social-network-portability

Social Network Portability

One of several user-interface ideas and suggestions for working with microformats.

The Problem

Why is it that every single social network community site makes you:

• re-enter all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)
• re-add all your friends

?

In addition, why do I have to:

• re-turn off notifications
• re-specify privacy preferences
• re-block negative people

?

AKA "social network fatigue problem" and "social network update/maintenance problem".

The Goals

When you join a new site, you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to

• your profile information
• your social network

from any existing profile of yours.

In addition it would be nice if preferences around:

• notifications
• privacy

also transferred between profiles.

AKA a social internetwork, a network of social networks.

Design Patterns and Recipes

The "How To" for social network profile sites that want to solve the above problems and achieve the above goals.

1. Publish microformats in your user profiles:
   1. implement hCard on user profile pages. See hcard-supporting-profiles for sites that have already done this.
   2. implement hCard+XFN on the list of friends on your user profile pages. See hcard-xfn-supporting-friends-lists for sites that already do this. (e.g. [Twitter]).
2. Subscribe to microformats for your user profiles:
   1. when signing up a new user:
      1. let a user fill out and "auto-sync" from one of their existing hcard-supporting-profiles, their name, their icon etc. Satisfaction Inc already supports this.
      2. let a user fill out and "auto-sync" their list of friends from one of their existing hCard+XFN supporting friends lists. Dopplr.com already supports this.

Discussion and suggestions

• Jeremy Keith: Twittering:

  Here’s what I want: when I go to the latest social networking fadsite, I want it to ask for my URL. Then it can go off and fetch my hCard and XFN list. A pre-filled form for my details and a pre-filled list of potential contacts can then be presented to me.

• Derek Featherstone: Solving problems with social networking
• Jeremy Keith: More thoughts on portable social networks
• Glenn Jones: Microformats and portable social network
• Velvetsarah has posted a screenshot and brainstorm about how a site could handle importing XFN enabled contacts.

• Jeremiah Owyang: Twittering:

  What if we could port all our friends and family from one social network to another. Why do we have to continue to add people = annoying

• Brian Oberkirch: Highrise, microformats and portable social networks

Social Network Portability FAQ

• Doesn't OpenID address the re-enter all your personal profile info problem?
  • No it does not. OpenID is fundamentally about proving to one site that you own or control another particular URL. Nothing more. All the profile stuff is extra and even then the specific property set is unspecified in OpenID. That's where hCard comes in. hCard specifies a vocabulary of personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.) based on industry standard vCard. And in fact that's all you need to solve the "re-enter all your personal info" problem for public sites - no need to authenticate public URLs via OpenID, just read them and parse their hCard(s).

See also

• user-interface
• hCard
• xfn

Notes

2007-07-28 Meeting between Daniel Burka, Tantek Çelik, Eran Globen, Brian Oberkirch at Ritual Coffee Roasters, San Francsico, CA.

• discussed portable social networks, problem statement, goals, design patterns, recipes