The Social Web is Splintering (ftw) | Hacker News Reader

The Social Web is Splintering (ftw)

jakelevine.me

12 pointsjrlevine4 comments

How do you splinter something that was never cohesive in the first place?

Unlike Email, IM, and many other things, social networks have never integrated with anything. (Not that IM did a great job of it, but at least there's more than 1 IM client for a given network.)

People should be able to sign on with any social networking provider and be friends with people on any other provider, just like email. There should be open, standardized protocols that allow each network to talk to each other, and route the appropriate information around.

Unlike email, there is a very significant divergence on what exactly a social network should entail and most of the networks don't mesh.

How could you merge twitter with facebook for example; you couldn't show most of the posts made on facebook on twitter because of length violations. And what, you go to twitter.com and you can see content that you couldn't see on facebook.com because twitter is choosing an public-only asymmetric model and facebook isn't?

It's an unnatural restriction. Email has no such restriction! In fact, email has gone on to break many of its restrictions, enabling attachments, inline images, HTML formatting, and more.

But lets say that the 140 character limit is desirable... Have a protocol for statuses (short) and posts (long) and networks that can only handle the short ones get links to the long version.

As for public/private... Anything posted as 'private' wouldn't end up on public-only networks. That's a limitation that network has chosen, and they'd have to live with it.

Email has adapted to users' needs, instead of laying down rules and refusing to budge. If there were a social networking protocol that was widely adopted, anyone who didn't adopt it would slowly die out... Unless they found some way to differential themselves that other network couldn't copy. And really, what couldn't they?

This already exists, of course. OStatus is based on LRDD, Webfinger and Salmon, which is based on PubSubHubBub, which carries Atom messages.

There are already decentralized networks working fine - you can install a StatusNet hub on your own server and follow and be followed by Laconi.ca users.

The problem is that there's no real demand; they don't really bring anything the users want.

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