more problems than it addresses. (Just you wait for the wrongful-death suits to start. Whatever their merits, you know they’re coming.)

The whole model of “connection” and “interaction” inscribed in the services you’re talking about is derived from the capabilities of technical systems, not built on an understanding of what makes relationships work and persist. In my view, it’s fundamentally wrong, fundamentally inhospitable to nuance and richness, fundamentally prone to create hurt and to increase the distance between people. No amount of tactical improvement can or ever will fix that.