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:
I’ve been using Mozilla Weave for quite some time now, ever since I made the switch from Foxmarks. This is a Firefox extension that allows one to synchronize browser settings, including tabs, history, extensions, and passwords. Another feature of this extension is OpenID integration using Mozilla’s OpenID provider. The problem is that the OpenID integration into Weave might be a nice little feature for people that are not used to it, but people running their own identity provider or using one of the many existing providers, like myself have to jump through hoops to use these instead of the Weave IDs.
I’ve found a post that mentions an about:config setting called
) will also start being used more extensivel, because we all know that writing on small devices is a real pain. There’s a great 