social-network-portability

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Revision as of 17:15, 27 September 2007 by Chris Messina (talk | contribs) (added Portable Social Network Micro Meetup)
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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:

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, 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.
    2. implement hCard+XFN on the list of friends on your user profile pages. Use xfn rel="me" to link to friends list pages and friends list pagination links too. 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.

Resources

Groups

Open Source

User Interfaces

Social Network Portability FAQ

See social-network-portability-faq.

Issues

Discussion and suggestions

picture-9.png

See ma.gnolia Portable Social Network Group for aggregated bookmarks around the subject and join the group to share links.

View blog reactions to this page.

Articles

See also

Related Events and Notes

(if you know of or can find earlier mentions on the web of "social network portability", please add the earliest reference elsewhere on the web to this chronology. Tantek 08:25, 22 Aug 2007 (PDT))

See the microformats events page for upcoming events related to social network portability.