Sean Reiser
New Service Needed: A Web 2.0 Directory
May 21st, 2008 I've been sitting here today reading tweets and posts from folks preparing for tomorrow's twit-out as they try to synchronize their twitter and friendfeed / jaiku / pounce / brightkite / other messaging platform lists and it's occurred to me that we've created nightmare when it comes to managing our social graphs, the process of re-adding all your friends / buddies / people you follow / etc is painful at best and impossible at worst. As I join new services I find myself bouncing into my favorite followers websites, friendfeed, etc to see if they have mentioned using whatever the new service is. To be honest a good part of the reason people don't leave twitter is they don't need to recreate their social graph elsewhere.
Some people felt that friendfeed would solve this problem (I know I did). Where friendfeed has helped aggregate the feeds of folks I follow, it hasn't made it any easier to cross pollinate folks. It often irks me that friendfeed doesn't query the APIs of the services I've subscribed to to find my followers and offer to subscribe me.
In many respects, where it's in a service's best interests to help you find your friends on that service, it's not at all in their best interests to help other services help you find your friends which might be part of the reason that this has gone on fixed so far.
Both XFN and FOAF have not lived up to their potential. Both ideas were setup to help document people's relationships and properly implemented they could work. The problem is that very few folks have embraced FOAF and XFN. Also, for the average user implementing either technology isn't as easy as we technologists and early adopters think it is (often a problem with technology).
So, how do we solve this? I think we need a service to serve as a directory (or web 2.0 style phone book) where you could look up folks by service. On the service you build a profile that will export as XFN and FOAF. The service would also help you find people you follow in new services.
A quick list of features as I see it is as follows:
- As mentioned above the ability to create a profile win with links to all of your services.
- Using the available APIs of the services as well manual data entry create a global friends lists / followers lists.
- Embrace both XFN and FOAF and make the data available in those formats.
- The ability to find your friends on other services (in other words you'd be able to find my flickr page by searching for my twitter username).
- Automagiclly notify you (via email or rss, perhaps) when interweb friends newly join services that you subscribe to.
- The ability to add friends it finds using the services' APIs.
Once this is all together I'd like to also see about pushing the web 2.0 services to accept a common XML format to add friends in bulk. I've got more of an application design in my head but don't have much time. I'd love to chat more with folks if someone's interested in working on it. If done right this shouldn't be an intensive application .
So, what do you think?
Sean Reiser, 40, is a developer, technologist, and amateur photographer. Sean has spent the past 20 years as a programmer, system architect and development manager. He is a life long New York resident.
Sean currently serves as the President and Chief Geek Officer of Repair Sense, Inc.. Please go to that site with any professional inquiries.
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Sean, great post. When I first heard about FOAF it was pretty hyped. I think it still has a way to go. Do you think privacy laws are restricting the features you've outlined from being implemented?
That's a good question.
I personally don't see how it can be a privacy question as the person being searched for would be providing the legal information, but IANAL. I hate to say this but I suspect that the reason this hasn't been built is that it's not your standard web 2.0 application (most web 2.0 apps are designed so you spend time on them, this is closer to set it and we'll let you know if you need to come back).
To be honest I'm more of an XFN person then FOAF but any tool should be agnostic, IMHO.
All that said I might just register a domain and take a crack at putting something together, just wish I had some time to do it right.
That makes sense. Most of these things need a business model to survive via funding. It sounds like a great idea though, let me know if you decide to do it. Wish I could code :(
If I could find a way to launch it and not lose my shirt I'd go ahead with it right away (the bandwidth costs could be killer). My time is also an issue, I don't have a lot of it these days.
It is interesting that Friendfeed will output FOAF (just found that buried in their forums). I am taking a serious look at starting to build something with that.
Isn't this part of what data portability and all the Google/Facebook Friend Connect stuff is about?
Seems like something FriendFeed could be extended to do relatively easily. We're already using that to register all the services we use... The next step, like you said, is just getting them to pull in our relationships from those other services and match them up. Maybe they've already got that in mind...
Most of the friend connect stuff I've seen seems to revolved around adding social features to static sites. I'm looking at this as a way to more completely define a social graph easily using the data already available but scattered all over the web. Maybe I'm missing something, however, it has been know to happen.
As far as Friendfeed is concerned, this is something I blogged about almost 3 months ago (http://seanreiser.com/node/213) and have written them about it and where I'm surprised that they haven't done anything about it, I've come to the conclusion that it's time for a third party to do it anyway. If friendfeed, facebook, google, etc do it they have a vested interest to leave out competitors if a third party does it they can leave it pretty open.