Justin and I have been talking a lot lately about what’s wrong with social networking. Much has been written about social network fatigue and about the lack of data portability provided by many of the major social networks. For a variety of reasons, the portability of my identity and the graph of who my friends are and my relationships to them – in other words, me and my social network – is an extremely interesting problem to me. (And as Eric says, every good piece of software starts with a developer scratching his own itch.) Perhaps I’m not so interested in data portability aspects of getting my photos out of Flickr or my bookmarks out of Delicious because it’s already so easy to do. Getting my information about myself and my social network out of Facebook isn’t easy to do…
Becoming a Node on the Social WAN
Whether they realize it or not, when people talk about a “social network,” they’re talking about a social LAN. All the profiles in Facebook or MySpace or Orkut or wherever are on the same network – they’re Local. What we need to be thinking about and putting in place is a social WAN – a … Read more