Goodbye MySpace & Co., welcome Portable Social Networks
The most successful sites right now on the Web are social networks, no point
denying it. Social Networks,such as MySpace, Facebook and Co., are huge
information silos that only reluctantly share this information with other
services on the Web, every time I sign up to a new Social Network, a thing many
of us do regularly, I have to re-enter all my information, re-set the
notifications, re-upload my images and re-search all of my contacts to this new
network. But MySpace & Co are doomed, the very fact that they limit the
scope of a friendship as I like to call
it will soon destroy them, they are not portable.
And here comes the nice thing: I already have a profile, I have a site, a blog or anything were I can put a little information about myself can be me profile for a portable social network, and the best thing is that I decide what to disclose to who, and how it should look, without having to hack those awful Stylesheets for predesigned social networks that won’t look nice anyway, I can decide everything by myself!
With the advent of OpenID we have every tool we need to create a portable, peer-to-peer styled, social network, no central authority that will control us, no need to ever sign up to a social network ever again. A portable social network is like a super-set of all existing social networks and it is truly global.
And there’s also a pretty good standard for the most important feature in social networks: friend relations. It’s called XFN, and is a simple, yet powerful extension to XHTML. And with microformat -magic we can do a hole lot of things most social networks aren’t able to do.
So join today, the last Social Network you’ll ever have to join, simply by adding some information about youself, some pictures or whatever you want to your OpenID URL and tag links to your friends’ Profile with the XFN Attributes and you’re done
For more on the topic of Portable Social Networks I recommend reading some of the following posts:
And here comes the nice thing: I already have a profile, I have a site, a blog or anything were I can put a little information about myself can be me profile for a portable social network, and the best thing is that I decide what to disclose to who, and how it should look, without having to hack those awful Stylesheets for predesigned social networks that won’t look nice anyway, I can decide everything by myself!
With the advent of OpenID we have every tool we need to create a portable, peer-to-peer styled, social network, no central authority that will control us, no need to ever sign up to a social network ever again. A portable social network is like a super-set of all existing social networks and it is truly global.
And there’s also a pretty good standard for the most important feature in social networks: friend relations. It’s called XFN, and is a simple, yet powerful extension to XHTML. And with microformat -magic we can do a hole lot of things most social networks aren’t able to do.
So join today, the last Social Network you’ll ever have to join, simply by adding some information about youself, some pictures or whatever you want to your OpenID URL and tag links to your friends’ Profile with the XFN Attributes and you’re done
For more on the topic of Portable Social Networks I recommend reading some of the following posts:
