Open Social Network Roundup

There seems to be more and more dis­cus­sion regard­ing the open­ness of social net­works of late. In try­ing to fol­low the dis­cus­sion, it seems that there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of ‘open­ness’ being dis­cussed. Dare Obasanjo has pro­vided a good overview of the dif­fer­ent con­sid­er­a­tions of what it means to be an open social net­work.

Regard­less of what def­i­n­i­tion of open­ness you are using, Fred Wil­son, reminds that:

…most of Facebook’s tra­di­tional users (like my two daugh­ters) don’t care that their data is locked up in Face­book. I’ll show them my Face­book run­ning in Netvibes when they wake up this morn­ing and they’ll say “that’s nice dad but why would you want to do that?

For­tu­nately, there are a num­ber of peo­ple inter­ested in portable, open social net­works includ­ing Marc Can­ter who pro­vides us with an overview of some of the peo­ple and pol­i­tics involved in the open social net­work dis­cus­sions that are hap­pen­ing. Marc is work­ing on the Peo­ple Aggre­ga­tor to be a stand along sys­tem and is dream­ing of dreams of aggre­gat­ing aggre­ga­tors, aggre­gat­ing con­ver­sa­tions and aggre­gat­ing groups”

Stephen Downes has also done some think­ing in this area and defines three areas of need for social net­work porta­bil­ity and names some of the tech­nolo­gies that may get us there.

Wired recently made head­lines with their cri­tique of the walled gar­den approach that many ven­dors are using to con­trol cus­tomer data. The arti­cle came along with a nice how to page from their wiki on how to Replace Face­book using Open Social Toos that gave some good ideas on aggre­gat­ing con­tent from your net­work of friends, but read­ily admit­ted the dif­fi­culty of pro­vid­ing the key com­po­nent of social net­work­ing– rela­tion­ship man­age­ment tools.

For­ward into the future we go– with mis­matched def­i­n­i­tions of what it means to be “open”, busi­nesses who build mar­ket share by walling their cus­tomers in and many cus­tomers who don’t feel any need for things to change.
Hope­less?
Hardly. As com­mon def­i­n­i­tions emerge, busi­nesses mod­els are adapted and the need for social net­work porta­bil­ity is rec­og­nized then solu­tions will come for­ward, it just may be a lit­tle bit of a wait.

Other resources:

• Social Net­work Porta­bil­ity Google Group