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:

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.

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

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.

Social Network Portability FAQ

See social-network-portability-faq.

Events

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

Articles and blog posts

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

If you can't see my friends and let my friends be seen, you'll be washed up and hung out to dry.

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.

Issues

Beware of and avoid Social Network Anti-patterns!

See and add to social-network-portability-issues.

Alternative Approaches

Non-web based:

psyc and psyced, a decentralized multi-protocol chat and event notification system with friendship and trust modeling.