This comment was left on the post where I responded to Chadblog’s question: “why would people want their social network identities tied together?”

So I went off, basically saying: “because they have their own reasons to move their data around, which include stheir friends, blog posts, media and links.”

So now he’s come back with thoughtful issues - which of course - play right into my other hand. You see to me, Identity, data-sharing/movement and what the big established social networks DO - are tied incestuously at the hip.

So here are my in-line comments to Chadblog’s comment:

Hm….I agree that this will evolve at some point. The way I would term it is once people get serious about X feature - blogs, photos, etc. they want to migrate off of more generic platforms and go to more purpose-specific platforms. However your scenarios seem to have two issues, one of identity management annd data sharing.

Got it - I agree - and you focus on the conflict between what we want and they DO is correct. It is EXACTLY what we need to focus on!

Regarding data sharing it seems to me that what you are referring to is some kind of basic data-publishing scenario where I publish my blogs / photos / listings / whatever once then they get pushed out at my leisure to various other platforms.

Correct

But….this is directly in opposition to the business plans of all the sn companies. I’m pretty sure newscorp isn’t too eager to help their users migrate to wordpress for blogging and flickr for photos.

Unless of course, Facebook’s openness forces them to. Or the further success of NetVibes starts to scare them a bit (if they were smart.) One thing I always say about MySpace is that unless they open up their APIs - all the data is leaving MySpace and none of it can return. APIs have to be bi-directional which makes them the great equalizer.

Also, how big is the user annoyance here? As long as my photos are on flickr I can link to them from anywhere manually today. I guess I’m not sure this is something that can be forced in terms of evangelism to the SN companies (thats kind of like selling thanksgiving to turkeys). Probably whats needed here are some kind of use cases that will make users demand data-publishing across SNs.

So I have 3 years worth of 1,000s of photos in my Flickr account. I also have some shots I uploaded from my cam phone onto VOX and Cyworld. I now wish to collect and print out a book of all my favorite shots of Mimi (my daughter.) That’s available - at a great price via Facebook. So……..

And note, a lot of the stuff you are talking about here is doable today using widgets. For instance you can push your flickr photos over to any webpage using a widget. Maybe this doesnt fix long-term storage but I’d argue people will gravitate towards service providers who are stable and won’t go out of business anyway.

Yes and we have a great feature in PeopleAggregator which will allow you to take your personal info from Facebook, MySpace, YouTibe, Flickr and Google and combine them into any number of widgets in any combination.

Maybe S3 can have a consumer offering.

Coolio - I fully expect Amazon to playing in this game - heavily!

On identity however i’m totally unconvinced. Sure IN THEORY if I could have one username and password to log into all of my different sites that would be much neater than how it works now. But from a user standpoint, again, I think people would be very nervous if their account on linkedin was even tangentially linked to their myspace account. Remembering multiple name/passwords seems to me to be here for awhile longer.

I actually think of it as multiple personas. Which may or may not want to be combined - but dude the issue here is CAN you do it, not that you MUST do it. Those of us who get off on an integrated, single access identity - will LOVE this. For all else - please keep your personas separate! But you do point out, off-handedly why I think the single sign-on current state of OpenID is just simply not enough. Without data movement, its all for naught! You gota be able to DO SOMETHING once you’ve connected these disparate systems together. Just being logged in - sure as hell ain’t enough.

We’re currently in a land-grab. My guess is that your vision will come to pass, but only after the boom-bust cycle takes effect and we get to a point where user annoyance is greater than the energy put into creating monetizable walled gardens by the companies. Which will only happen when the ad bubble bursts again and the market for startups stops valuing captive users so highly.

I actually agree with you here. Totally. There’s a whole ‘nother level of greeed that has to be exorcised first.

I mean, end of day its a social problem not a technical problem, its solvable today without a doubt. But like your earlier effort (FOAF) I am a little doubtful that there is sufficient force pushing in the data-sharing and identity-sharing direction as opposed to force pushing to capture users in walled gardens.

We learned a lot of lessons from FOAF and the FOAFnet. Now we’re applying that knowledge and expertise moving forward.

In a way it reminds me of what I used to hear from arrogant enterprise software companies about “our customers”. The same 500 customers, every arrogant enterprise customer thought they owned.

Yup - and that’s almost exactly what Jonathan Abrams said to me back in 2003 about Friendster. When I approached Tom of MySpace back then, he laughed at me. But Mr. Zuckerberg at Facebook seems to be doing the right thing - almost. So…… we’ll see what happens.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.