The Movement Toward Opening Up Social Networks #

The movement toward opening up social networks, which began with Facebook releasing its platform for developers, is accelerating even further. Enter OpenSocial, led by Google, seemingly as a counter to Facebook. While Facebook's move was aimed at turning its own service into a proprietary platform, Google allied with many other players to create what could be called a standardized foundation.

Both approaches share the same goal: integrating external services as if they were part of the social network itself.

Social Network Aggregation Services #

In Japan, "SNS" often brings to mind diary-sharing sites like mixi, but platforms with one-way "Following" like Twitter, or niche-specific services like Flickr and Last.fm, can also be considered social networks.

Recently, services focused on aggregating these diverse social networks, such as FriendFeed, have started to appear. By providing your IDs for various social networks to the service, it aggregates your feeds, allowing you to just follow that single site and only visit the connected services when necessary.

In this way, since the emergence of social networks, the direction the web is heading toward has been shifting to: "Even if your IDs are scattered all over the web, the person using them is one and the same, and your friends are the same too—so why not bring them all together?"

DataPortability #

DataPortability is an initiative aimed at liberating data that is currently locked into these individual social networks and making it interoperable.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

While I haven't grasped all the details myself yet, all the key players have now gathered: MySpace with Data Availability, Facebook with Facebook Connect, and Google with Friend Connect. I'll introduce the characteristics of each in upcoming posts.