Musings on Profile Portability

May 5, 2008

This year there will continue to be a big discussion about portable identities on Social Networks. The ability for people to bring their identity and friends from one network to another is going to be one of the next stages of the evolution of SN’s. As Jeff Weiner from Yahoo (they’re having a bad day) said at EconSM last week, people will eventually get sick of signing up for network after network (paraphrasing). I agree that most people, like me, are not interested in spamming their friends with invites every time they join a Dodgeball or Twitter, but I disagree that the users of niche social networks are reluctant to invite their friends.

We see that on networks that ONEsite powers, such as WWE and Univision, members are highly motivated to invite their friends. Further, we see that our members are motivated to include their friends and family, and are driven to make *new* friends that share similar interests, expanding their networks. Not only are our members highly active, they’re excited about a network that speaks to their interests and jump at the opportunity to communicate their enthusiasm to their out of network friends.

Getting back to the point, I join a lot of networks just to try them out. The thought of bringing my friends from one to another is intriguing, however I would need the ability to assign context to each of my friends. For instance, I wouldn’t want to bring most of my LinkedIn contacts over to Yelp, because all of those friends have different context. Currently many networks let members import contacts, but the import mechanism often insists that everyone you know that’s active on the site should be invited to connect, or it makes you browse through hundreds (if not thousands!) of contacts to pick and choose people to connect with. Even if this were perfect, and I assigned context prior to importing, I’d still end up spamming the same people over and over again with invites every time I want to try out the latest and greatest. Let’s call the solution “Context driven portable network identities.” I’ll work on an acronym-friendly version later.

My experience is a much different experience than our members joining a ONEsite network, but down the road we’ll see this issue moving more mainstream. Being on the forefront of the evolution of the social internet helps our company anticipate changes in the marketplace. We strive to be at the sweet spot of the market - providing clients with the tools they need to create meaningful experiences for their members, while making sure our clients stay ahead of the technology curve. It’s a pretty sweet job

(originally posted to my ONEsite blog)

Posted in Work