Social Network Portability

Social network portability is one of several user-interface ideas and suggestions for working with microformats in the area of data-portability.

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 you 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.

Publish microformats in your user profiles and contacts.
1. implement hCard on user profile pages, including xfn rel="me" on hyperlinks to users' blogs or home pages that they specify. See hcard-supporting-profiles for sites that have already done this. See how-to-publish-user-profiles for more details (See hcard-authoring until that previous link is created and filled in.)
2. implement hCard+XFN on the list of contacts on your user profile pages. Use xfn rel="me" to link to contacts list pages and contacts list pagination links too. See hcard-xfn-supporting-friends-lists for sites that already do this. (e.g. [Twitter]) and how-to-markup-contact-lists for more details.
3. implement hCard wherever a user's name is mentioned in lists, in comments, in messages or wherever else it would help to identity that a "person" or "organization" is being referred to.
Subscribe to microformats for your user profiles and contacts:
1. when signing up a new user and importing contacts
  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 (sign up page). See how-to-import-user-profiles for more details.
  2. let a user fill out and "auto-sync" their list of contacts from one of their existing hCard+XFN supporting friends lists. Dopplr.com already supports this (screenshot). See how-to-import-contacts for more details (e.g. first implement direct XFN friends list import/subscribe by using the SGAPI to important contacts *across the web*, much faster than importing from one service at a time.)

Resources

Groups

Ma.gnolia Portable Social Networks group for aggregated bookmarks around the subject and join the group to share links.
Upcoming Social Network Portability group for events to discuss and implement social network portability.

Open Source

"OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites.
hKit - web service and open source PHP for parsing/importing/subscribing to hCard open user profiles.
"Online Identity Consolidator" rel="me" web parser/crawler web service and open source Python. (source code link now broken; Google code has a copy at rel_me_crawler.py)
"Django-PSN (portable social networks)" open source for a user interface to create links on a social network profile to "other profiles" marked up with rel="me" naturally. The code can be seen in action on the Pownce website, e.g. on a Pownce profile page that links to other profiles of the same user. This is a great complement to the above Plaxo Online Identity Consolidator. What Django-PSN publishes, Plaxo Online Identity Consolidator parses.
identity-matcher - Rails plugin to match identities and social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and any site supporting appropriate microformats. This code was extracted and contributed from Dopplr.
Portable Social Network Lib is a Ruby library for consuming/providing Portable Social Network services in social web apps, written by Steve Ivy. (More)
DiSo - distributed social networking components, Chris Messina and Steve Ivy

User Interfaces

"Social Network Portability with Microformats" - a user interface that lets you check how portable your social network is across various sites.
"ufXtract - Portable social network profile parser" - A public API which can extract both hCard-XFN patterns and XFN rel=me links from social networks. The API can spider multiple pages following rel=me links. It also tries to find the representative hCard and provides output as JSON or XML.