Comments for Six Apart Releases Statement About Opening the Social Graph

Six Apart Releases Statement About Opening the Social Graph

2007-09-20T20:00:22Z

Blog software vendor Six Apart this afternoon posted a long rumination, with video, on the "social graph" and how vendors should relate to it. The social graph is the network of your networks, all your accounts and friends across multiple online social networks and other sites you participate on.

The company is clearly full of great ideas that unfortunately get a maddeningly geeky explanation today on the Six Apart blog. There's an experimental product alluded to as well, but that's not being released right now.

The whole manifesto-lengthed blog post is worth a read, but he best part is the statement of the following principles.

You should own your social graph
Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn't always be connected
Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems

That's really nice to read from a software vendor. I wish decision makers at Google said things like that. Someday the social graph and all of our Attention Data are going to be brought together and those are some great statements to serve as a policy foundation.

]]> Six Apart (LiveJournal at least) is by many accounts the birthplace of OpenID and they do a lot of very innovative work still. I hope that they can quickly translate this work on the social graph into something more accessible; that's something the OpenID community still struggles with.

For now, though, we'll have to all get up on our bidirectional XFN links, FOAF and hCard so we can ride towards the glorious sunset of user-controlled data portability and a better experience online. To think that I just found the kickstand on my TCP/IP.

That said, it's a great start. For some more accessible background on the questions raised by Six Apart, micro-format and Identity savvy dude Chris Messina recommends checking out the social network portability discussion at microformats.org, Robert Gaal's Making OpenID Your Only Online Profile and The Future of Everything is Social: Consolidate and take back your social network at the blog Four Starters. Mark those puppies "to read" because this stuff is here to stay.

Comment from alain on 2007-09-21

2007-09-21T12:55:12Z

Realmente es un placer leerte. Muy cierto todo el comentario. Se disfrutan cada una de tus palabras tan certeras.
Saludos,

Comment from Marianne Richmond on 2007-09-20

2007-09-20T22:37:06Z

Great post Marshall...thanks for de-geeking. The question that I have about "taking back" and "controlling your data" and essentially the entire concept of privacy is: aren't we, as we say here in the midwest, closing the barndoor after the cows got out?

Marianne

Comment from daniel on 2007-09-20

2007-09-20T22:21:05Z

of course you know project noserub?

http://noserub.com/

"What is NoseRub all about?

Social networks are great: you can stay in touch with friends all across the world and find new ones based on your interests. But often, social networks serve a single purpose or interest. For instance photos, videos or classmates from school and university.

This is not a problem by itself, but when you want to keep track of all your contacts in all this social networks, this is a lot of work for you to update your contacts list in all the social networks you are in. And you also might need to get a member of a social network, although you're not interesed in the subject, but only want to track your friends activities.

NoseRub only defines the social network and some basic content types like media, links, micropublishing and text. You can now add all your contacts to a NoseRub network and aggregate several social networks into just one.

And you always have full control of your data, as you can install NoseRub on your own server and have it connect to other servers out there."

Comment from David Recordon on 2007-09-20

2007-09-20T22:11:36Z

You're right, our post was a bit more developer focused today as we have to start with explaining the fundamentals to geeks so that when we build good experiences for end users, people know they can trust the underlying technology. I'm glad that you agree with our principals and that the entire post isn't just for geeks. We'll be following up on our various product blogs as these sorts of tools become user facing.