ON MUCH NEEDED SOCIAL NETWORK FEATURES

WHILE WE'RE DREAMING...

Dave Winer has a post up on what Facebook is worth, adding to the heated discussion on Techmeme.  Here's the bit that I violently agreed with:

"I'm tired of building networks of friends, over and over. Next time I do it, it'll be for keeps. It'll be the "real" social network, the one all future social networks..."

Although it's been great to build new relationships via these networks (see preceding post), it is getting old to invite the same folks again and again as I join different networks.  And I'm sure it's getting old for them to add me to their new lists too.

While we're waiting for this ultimate, future social network, I'd just like the ability to IMPORT my existing social relationships from an existing one into a new one.

Just as easily as services like Facebook, Plaxo and others allow me to automatically import entire address books from Outlook, Google, Yahoo!, AOL/AIM and other services.

Of course, the social networks themselves would rather delay allowing these export capabilities as long as they can.

While I'm asking for new features, I'd also like to have simple URLs for my identities on various social networks.  Something I could put on a business card as easily as I put my phone number, email, or blog address.

I can do it with Twitter, where my address is www.twitter.com/mparekh.

But I can't do it with Facebook, where my address is http://www.facebook.com/p/Michael_Parekh/2737328.

See the difference?

I know technically it's not easy stuff in a system that needs to scale to tens of not hundreds of millions of users.  And provide at least some basic anti-spam protections.

But a tough to share address is just not as easy to make one's own.

It's almost like my old ID-based email on CompuServe in the 1980s used to be something like 43218.23 (at) CompuServe (dot) com.  And then along came AOL a decade later, giving me an email like MParekh (at) aol (dot) com.

Easily readable and sharable personal URL addresses should be a basic capability of any social network going forward.  Definitely a basic requirement before I make it my social network "for keeps".

Don't you think?

Comments

[Amit Patel]

The way to make this scale is to use the solution we already have: URLs. Create a short URL on your own domain and have it redirect to Twitter, Facebook, etc. When you get tired of Twitter and switch to Jaiku (or whatever), you can change the redirect, and all your business cards are still valid. You might also direct to a page that shows all the social networks you're in.

You can see the same approach being used with feeds. Just as you don't need to give out your actual twitter.com or facebook.com URL on your business card, you don't need to have people subscribe to your physical feed URL. Instead, use an intermediary like Feedburner. At the very minimum it can serve as a "permanent" feed URL that persists even if you switch blog hosts. Feedburner also offers other services.

We need that intermediary for business card URLs. The problem right now is that not everyone has access to a server that lets them create redirects, and also that even when they do (e.g., Apache), it might be difficult. There's probably a business opportunity here, but my guess is that everyone who gets into this business also wants to be at the other end of that redirect, so that you can't easily switch. :(