Social Portability – An Open Web

The latest trend to share social connections may lead to dramatic changes in how we use our favorite social networks. Recent launches of Google Friends Connect, Facebook Connect and the adoption of OpenID from MySpace provides new opportunities for third-party websites to offer portable connections. While all three provide different implementations, the ability to be able to login to a website using your existing Facebook ID, for example, and port your existing friends is a big step in sharing connections.

For those of us that dread creating yet another account on each individual site we use, this new feature may be a very convenient one indeed, but it will be interesting to see who decides to jump on the bandwagon to implement applications leveraging this new approach and who benefits in the end. An example of an implementation of Facebook Connect will allow activity from one site to automatically be posted to your Facebook and vice versa. This new sharing of data provides an open nature on the web.

It will also be interesting to see how privacy concerns and usage of information will be addressed as this new sharing amongst the big networks takes hold. These networks have our most personal information collected from our profiles, which we may not expect to share outside the network. Depending on who is on your friends list it may also impact how they feel about having their information shared. As these big three jockey for position in being the top dog in providing a portable solution I hope they do not lose sight of how we value sensitive personal information.

I’m sure there will be much more to come on the subject in the near future!