This is a follow up to Mike Dover’s posting on Facebook: A Call for Openness.
Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal and OpenID, has written a blog posting on his thoughts on the social graph and how it should be decentralized. According to Fitzgerald, we should be making the social graph a community asset, ensuring to utilize the data from different sites, but without depending on any individual company or organization as a centralized owner. Open source software could collect, merge, and redistribute the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph.
Fitzpatrick believes that a user should be able to log into a social application and be presented with the option of prompting you to become friends with others, based on a previously declared relationship elsewhere. Fitzpatrick’s goal is to build the guts that can allow a thousand new social applications to bloom.
Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Users wouldn’t have to re-enter their personal profile information each time they signed into a new social application, nor would they have to re-add all of their friends, thus avoiding the ‘social network fatigue problem.’
However, it is recognized that users don’t always wish to ‘auto-sync’ their social networks. People use different social networking sites in different ways. For example, a friend on Facebook may very well not be the same type of friend that one would have on LinkedIn. Do you really want everyone to know what you’re up to at all times?
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[...] that there have been further developments in the realm of decentralizing social networks since my last post on the topic in August of last year. It was announced this morning that representatives from Google (Brad Fitzpatrick), Plaxo (Joseph [...]
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