Freeing Social Networks

Practical Social Network Portability

A talk about the possibilities and technologies available for building truly portable social networks in an open and distributed web.

FREEING SOCIAL NETWORKS

With the enormous rise of social networks and web services over the last years, a lot of us now see various problems and annoyances regarding new social networks:

- Signing up again and again
- Maintaining multiple profiles
- Finding contacts and confirming relationships
- Importing and exporting data

While we might no have the perfect solutions for any of these problems yet, existing standards and technologies would already allow us to quite easily build somewhat portable social networks today.
This talk aims to give a short overview of the problems with closed social applications and the currently used anti-patterns of data portability (like giving away your email password to every new site) as well as highlight ways to connect existing ideas like OpenID, Microformats and XFN to build portable social networks, discussing areas like user identity, profile data and contact & relationship management.

Contact / Info

Colin Schlueter
student & web developer from Berlin, Germany,
currrently writing a Bachelor's Thesis on Social Network Portability
colinschlueter.com - mail@colinschlueter.com