Breaking Down The Walls Of Social Networks

Sites like Facebook and MySpace seem on the surface to be all about the Web 2.0 experience:

• User generated content is rampant throughout them
• Social interaction is dynamic, and happens on a worldwide scale
• Members enjoy a wide range of applications that allow them to customize their personal user experience.

However, when looked at from an outside perspective, most of the Web 2.0 essence of today’s social media sites is hidden behind virtual walls.

Because of the lack of data portability or two-way interoperability, these sites look from the outside like many of the “walled gardens” that made up Web 1.0 in the 1990s, such as an AOL or a Prodigy.

There is an extensive amount of connection and activity within, but those connections are severed (at least one way) when you leave the site.

The reason for the walls is simple: the promise of monetization for these sites is based upon people staying put, in order to watch ads or buy products. The datasets on their users are a social network site’s most valuable asset, and they have little inclination to share.

While these sites may publicly support things like Open Social, in reality, as Shiv Singh states on Going Social Now:

“Most of the vendors who have joined these initiatives are more interested in plucking each other’s social graphs than actually opening up their own networks.”

From a user perspective, breaking down the walls of the social network sites through data portability would be a good first step. However, data portability simply means the ability to take your contacts list from one walled site to the other. And for many users this is probably not something easily undertaken if it was offered, and some would even call the whole concept “boring” (hat tip to Robojiannis).

What is missing are applications with simple and elegant interfaces that float above individual social network sites, and allow a free flowing interaction between participants linked across multiple social networks.

Thanks to several posts by Allen Harkleroad at the Favorite {fvrit} Blog (who always seems to be spotting new and innovative social media applications), I can see the beginnings of a solution through social aggregators.

Although they aren’t open to the public yet, services such as socialthing! and iminta seem to be a good first step by at least putting all your communities in one place as a social network dashboard. Plaxo’s new Pulse service also seems to be playing in this arena.

What seems even more intriguing is Socialstream, a Carnegie Mellon project that was sponsored by Google. According to their description, Socialstream “is a system where users can seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks”.

What I was even more impressed with was this:

“The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.”

In the case of the Socialstream ideal, data portability becomes an non-issue. You never have to worry about breaking down walls in order to move your network, since your network never leaves your side.