Chrome Bits

Evolution of the Social Web

Like a lot of other folks interested in the social Web, or just the Web overall, I have a lot of profiles scattered across many different sites: Amazon, Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Wordpress, YouTube, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, etc. And then there are my identities in MMORPGs; this is not a separate problem from Web sites. End users see “the Web” and “the Internet” as the same thing; engineers don’t necessarily, but I’m not sure that at this point it’s useful to delineate so much purely based on network protocols.

There are at least three different sorts of pain associated with this fragmentation:

1. Identity: I have to generate a new ID and login credentials at each of these sites. Projects like OpenID (and I suppose Microsoft Passport) are intended to fix this, but this is an area where trust is paramount and not that simple. More sites need to integrate, and OpenID seems like it’s starting to win the war to this inexpert observer. And while we’re at it, stronger authentication would be useful. Blizzard is starting on two-factor authentication for World of Warcraft, and of course banks have been working on this for a bit.
2. Graph: This is a much-discussed problem. Essentially, users are tired of having to find and connect to their friends anew each time they start using a new social networking site. Facebook helps with this, assuming everything you use is a Facebook app… but being locked in to one site is sub-optimal. Fortunately, a lot of folks are working on this. And remember that only a tiny fraction of the connected world uses this sort of thing, not to mention the larger unconnected parts of the world. How many of your friends, family, and colleagues are not involved with the social web?
3. Profile: This is everything about me besides my credentials and my connections. Other methods of contact (email, IM, blog, website, etc.) are a great example but not everything. On the easy end (similar to Google Autofill), I want to be able to give vendors my address info with one click. On the harder end, when I visit Barnes & Noble’s site, I want them to go find my Amazon wishlist and tell me that they have some of the books cheaper. FriendFeed helps centralizing some of this, but it’s not really the answer. It’s a stopgap at best.

All these walled gardens are anathema to the original vision of the interconnected Web; we’re really just getting started. Comparing the Internet now to what existed twenty years ago, what will become of it in another twenty years?