I Am Bismark

Earlier this week the tech blogs started buzzing about the rumored existence of a Facebook competitor made by Google called “Google Me”. Everyone started speculating about whether it could beat Facebook or not, how would it be different than Buzz, Orkut, etc etc.

Without any way to see into the future, it’s really impossible to say what kind of “success” such a product will have. However, while thinking about the possibility of a major competitor to Facebook, I furthered realized just how broken the “social networking” industry is.

You Don’t Own Yourself

Log into Facebook and take a look at all the information about you contained within your account. Your profile page. Your list of friends. Your pictures. Other’s pictures with your face tagged. Notes. Statuses. Likes.

Taken as a whole, this information basically acts as many of people’s entire social presence online. It’s how you interact with friends, it’s how you send out updates about your life, it’s how you express yourself. And who owns all of this data? Facebook.

A few months ago, the trendy thing to do in geek circles was to delete one’s Facebook account out of protest of Facebook’s stupid privacy debacles. Though it made a few headlines, it’s likely Facebook gained more users in a few hours than they lost due to this nerd exodus. Most people probably are ignorant of or plain just don’t care about Facebook’s many issues. But even those that do care are faced with one large barrier: one’s entire social profile and social graph are completely locked within Facebook’s silo.

Let’s say Google release Google Me tomorrow and it is freaking amazing. It has all of the exact features you have always wished Facebook would implement and it also fixes many of Facebook’s problems. So, you go and create a profile. It’s easy enough to copy and paste from your current one on Facebook. Then you think it would be good to have all of your pictures. Well, Facebook doesn’t give you an option to export your pictures in their original resolution, but that’s not a huge deal. But of course, all of your face tags won’t come with… Ok, forget the pictures. Next, it’s time to add back all of your friends. Wait, only three out of your 357 Facebook friends have Google Me accounts? Well crap. I suppose you could try to evangelize a bit to encourage them to move over, but do you really think you are going to be able to convince Great Aunt Gertrude why she should move over to some brand new scary system now that she finally figured out how to comment on her friend’s Facebook walls? Not gonna happen.

So, you have two choices:

• Forget about Google Me and keep your social graph intact on Facebook.
• Cut out huge chunks of your social graph that has built up over the last 6 years that you’ve spent on Facebook.

Now it’s true many people had a MySpace profile before jumping on to the Facebook bandwagon. However, I think it’s safe to say that everyone’s social capital investment is much larger in Facebook than it ever was on MySpace, adding much more friction any changes.

Nevertheless, Google Me may win. It may just be so awesome that it garners the critical mass of users to make it worthwhile, even to Great Aunt Gertrude. But if Google Me is just as closed as Facebook, we would just be trading one poor master of our social graphs for another. Over time, the number one social network will continue to get bigger and bigger and will continue to suck up more and more of your social graph until there is absolutely no way you could possibly move to a competitor (and honestly, this may have happened already with Facebook).

So what are we supposed to do?

A Real Open Graph

In an ideal world, it shouldn’t matter what social network you are on. If you are on Google Me, you should be able to “friend” someone who is on Facebook and tag a photo of someone who is on MySpace. Why are social graphs limited by these walled off networks?

The thing is, we don’t really need another network: the Web already provides us with one. The Web (graph) is a collection of data interconnected by links (since we all use search engines so much these days, we sometimes forget to think about it that way). If I can create a link here on my blog to any other item that exists on the Web, then why isn’t adding another person on the internet to my social graph just as easy?

It may require defining a new standard of how to connect profiles as friends as an extension of the Web. Unfortunately, that would mean the social networking companies would have to collaborate extensively, something they have little financial incentive to do (have you ever thought how much in dollars your personal information is worth to Facebook?).

Another barrier to the Web as the social graph is the incorrect idea that personal information can be kept private on the Internet. Let’s just be honest: if you post it on the Internet, it doesn’t go away and someone who you never expected to see it will. Five years ago, did you really think your mom would ever get a Facebook profile so she could look through those crazy party pictures you are tagged in? Facebook is not private. Do not treat it as a private way to interact with your friends. Other people will see it.

Once everyone get’s over the illusion of Internet privacy, then perhaps we can start moving to a saner model for social profiles. Why not do it 1997-style and create a personal website containing your public info, public pictures, and links to your public friends? This gives you complete control of your social graph. Sadly, this is not nearly as simple as setting up a Facebook profile, and this is one area where we geeks have failed to help our Great Aunt Gertrudes.

Some of you may have heard about the Diaspora project which is seeking to free our social graphs from companies like Facebook. I think the idea is neat, but so far I don’t have much hope. Even a geek like me yawns when I see feature lists like:

• OpenID
• Voice-over IP
• Distributed Encrypted Backups
• Instant Messaging protocol
• UDP integration

For Posterity’s Sake

Many of you reading probably think I am making a big deal about nothing. Well, I have one last point to make: Do you want your grandchildren to have records of who you were? Do you enjoy looking at old pictures of your ancestors and hope that your great grandchildren will do the same with pictures of you? Think about this: that last set of pictures that you uploaded to Facebook and then deleted off the camera is no longer yours. Will Facebook be around in 100 years? If it is, will your profile be around? Will your great grandchildren have access to your profile?

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer to all of this. I still have my Facebook profile, but I basically just use it as a place to aggregate my tweets and blog posts. I have made some attempts to control my social graph. One reason I started using Tumblr is it’s really simple export capabilities. I keep local copies of things I write in an archivable format (not .doc). I post my pictures to Flickr which gives me complete access to the original picture file (I don’t use some of their nifty tagging features since there is no portable way to export that data). I only put on the Internet something that I want my mom, my future employers, my Great Aunt Gertrude, and my great grandchildren to see.

If you care about this at all, try to take control of your own social graph. Forget about trying to hide it behind a Facebook privacy setting. Good luck.