Friday, January 28. 2005

Social Networks are a hot topic right now -- if you're paying attention to anything it has really become the flavor of the week. Regardless, unfortunately right now I think Social Networks are largely worthless to me and I'm wondering why it has to be that way.

The problem I'm seeing with social networks are, basically, they are very segmented to the point where they are more trouble than they both need to be or are worth. Recently I made myself an account on my first business-oriented Social Network LinkedIn. I like the account, I felt like it was actually useful compared to Orkut which sort of was neat for awhile but didn't really give me anything particularly useful. Unfortunately as I was going through my Contact List inviting those who weren't signed up to join, and connecting with those who already had an account, I realized it was a waste of my time because half the people I invitied accepted my invite then promptly invited me to another service that they favored for whatever reason... I now have accounts on four different social networks (Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Open BC). That means I have to re-enter and answer the same stuff four times, manatain that information in four different locations, and honestly who really has the time to deal with all this crap?

In my opinion, this segmentation between the networks makes them more trouble than they are really worth. I'm better off just keeping my contact list to myself in Evolution than going through the trouble setting up an account on a network.

My question is this: Why can't these networks provide a Web Services API?

Think of Instant Messenger Clients which had the same problem years ago -- I needed one for my friends on Yahoo!, one on my friends on AIM, one for MSN, and it was a real pain until someone got their act together and wrote clients like GAIM and Trillian which consolidated all of those contacts into one easy to manage list. What was the result? Basically everyone ended up with an account on every network and everyone was happy -- I think the same thing would happen to Social Networks if they'd let it.

If I had access to a Web Services API for these sites I would love to write a web-based application which communicated with all of them and provided a single interface to search, interact, and otherwise manage my social network without having to worry about which physical company's network my contact belongs to. I would think that this is probably possible now to some degree, because most of these networks provide Outlook or I.E. toolbar plugins which communicate with the network -- it's only a matter of understanding the protocol they are using.

Although that's a possible solution, it'd be nice to just see these sites expose an API via SOAP which would let me do all of this. I know one of the companies is planning something like this, I don't suppose an employee of one of the others might be able to chime in and give me some advice here?