Chris Sukornyk, ongoing…

Why not extend OpenID to include your social network?

Image via WikipediaOpenID is a shared identity service that enables you to login with one username and password across multiple participating sites. As more and more niche communities spring up on the Web this open standard will relieve you of having to maintain multiple accounts. While that solves one problem, I still find myself maintaining multiple social graphs (my friends) on multiple different sites. My LinkedIn network has a high degree of overlap with my Facebook network. In addition, I belong to many other online niche community sites that some of my friends also belong to. Yet each time I join a new community I have to setup all these friendships again and again. What if this open standard could be extended to allow you to maintain your social network in one spot?

Imagine if OpenID were extended to support a concept you might call OpenGraph. Rather than just maintain one central identity you would also maintain one central network of friends and groups. In this fashion you could login to any OpenID enabled service and could selectively grant access to parts of your social graph. The concept is reminiscent of FOAF (friend of a friend) which is a means of defining your social network. FOAF was more of a toy than a standard that had any chance of being picked but with OpenID picking up a little steam something like this might actually work.

Say you wanted to join a new scuba diving community site powered by one of the many white label social network platforms. You login with your OpenID account and are asked if you would like to open up your social network to that community service. The OpenID service would only release detailed information on friends that are already a part of the scuba diving community. Those friends would be instantly available to you and you could message them directly or within that community site. All of your other friends would be unavailable to the community site until they too become members. In this fashion you could prevent these communities from spamming all your other friends. Nonetheless, numerous security and privacy issues would have to be worked out.

Unfortunately there is zero chance of an idea like this being picked up by the big social networks. Imagine the valuation hit a site like Facebook would take if they suddenly did not own the social graph!

Update: I forgot to mention dataportability.org but that is more about sharing ALL of your data….your photos, your videos etc.   Obviously much more ambitious and difficult to gain consensus on formats.  I see your friendships as one block of data that is easy to define and certainly valuable to take with you from site to site.