Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Joseph Smarr — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:08:14 -0000

Dave-all the users we talk to (ourselves included) care about the following BETTER FUNCTIONALITY that they can't get in today's closed world of walled social web gardens: 1) why do I have to re-create my friend list on every new site I go to; 2) why is it hard to find who I already know on these services; 3) why do i have to go around to all these different sites to stay in touch with my friends.

These are real issues today and even though some of the most popular social networks have a ton of users, it will just never be the case that everyone in the world is exclusively using one service. This is the web. There will always be people scattered among multiple sites, people will always be trying new things, and users will always have this pain unless we do something about it.

The reason we think open standards are the way to go is because that's what's made the web, RSS, and similar technologies really work at scale. Rather than having to trust a particular vendor, you say "users demand and deserve access to their own data" and they are then free to move it around as they see fit. And the sites don't have to explicitly agree to work together as long as they support compatible standards.

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 13:25:22 -0000

Yes-we absolutely need an open friend standard for import/export/sync of your friends across all the social networks you use. Plaxo is certainly going to do all we can to help define and support such a set of open standards, and everyone that believes in user-centric identity and user control of their data should help convince the sites they use that this is the right way to go! I encourage anyone that wants to talk about this to get in touch with me at joseph at plaxo.com. Together we can really make this work the way we want!

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Brian Oberkirch — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:06:23 -0000

Pete: lots of people are working on this. I've been doing a series on portable social network design:

http://www.brianoberkirch.c...

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Paul Lindner — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:38:03 -0000

Some sites support FOAF ((http://www.foaf-project.org)

Looks like it's getting some more attention lately...

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

carlity — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:16:43 -0000

It will be great once a startup figures out how to solve this problem. Or will it be from the semantic web?

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

strongfams.com — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:09:40 -0000

I agree social networks should be opened i am tired of signing in 5 places a day. Please add my two social networks to your social networking destination/portal. I have two awesome social networks, lovesports-ent.com for sports lovers and strongfams.com for family oriented users who especially need to share pictures. Now the average guy would have 7 places to sign in. cheers

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Julian Bond — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 10:29:19 -0000

One tricky bit in this puzzle is recognising that jbond on Facebook is the same person as jbond23uk on Yahoo who has the Skype ID julian.bond and is jbond23 on LinkedIn. We maybe need a universal ID translator to go with the import/export standard.

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Pete — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:51:34 -0000

Yeah, I read Canter a lot.

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

David Cann — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:20:18 -0000

I think this is a problem that can be solved by a simple service. I think I first heard about this idea through Simon Willison.

I own the domain openidfriends.com and have been working on a simple concept for the service. If any other developers would like to get involved, contact me or reply to this comment.

-d

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Hueniverse, LLC — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:02:02 -0000

Marc Canter of People Aggregator wrote a very good article on this topic at http://news.com.com/Open+st....

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Adam Nemeth — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:54:47 -0000

I created an Open Socnet concept, which is very similiar to OpenID, except that it sends [requestor-site-specificly] hashed uid's of friends of a given socnet. Say I'm a facebook user, and I want to see who I know of mashable's commenters, I could give my hashed friends' uid to mashable, and if some of my friends provided it too, we could meet here too.

I quickly translated my presentation to English, if you can't understand, tell me which hungarian parts I have to translate:)

http://jo-hely.hu/~aadaam/p...

Re: Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)

Uno de Waal — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:50:37 -0000

This is really really good news. A bunch of us have been blogging about the potential of OpenID and microformats.

I don't think Facebook will adopt the open approach (it would be great if they did) but we're going to see newer networks adopt the open format. Once you get a few big players involved it will become defacto standard. I can't wait.