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.