How about a social directory?
Source: saunderslog.com
The last posting I wrote about Spock has touched a nerve among more than a few people in the blogging world. Both Irwin and Andy have responded saying "enough is enough! who needs another social network". Andy writes:
Do we really need more networks, or do we need to get more from the ones we already have? As Plaxo looks more like LinkedIn, and as LinkedIn tries to keep up with the Facebooks, the whole idea of social networks, to get closer, not farther from people has really started to wane, and we may be seeing something more necessary the OPT ME OUT NOW option that would prevent the impersonal "join my network" emails that are doing nothing but creating the equal of Internet "in box pollution." In affect the value of the "network" which is really at the core of all these is being burned at the altar by a "get big fast" VC fueled management style these networks all have in common.
Spam aside, our idea of social networks is undergoing a dramatic change. When Facebook opened up their "social graph" to third parties they profoundly altered the balance of power around directory. Recall this paragraph from the Voice 2.0 Manifesto:
…in the Voice 2.0 world, individuals own their own directory listings. What you wish to list in your directory listing, including the fundamentals of name, address, and contact point(s), is your business. It’s your identity, and you get to manage it — not the carrier. Directories can be extended to include the idea of persona’s (work, home, leisure), interests, and a myriad of other kinds of personal information. Directories also become repositories for subscriber preferences, credentials, social networking details and potentially even financial information for voice enabled transactions. In the voice 2.0 world, the directory is an opt-in enabler for applications, commerce, and identity.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It should. It’s the same information you find in your Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Your profile is your opt-in directory listing - the identity that you get to manage.
Social networking sites are evolving from being the repository for your personal network to your address book, and ultimately to a full people search engine. Today’s phone book is a primitive paper DNS system for e.164 phone numbers. In fact, it’s not even as efficient as DNS, because it doesn’t have any ability to replicate changes when they occur. Tomorrow’s system will be a completely different kind of "phone book", though — one that’s built on identity, trust, recommendations and relationships. It will be a social directory built on the graph of relationships we maintain every day.
In an ideal world, a social directory like Facebook or LinkedIn would:
- Allow me to efficiently segment my profile based on the viewer. (As an aside, Facebook’s decision to allow people to construct lists based on their friends doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s a timid half-step.)
- Interoperate with every other social graph tool out there so that I needed to only maintain one identity. After all, in the real world we each have one set of social relationships, not the multiples that multiple social networks would imply.
- Automatically update every other address book and social graph so that I wouldn’t need to manage multiple instance of my identity. Plaxo’s killer feature should be a core component of the social directory.
- Expose my identity and profile information to applications as I permitted and required it to.
- Allow me to search other profiles through my relationship network, and rank those results based on the information I need, plus factors like reputation, location and so on.
- Permit all kinds of communications based on privacy and profile segmentations.
We’re headed in the right direction on many fronts. The cries for help from folks like Irwin and Andy are simply an indication that we’ve got a long way to go on some crucial issues like interoperability and profile segmentation.
