Getting ready for Social Network portability


  • Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon, kicked off another round of discussions on aggregating, decentralizing and Social network portability in a post called "Thoughts on the Social Graph". The post is long, but he summarized the problem statement into a few lines..


Users and developers alike are going crazy. There's too many social networks out there to keep track of. Developers want to make more, and users want to join more, but it's all too much work to re-enter your friends and data. We need to lower the amount of pain for both users and developers and let a thousand new social applications bloom.

I've mentioned this problem in the past as well and feel like this is long overdue. Sites like Plaxo and Facebook have taken a step in the right direction, but its not the solution. As I see it the real solution should be something similar to the XMPP standard which opened up the chat protocol to allow decentralized chat networks work with each other.

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