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.