Open Techknowledgy: What makes up your social graph?

By: Dennis Mongello

Posted: 8/24/07

How do you interact with people on the Internet? Sure, there's the old staples like E-mail and IM, but now people have blogs and are members of several different social networking sites. Why do people have to sign up for so many different sites? Isn't one enough?

The simple answer is no. It's not. We all have a lot of friends, and they are all on different social networking sites. Who is on MySpace? Who is on Facebook? Who uses LiveJournal instead of Blogger?

The sum of your contacts online, in addition to all the social networking sites and systems you use, equate to your social graph. Think about how many different sites you have to login to. Why should we have to go through this inconvenience for our networking? Most importantly, why do you have to sign up with each individual site in order to be able to view these profiles or communicate with the people behind them?

A similar problem has existed for a while: There are tons of IM services. Everyone has heard of AIM, but people in other parts of the world don't take kindly to using something called "America Online." Also, some people have just always used and prefer Yahoo! Messenger or Microsoft's counterpart. Now, with Gmail, you have your Gtalk account to worry about. Here you are, with your AOL screen name and buddy list and someone tells you their IM screen name is blahblahblah@hotmail.com. See if that buddy ever comes online.

The solution was an easy one: make one software program that can sign you in to every network at once. Programs like Trillian, Pidgin and Adium bring all of your IM buddies into a single sign on environment, so why can't the same thing happen for other social networking services and blogging?

This is what Brad Fitzpatrick would like to accomplish. Fitzpatrick is best known for creating LiveJournal. Well, at least, his most well known creation is LiveJournal, even if you haven't heard of the man before. If you haven't heard of LiveJournal, it's a blogging site that predated MySpace. Users wrote an entry, like a journal entry, and people were free to leave comments about it. This was one of the earliest social networking sites on the Web.

Fitzpatrick's solution to combine the social networking sites would be a seamless experience for the end user. Upon first entering a new site, the site should recognize who the person is and recognize their friends from other sites that already have profiles on this new site. So basically, he envisions an underlining social system that has the ability to keep track of all your cyber relationships across all social networking sites and can update each site accordingly and automatically. Of course, all of this automatic dissemination of data should be controlled by the end user, who must first give permission as to what, exactly, they want to be done automatically, for privacy's sake.

Fitzpatrick does not intend to make a new social networking Web site. The whole point of this project is to not reinvent the wheel when it comes to these sorts of sites. It should also help limit the amount of personal data we have about ourselves on the Web. For example, if you have a MySpace and Orkut profile, you might have some photos shared on each site. Some might overlap; some photos might be unique. Either way, you don't have an exhaustive list of all of your photos on these sites, because storing photos is not the main draw of these sites, meeting people is. However, you then have your Picassa or Flickr site that has all of your photos, because that is what these sites are made for. Wouldn't it be great to upload your photos once, to one site, and still have all of your friends be able to see them? And still have all of these photos associated with your MySpace profile so that your MySpace friends can see them all? Having data stored once, in one place, means that you can keep track of everything more easily and the chance of it getting hacked or stolen goes down as there are less targets for attackers.

A lot of you might be reading this and thinking that Facebook (and more specifically Facebook applications) is doing this already, and Facebook has become the Swiss army knife of all social networking. Having all of these features under one owner, so to speak, is potentially dangerous.

Fitzpatrick warns against Facebook's users becoming slaves to the site. Concern might also arise according to who owns this one central site (remember when News Corp. bought all your personal information on MySpace?). Having these services spread around across several owners might be a better idea. This also gives people a choice as to which sites they want to use for which function. For example, someone might like Google Video for sharing videos more than YouTube. It would be unfortunate to force people into using one site if they want to take advantage of their social graph.

As the Web moves ahead with Web 2.0 technologies, social networking will become even more ubiquitous and it will become more important to be on these sites to improve one's social capital. It would also be a hassle to connect to each site individually; it's a time consuming and, quite frankly, needless task. The competing sites also won't interconnect their sites on their own, and that's where Fitzpatrick's system comes in. His proposed framework just makes things simpler overall, and what can I say? Making things simpler for the end user is always a good thing.

Dennis Mongello is a senior majoring in information systems and is author of the Open Techknowledgy column.