The last few weeks / months have been exciting in the Social Networking space (Open Social's release, Microsoft's Investment in Facebook, Facebook Social Ad's release), doubly so here in Silicon Valley since two of the big news makers, Facebook and Google, are headquartered here (and MySpace is opening offices here). Recently the Silicon Valley Web Guild sponsored two events (OpenSocial - High Octane For Widgets & Web Apps, Next Generation of Social Networking) with some great speakers that got everyone thinking, including me. In this posting I was to explore the issues of Openness and Account Portability. First a couple of characteristics of Social Networks:

• Existence of a Social Graph - From John Furreru "Social Graph is the network of connections that exist through which people communicate and share information." Link. Even though this definition is large enough to include World of Warcraft (Wow) Guilds, Email, Water Coolers and Hand Signals on the Freeway let's run with it. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are built around the Social Graph - hooking up with 'friends' is the primary reason to visit the site. In Warcraft forming Social Graphs is a supporting function to the real goal of completing group quests i.e. when logging on at 8pm on Saturday nights its convenient to have a large trusted Social Graph to call up to smite Onyxia. The Social Graph is really just like application data, akin to the docs produced by Word.
  
• User Control of their Social Graph. This can be as simple as choosing whose friend invite you accept and whose you don't. Although in practice I've rarely seen friend requests rejected. <sarcasm> And I am not just talking about the popular me. </sarcasm>. While this may seem innate to a network, actually most things in life don't allow you to control who is in your network i.e. pretty much anything offline like neighbors, classmates work collegues, freshman roommates.

Looking at these  already with just two elements controversy arises. If Social Graphs are akin to application data and users can control control their Social Graph then shouldn't they have control to port that data to another network / application? For instance shouldn't I be able to click some buttons and move my Facebook profile (including its social graph) over to MySpace. But this is not the case. And this limitation is not just with Facebook to MySpace alone - it's universal. This capability roughly exists in the 'offline world' of Outlook where you can export your address book (social graph) to csv and import that same csv into Thunderbird if you so choose. Many had hopes that Google's OpenSocial initative would enable this portability. But they have been strangely silent about how or if it will support account portability (right now its more of a widget portability for developers). Admittedly the alliance and spec is still a work in progress, but this is a fundamental question and I am surprised they didn't have an answer at launch.

True sometimes portability is not desired. Stretching the analogy a bit, corporate email accounts are Social Networks that are not portable. When you leave a company they take your account away. Interesting aside: For work places that use instant messanger employees do keep their accounts, including their buddy lists. Before Microsoft I worked at Yahoo!, where IM is deeply embedded in the culture. It was fast and efficient means of communication. But for quite a few months after I left, I was still getting IMs pinging me about work issues on my Y! messenger.

But in the Social Network space, the data (profile, social graph, pictures, etc.) are created by the users for their personal use (not the use of their employers or the corporation behind the Social Network). The optimist in me can't but help think whoever supports portability will have a marketplace advantage. Underlying this optimism:

1. Users will be more likely to invest time in creating their profiles if they know no 'vendor lock-in' occurs. True that some people think they 'own' their profile, but this can be debatable. In Wow, Paragraph 3a of the EULA stipulates that characters, character names, etc are owned or licensed by Blizzard.
   
2. Users will be more likely to invest time in building their social graphs is they know no 'vendor lock-in' occurs. Separate from the first point because ultimately you can recreate your profile information (hint: don't keep uploaded photos as the only back-up), but its more considerably more difficult to trace down those old contacts.
   
3. Portability could see new services arise. Services could spring up enabling users to archive or store their profiles.  This eliminates the need to worry about the vendor going out of business. Corporate companies offer soldiers the service of analyzing their personnel files before promotion boards, lots of variations on this could help the Social Networks (I would love to see something like this for Linked In).
   
4. Developers will be more confident in building on a platform where their users could more easily follow them. For example suppose a developer creates a successful event planning application on MySpace and this application takes advantage of the user's Social Graph e.g. automatically inviting their MySpace 'friends' to a party (OK, its a theoretical example - this is probably not a good app idea). Unless users of the app have account portability, the developer's options for distribution, monetization and even continued operation are severely constrained.
   
5. Finally for companies, this is just a plain good marketing + PR option. Most users probably won't take advantage of it. Look at MS Word, conversion utilities exist, but despite the price difference even many diehard free software fans prefer it over AbiWord, Open Office (I know, I've had many ask me to get them copies from the MS company store!) [Note: I am not trying to be an MS shill, actually I find Zoho Writer and Google Apps to have some great features, esp with regards collaboration]

I don't believe that openness always wins. But I do believe its an option worth the fight.