Content Matters

Social networking applications are proliferating.  In addition to the major players like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, there are numerous apps with social network components such as Twitter, Bebo, Plaxo, Spock, Digg, Pownce, Flickr, Zooomr and more. 

The barrier to adoption for many of these is the effort required to get your data into a new social network.  Today, my LinkedIn network is larger than my Facebook network.  That's due in part to the fact that many of my "real" network contacts have yet to adopt Facebook, but it's also because I haven't done a good enough job of inviting all of my LinkedIn contacts to connect in Facebook.

Over time, I expect users will participate in multiple social networking applications, each providing different functionality.  But the thought of maintaining friend lists on numerous sites is at best, daunting.  Instead, users will want to maintain one list of contacts, then assign those relationships to the appropriate networks.

Brad Fitzgerald (founder of LiveJournal) and David Recordon have just posted a detailed plan and proposal to address this in their post, Thoughts on the Social Graph.  They propose an open source application to build and maintain your "social graph", which may then be accessible within various social networking applications.  This would allow application developers to focus their energy on their applications and not worry about which platforms to support.

The proposed plan has three primary goals:

1. Make the social graph a community asset (i.e. no company is the social graph owner)
2. API's should be developed to ease application development
3. End-users who join a new service can tap into their social graph and decide whether to include their existing relationships in the new application

Brad and David have already done much of the prototyping.  The hard part will be gaining the support of the existing social network providers, who are likely to want to wall in the social graphs their users have created on their platforms.  However, as others have pointed out recently, creation of a new walled garden will not be what wins the social networking race.