I’m reading more and more about initiatives that are moving towards what I have been calling “social convergence”. The way I see it, social convergence is aggregating the assets from various online social mediums, and providing many views into that data. The views could potentially be a single page, or many. The important thing is that the assets have a relationship with each other.
But what are the assets? An asset could be a blog post, a tweet from twitter, an event shared in Pownce, an image uploaded in Flickr, a Facebook status update, and so on. You get the idea. It’s any content created on any social networking website.
Assets are more than that, though. Assets should include your identity: your image avatar (if any), your profile, and most importantly your friends. Your friends are what make social networks social, and not just a database of your own thoughts. It is vitally important that those carry on to different sources.
Consider how frustrating it is right now. I create an account on Twitter and make a bunch of friends . Now I create an account on Flickr or Digg and a majority of those people are on that service too. But now I have to remember to look them up, add them to my friend’s list, and hope they sign on and approve me as a friend for the millionth time.
Robert Scoble talked about this very same thing in a blog post on data portability:
When a new social network comes along (say your company turns one on this morning) I’d love it if it noticed that 15 of my friends who join up there are also on Twitter, etc. Why is that important? Because if there were some way to bind these social networks together they could do a lot more for you. For instance, I know that Scott Beale is on almost all of my social networks listed above. Why don’t the systems know that?
Thinking about this problem has made me realize that the problem of social convergence is a lot larger than just aggregating data feeds from various services into one location. At that point, it is just data. It isn’t meaningful and nor does it have any real context outside of the person the data is being aggregated for. To be really useful, all assets, especially friend data, needs to be propagated and shared from one participating service to the next.
One big issue I see is the question of authority. Who takes the lead on maintaining this data? Should we go the full-on Data Portability route and use OpenID along with other services? And at that point do you really know who controls your credentials and friend assets? And what happens if that central source is compromised? Having a single source of this data makes it very valuable to malicious people.
Maybe there is a good compromise that can meet security and privacy concerns while at the same time allowing our social networking converge to actually happen. Maybe authentication and authorization can be left in the hands of the individual service providers and each of those services can utilize a service to share the assets. But even doing that doesn’t address Scoble’s concerns about what happens when your authentication information (like an e-mail address) changes.
This is a difficult problem, and the person to come up with an elegant solution to converging our data in a secure and easy fashion will make quite a name for himself.