Experience Matters

“Here I go again on my own…” *sigh*

A couple of weeks ago a colleague pointed out a new social application called Brightkite had popped onto the social network radar screen. I’m looking forward to playing with this application more – it promises to deliver a location-based networking service. After checking it out I couldn’t help but think what we’ve all said or thought at some point over the past year – another site that requires me to register, build my profile, add my friends – you know the rest. I also could not keep a certain White Snake song out of my head, but that’s my concern. The part I find interesting is that this was a big rant often heard 12 months back – but now there seems to be nothing. Have we decided to stop whining and accept the pain?

Last month I had the opportunity and pleasure to attend the 2^nd annual International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Seattle. The conference draws in experts and academic researchers focused on blogs and social media as a whole. A particular topic or theme stretching across the conference was the social graph problem. Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of Live Journal and now working with Google, delivered a very interesting keynote on the topic of the Social Graph problem. Brad and others have continued to work on the problem. They have been at it for some time now and they have some momentum developing.

Jeremiah Owyang, Sr. Analyst with Forrester, provides a very good executive summary of the social graph and issue:

“The Social Graph is the representation of our relationships. Today, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social websites. Unfortunately, we’re duplicating our same Social Graph on multiple websites, resulting in inaccurate data and time spent managing it. Despite many challenges, our Social Graphs should be self-managed from a single trusted source, replicated to websites of our choosing, thus resulting in accurate, efficient, relationship management.” Read more from Jeremiah here.

Brad Fitzpatrick rolls his initiative into 3 target areas:

1) Ultimately make the social graph a community asset. Utilize data from various locations and ensure the data is decentralized from the companies and organizations.

2) Provide developers with options; offer high-level APIs that allow new social network developers to avoid re-creating the wheel with each new start-up.

3) Give the end user a better overall experience; allow users to synchronize their data with their social networks.

I like the approach Brad et al are taking and the theory provided. The concept almost starts to sound simple, but it’s anything but simple. There are other groups out there also trying to solve the social graph issue – OpenID, Move My Data, Open Social and Google Code’s Social Graph API to name a few. All of this helps to muddy the waters for the average user. From the start, Brad Fitzpatrick has been focused on friend data. Move My Data is focused on helping users own and control their content. OpenID stems from the open source community, while Open Social is centered on developing a common / standard API for social applications. Google Code’s Social Graph API “now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.” It seems to me like we’re already in the middle of a standardization storm, not sure how all of this activity will align and solve the bigger issues yet.

Now I don’t have the answer to this problem but I do know (technically speaking), it’s far easier to re-create a unique social graph for a new social start-up then it is to solve the larger social graph / network portability issue. Until there is a universal way for personal data to be available publicly we’ll continue to feel the pain. The concepts proposed by Brad Fitzpatrick and company make good sense. They also will not happen over night. Building consensus and opening up the social graph will require clearing many hurtles and tying like-minded solutions together.

So - how long will we really have to wait? Web browsers, programming languages, operating systems and mobile devices all represent examples of the speed at which standards initiatives can move – very slowly. Without a solution we will all carry on using the social networks and applications we’re comfortable with or the ones our friends use. Perhaps it doesn’t matter? However, I know it’s wearing thin for me…