How to get the social graph portable without hurting people’s privacy
Unknowingly, Robert Scoble reminded me about something I thought about the last 24 hours: Yesterday, I attended Web Monday in Cologne, Germany. Although her entry to the presentation was not tech but fashion, Sandra of armedangels.de gave a great presentation on a shirt fashion label that noticed a community gathering around them and aims at binding that community to the label by doing just that: add common community functionality to their site. Sandra ignited the discussion of what a community site needs by means of features; one annoyed question of some attender there was “Why do people need one another community site?”
Today, pondering the idea to extend the focus of this blog to w0rk and on/offline society, and noticing what I have in mind might be better doable as a community, the “why one another community?” question from yesterday evening came back to my mind. Open Social and Open ID without particularly mentioned floated around.
As far as I know (and if I remember correctly), there still is no consensus on how to make the personal social graph portable. One issue in this is privacy: Data that I own is my own data. But my social graph defines by some more data: data that belongs to me, but I am clearly not the owner of it. That’s relationship data, i.e. my contact list. Though it does belong to me but I don’t own it, that’s exactly that part of data I am interested to take with me, over to the next social site I join. Simply because I’m yet fed up adding the very same friends at every new platform I join, ever and ever again.
On the other hand, on most social platforms I am aware of people I add to my contact list need to confirm the contact — or to reject my request if they don’t like me. That’s a common need, people are familiar to it and — most important — they accept that bit of manual work, the demand to explicitly confirm or refuse whatever contact request comes in.
So, if that’s so simple, so common and people are used to do it that way, then why not just to add a second checkbox that says: “allow contact to port me”? In other words: If the contacter wants to port their social graph to just another social platform, me gives the permission to be ported there too, i.e. this one arc of the requester’s social graph. That would ease to reuse once established social graphs on every new social platform I join — without violating the other ends’ (of my social arcs) privacy.
That checkbox would refer to the relationship between contacter and self only, not to personal data of self (i.e. the contactee).
