There has been a lot of activity recently devoted to opening up the social networks (E.g. Open Social) and linking them together so a person can find their friends or family in multiple places.
This is related to the terminology called the 'Social Graph', a representation of an individual's network.
Here's some nice chap at Google explaining how the stuff comes together:
4 comments:
have you seen any sites using this API yet?
No, not yet. But its only a matter of time before some sites provide this "add all my contacts" sort of functionality to gain size and momentum over thier competition.
The bigger issue this creates is that it no longer ties users to a single social network. We may consequently see mass migrations from one network to another happen very quickly, quickly affect their user base (and valuations)
Most of the social sites link straight into each others apis. Facebook and Linkedin have googlemail yahoomail and hotmail buttons that when you login with your account from them lists all email addresses and then tries to match them. So do they need an open way? Might save a login I guess.
Tristan
Yes, some sites allow you to import your contacts from various sources by connecting via API's.
However this is not necessarily the case all the time (some API's don't allow you to import some details from their site). For example take a look at the recent issues Robert Scoble explains:
http://www.mogulus.com/robertscoble
There are also concerns about the ways that some of these differently-coded migration routines work (screen scraping, etc.)
What also happens when your contacts in one place get updated? Should you have to regularly run the contact import routines on your other social networking sites?
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