Social Network Fatigue
Another typical day 2.0 of a person 2.0 that wonders if there
maybe has come the time for a version 3.0. While on
facebook there are another ten
invites to the next “super super wall” waiting, on
myspace that hot chick wants me
to visit her site (probably 2.0 as well but I didn’t
check) ….but for some reason she is only friends with
Tom. On Orkut another brazilian
girl left a message on my message board. Too bad I am one of the
few people on that platform that does not speak portuguese or
spanish. On (the german)
studivz another friend does the
equivalent of poking me and I still wondering WTF
“gruscheln” is supposed to mean. In my email inbox
(which is so 1.0) I’ve already got another 2 invites to
the next big social network that tries to make millions by
gathering people and have them enter their information –
again.
I am so getting tired of this. And people around me already are
too. Some even left those networks (or just don’t use them
anymore) because social network fatigue is currently spreading
like a infectious disease. And since I am also only really using
LinkedIn and
Xing I
might opt out of the others as well.
One graph to rule them all
While I am a big believer in the potential of social networks I
also think that the current implementations are flawed. While
Open Social
claims to overcome the silos I can’t truly see the vision
of the one social graph behind it – which for me is the
holy grail of social networking. There are some people arguing
that a single graph is
not desirable
and
cannot reflect the dynamic nature of human relationships. While I do think those critiques have a point, I also think
that the conclusion they draw are wrong. The graph does need to
become more dynamic and yes – the data should be yours.
Your data, your control
The data should belong to the user and this is clearly expressed
by initiatives like
FOAF. They put
you in charge of your data – other people
may consume it though. Google recently announced to
crawl the FOAF
data for example. As taking ownership still requires too much
geek skills these days, of course one could imagine a scheme
similar to OpenID providers to
give you the freedom and control of your data in a non/less
geeky way.
The problem I see with
FOAF (or
XFN) is also that there is no
privacy control. Information wise you do a striptease and put it
up on the net as a video. The user needs to have fine grained
control of what data gets exposed to what service. So what has
been a static FOAF file needs to become dynamic and provide
different views to the different services consuming the data. I
don’t want all my contacts on Facebook to show up in
LinkedIn or vice
versa.
So if we could provide a way to provide different views on the users data to the different social networks, the different networks could happily co-exist and complement each other. Relationships could become less binary (friend or not friend) and could be more easily maintained.
Technically this is quite quickly spec’ed out – what’s needed is adoption. Maybe something the data portability initiative could help with?