A Practical Vision for FriendsList Portability

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A Practical Vision for Friends-List
Portability Joseph Smarr IIW 2007b, 12/5/2007
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The problem

• Social networks keep friends-list data trapped
• Social apps dont have access to who I know
• Little control over who I can share my data with
• Have to re-establish my friendships on each site
• ? Too hard to stay on top of what the people I
  know are doing online

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The fallout

• Limited friends-list on most social apps
• Missing a lot of content from my friends
• Social apps desperate to get some friends-list
• Re-implementing webmail scrapers
• Building apps inside facebooks platform
• Sometimes Im too easy to find on sites
• e.g. hard to opt-out of being findable by email
• Sometimes Im too hard to find on sites
• Generally cant look up by homepage / URL

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The vision

• A facebook-like platform for the Open Social
  Web
• Friends list people you know from any site(s)
  you use
• User IDs email / URLs from all services you
  know
• Social apps running anywhere with same richness
• Services can still run their own external web
  sites
• Activity streams and profile badges show up in
  social networks
• Apps connect users and data across multiple
  services
• Manage relationships across multiple sites
• Meet someone new ? choose where to connect
• Try new services ? find out when your friends
  join
• Social app developers can outsource who you know

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The building blocks

• Who am I?
• OpenID prove that I own a URL / profile
• relme these URLs describe the same person
• Who do I know?
• OAuth securely share my (private) friends-list
• SixAparts (public) relationship update stream
• How can I use my data?
• OpenSocial cross-platform social applications
• FOAF, XFN, vCard standard data interchanges

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Building blocks Who am I?

• Basic unit identifier
• mailtojoseph_at_plaxo.com
• http//josephsmarr.com
• http//twitter.com/jsmarr
• aimjosephsmarr
• josephsmarr
• Users role managing their set of identifiers
• Which identifier(s) can reveal which others
• Which identifier(s) can I be found by per app

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Building blocks Who do I know?

• Friends list Set of identifiers I know
• Need portable list aggregated identifiers
• Often private data (need auth)
• Proposal social sites should provide a
  persistent URL to your friends-list
• URL can contain OAuth token for private data
• Lists all identifiers you know
• Can be hashed for lookup-only uses

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Building blocks How can I use my data?

• Bring my list of identifiers to a new site
• Can be expanded by following relme links
• Persistent URL ? can keep data in sync
• Match my known identifiers against the sites
  list of findable identifiers per user
• Users need control over how theyre findable
• Find all people I know on new site
• Choose who to connect with and how per-site
• Add new site as source of friends-list data
• Site publishes MicroIDs for findable identifiers

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A practical vision

• Clarity on roles and responsibilities
• Users manage your identifiers (relme,
  findability)
• Social networks / applications
• Give users access to their friends-list data
• Let users control how theyre findable
• Provide lookup for findable identifiers
• Not revealing any new private information
• Just using existing info more effectively
• Built on existing, open technology standards
• OpenID, OAuth, XFN, MicroID, URIs
• Bridges lookup by e-mail address vs. URL

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Room for everybody to win

• Social networks become more powerful and relevant
  as they extend their reach
• e.g. facebook platform, Plaxo Pulse
• Social apps are easier to build and scale
• Can outsource who you know
• Better friends list ? more compelling app
• Users can find and share more content
• Enhanced discovery, lower friction

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Next steps

• Clarify / propose basic specs for interop
• Get early adopters to implement it
• Watch for early results (usage, privacy)
• Feedback?

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Online Identity Consolidator
Open-source relme crawler (OpenSocialGraph.plaxo.
com) http//twitter.com/jsmarr ?
http//josephsmarr.com ?
http//www.bloglines.com/public/jsmarr
http//flickr.com/people/jsmarr
http//joseph.myplaxo.com ?
http//claimid.com/jsmarr
http//del.icio.us/jsmarr
http//digg.com/users/jsmarr
http//jsmarr.yelp.com
http//pownce.com/joseph
http//www.linkedin.com/in/jsmarr
http//www.socializr.com/user/jsmarr
http//www.facebook.com/p/Joseph_Smarr/204060
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A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

• We publicly assert that all users of the social
  web are entitled to certain fundamental rights,
  specifically
• Ownership of their own personal information,
  including
• their own profile data
• the list of people they are connected to
• the activity stream of content they create
• Control of whether and how such personal
  information is shared with others and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their
  personal information to trusted external sites.

http//OpenSocialWeb.org Joseph Smarr, Marc
Canter, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble
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A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

• Sites supporting these rights shall
• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile
  data, their friends list, and the data thats
  shared with them via the service, using a
  persistent URL or API token and open data
  formats
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream
  of activity outside the site
• Allow their users to link from their profile
  pages to external identifiers in a public way
  and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know
  is also on their site, using the same external
  identifiers made available for lookup within the
  service.

http//OpenSocialWeb.org Joseph Smarr, Marc
Canter, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble