smallchou.com/blog

Interesting article/idea by the guy who started Livejournal, followed up by this week’s announcement from Six Apart about opening up the social graph. It’s a good read if you’re interested in things technology and (specifically) social web-related.

The short version is that, as a user of a ton of applications relying or built on my personal network of friends/colleagues/etc., I’m tired of going to all these sites and ‘adding’ all of my friends. It’s a tremendous problem if you think about it…

For example, I thought Twitter was pretty cool and seemed like a tremendous idea. I tried it out, liked it a lot, and thought to myself “This thing would be great if I could get all my friends to use it.” So I thought about inviting all of my friends to try it out, but then I realized I’d be spamming them and their responses would sound like this:

Hey, Jack just sent me an invite to this new application. It looks like another one of those social network things. Ugh, what a pain in the ass, I don’t want to go in there and add all my friends – I already use Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Myspace, and that new one Hunkydory.com.

The result is that there’s a huge perceived “switching cost” to move from application to application, even though most of these sites/applications are built for completely different purposes. The example that Fitzpatrick gives (dopplr.com) is a site that really isn’t interested in replacing Facebook or Myspace. It just wants to do its thing. But by being labeled as a ‘social networking site’, there’s really no way around the huge perceived “not another social network” phenomenon.

While it might be tempting for large social networks to think of that switching cost as a great way to achieve lock-in with their users, history has shown that type of strategy is rarely productive in the long-term.

My old officemate Ben once made the comment that his social network/graph is in his GMail account (or something like that). That’s a pretty powerful idea if you think about it – maybe the complete social graph can just be aggregated through all of your contacts in your email address book. I think it’s an idea that clearly carries a lot of weigh, after all why else are so many apps implementing the “Give us your email address and password and we’ll import all of your contacts/friends from GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail” feature?

But at the end of the day, my ‘social graph’ is more than just the people in my GMail contacts. It covers a wider and deeper pool of people (I hope). An initiative like Social Network Portability could help me fully replicate that in a virtual form.