Like It Matters – Deeelightful: Insanely Grea...

Like It Matters Social Media & Relevant Conversations
Posted
3 August 2007 @ 12pm
Tagged
amp,apis,mashups,portablesocialnetworks,socialnetworking
Deeelightful: Insanely Great Services Enabled By Portable Social Networks

So far I’ve talked mostly about the basic benefits of portable social networking (being in charge of your profile and contact information in a lightweight/subscribable format), mostly in the context of making life easier for users of individual services.
However, once we start to get data flowing freely and all these apps interoperating for our benefit, and for the benefit of deriving greater value from our personal social networks, then things start to get really interesting.
Above is a quick sketch to show that in addition to helping me tidy up my social networking life, having open profile and networking data allows me to make use of some potentially insanely cool services. I could see entire businesses that spring up to help us:
Manage invitations and other network requests from one place Work from a master in box for all our networks Allow for aggregated privacy/preferences settings Let you turn the volume of information up & down (as if on a dimmer switch) based on your mood for ambient social information at a given time Aggregate and make better use of tags and other metadata Triangulate geolocation data (FireEagle but Y! apps plus everything we might want) Create visualizations that reveal things and spur more intimate involvement with what is happening in our networks (hello,Stamen, looking at you) Allow for one-stop status updates to a variety of networks Contact suggestions based on friend network data Add contacts to more than one network at a time Create master searches across networks Create a master social graph or multiple social graphs as we might like House a master media library making video/photos/audio available across networks
I’m sure there is a lot more we can do, but I wanted to start to tease out the implications.
[This post is part of theportable social networks working group effort to identify and evolve design practices for open social networking using tools likemicroformats andOpenID. By putting user needs first, we hope to bake in usability and business elements into the deployment of the spec. You canread other posts in the series orvisit the wiki to get involved.]