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17 Jul 2006
Social Network Portability
Marc Canter discusses some issues on social network portability
Moving her links, photos, blog posts, etc. is not the issue. That’s easy. She clearly owns all that stuff - lock, stock and barrel. She move it anywhere she wishes - with no ramifications on anybody else. [NOTE: We’ll cerainly want to give her control over exactly what can move - where.]
But when she moves her list of friends (and in a related issue - her Groups) to SNS-B - she needs to bring along the emails of those friends - or else they’re really not ‘there’.
On one hand - we want to move our friends with us - on the other - they deserve the right to say - “NO - don’t move me.”
What do you think?
Well, I agree that this is a very heavy issue. It seems that the moving the simple MicroContent, such as links, photos, etc is not difficult. I guess there are probably some issues, but they are easy compared to the MicroWeb issues: the links between all the MicroContent Items. The message here is to host your MicroContent on an open hosting provider. And maybe you should not mix a hosting with a social network provider.
I see a conflict between the concepts of social network and a service. A social network service seems to be a closed thing and I wonder it can really be open. My friends are in my local address book and some have an identity at a a social service. So if I want to know what they are up to within a social (network) club, I visit that club. In the case that I no longer want to be a member of a club, I cancel my membership. I surely would like my friends to go along and I will send them an invite. But to move all my conversations within the old club with me sounds odd. Why did you not converse outside the (old) club? What was the benefit of the old club in the first place? So use your normal mail service if you want to carry out conversations.
I guess you should publish your public network in your FOAF-file at a FOAF-hosting service. Any social network service should be able read (and update?) that external FOAF-file. Thus the FOAF-file can grow to something that is independent of any network.
And email should be seen as simple MicroContent. In the case you used a private email service, you should be able to move it to another email service. This has some interesting consequences for email addresses, but that is where the FOAF-network should be able to do the translations. And you can only move the emails that you have authored. So the interesting situation might arise that your email discussions are fragmented over multiple private (Social Network) email services. So I guess I am saying that I am against private email services and that they should open up and use the open public system.
Probably I am thing to simple. I am just very critical of Social Network Services.