Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends with You

Open Data

Tools like Firefox plugin Operator can extract the hCard and XFN data and combine it with other sites in useful ways.

When importing data into a new social network, formats like XFN and hCard allow you to describe both the person, and his or her relationship to you. XFN is used to find links to the people you consider friends. hCard is used to extract structured information about those friends, including things such as URLs, email addresses, organisations and phone numbers, all of which can be migrated into other services through the use of open data.

Sites that Allow the Import of Data

As an example of helping users avoiding the tedious task of retyping their information over and over again, a site called GetSatisfaction.com allows them to create a user profile based on the URL of an hCard. Instead of filling out tedious common form fields about their names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, users simply enter their hCard URLs. GetSatisfaction will then fetch the HTML page, parse it for hCard data and populate the corresponding fields.
Several sites already have contact information marked up as hCards. If you have a Flickr account, for example, your profile page is encoded in hCard. So you could enter the URL of your Flickr profile, or maybe a page on your blog.

Ideally, GetSatisfaction would remember that URL, and if or when you changed the data on your Flickr profile page, GetSatisfaction would update its information as well. Much like RSS's publish/subscribe model, GetSatisfaction and others could subscribe to your remote contact profile data encoded in hCard. Then you have only a single point of data that needs to be updated, and all the changes are reflected globally.

New microformats and social networking-related tools are popping up all the time. Dopplr, for example, offers users the ability to search for friends who might also be using the service. This simple tool helps you see if someone you know is a member of the service; then you can connect with them. The downside of the service is that I manually need to enter each friend's name in order to search for it. My address book isn't huge, but still, that's too much work to search for my contacts one by one. Microformats to the rescue! Dopplr gives you the ability to enter a URL of a page that's XFN encoded. It will parse that page for any XFN links, automatically search its database for matches, and tell you how many of your friends are part of Dopplr. It's just reduced my workload from searching for hundreds of names, one by one, to searching on a single URL.

I'm not completely off the hook, though -- much of the work is still on me. I need to keep an HTML page online, which has all my friends' URLs marked up in XFN. That sounds like a lot of work just to start, let alone keep up to date. But because of the portability factor, we can use other social networks' open data as our seed list of friends. My Twitter account, for example, has a Friends list that happens to be marked up with the XFN microformat. In Dopplr, I can point to that Twitter Friends URL as the list of friends I want to import. Effectively, I'm using one social network to jump-start another. Again, there's also the possibility for Dopplr to "subscribe" to my Twitter Friends XFN list. So each time I update/add a new friend to Twitter, Dopplr would find it and check to see if the new friends are also a members of their services. This means I need to keep fewer places updated, because all the services are feeding from each other.

Sites that allow the importing of data through URLs are building the next step in creating a more open portable social network. By importing data from other sites, users are able to quickly build their new networks using these next-generation sites. By sharing this data as XFN, the social network sites become hubs from which other networks can extract data. The built-in power of HTML allows us to create these associations and links without using any new technologies.

Anti-patterns

Not everything that appears to help customers jump-start their social networks or import their data is a good idea. Several anti-patterns have emerged, and you should avoid them whenever possible.

Some sites ask you to upload your address book so they can "help you find friends". What they could really be asking for is a list of your friends' email addresses so they can spam them. Privacy is certainly a grey area -- and rarely will your friends want to be contacted by third parties on your behalf. You should think twice before uploading any personal data about your friends without their permission. Not all sites will spam your friends, of course, so be sure the read the fine print.

Another pitfall that you'll want to avoid is sites that ask for the login details for your email account. This is a huge security hole. By handing over this information, you're giving a random provider access to all your emails and friends, not to mention access to APIs through which they could edit and delete your information. And, as none of us want to admit, we often use the same passwords for many different services. Provide your email password to a site, and its owners can not only get into your email, but possibly your bank accounts (and a bunch of other services) as well. You should never give your password to anyone! Creating assurances of privacy lulls us into a false sense of security -- it relaxes us into thinking everyone can be trusted and everything will be safe. This bad behaviour is exactly what phishers love to prey upon.

The ability to import data from another service is a great tool, but doing so with a username and password is the wrong approach. Sites like Flickr, with its Authentication API, Google's AuthSub, and Yahoo's Browser Based Authentication are doing the right thing with authentication. OAuth is an attempt at open authentication which will help consolidate the spectrum of different authentication methods across different web sites.

Using these tools, you can authorise other sites to access your data with the fine-grained permissions you set -- not through giving full access through your username and password. If you're using your username and password, then the social network developer is not importing your data the correct way.

Towards Real Portability

OpenSocial is a new development from Google that's a step in the right direction. Although it doesn't allow for the direct portability of your social network, it creates common hooks between any social network that implements the OpenSocial API. This means that a developer can use the People and Friends Data API to get a user's profile, get a list of friends and, with that, obtain their profiles as well.

Even though there's no export button (yet), a simple widget could be developed to export your data into portable formats such as XFN, hCard and FOAF.

OpenSocial is in its very early stages, and the only site that implements a limited API is Google's own Orkut, but it is a very important step in creating portable social networks.

Promoting Good Behaviour

Sites that easily allow you to import and export your data should be promoted for their good behaviour. You should try to patronize sites like these and pressure other sites to follow their lead.

The Web works because anyone is allowed to link to anyone else. Your real-life social networks blossom because no one tells you who you can and can't be friends with. Online networks should be no different. The Web is my social network; I just happen to use various sites to help me manage it, not be the traffic cop who controls it. Open portable social networks solve all these problems.

Your online identity is yours to control as you like.

For more information on portable social networks, check out these sources:

• the microformats.org explanation of social network portability
• sixapart's announcement about its opening of the social graph
• a post on the Dopplr Blog about new features to allow the transportability of social network profile content
• an explanation of the Plaxo Pulse service
• Getsatisfaction's signup page
• an interesting opinion piece on personal, portable social networking by Cameron Adams
• Dash, the Internet-connected GPS that allows you to access social network-related info on the road
• Jeremy Keith talks about the password anti-pattern
• Corey Reece explains the value of opening social network systems
• Corey discusses the process and implications of open graph on online friendships