dessalles

The ongoing discussion on social network portability cascaded into a bit of playground drama the last couple days. Fortunately, it’s all been sorted out and Facebook was kind enough to play nice with the Data Portability Workgroup and it’s cheerleaders. Don’t get me wrong, portability is certainly a compelling cause. And I genuinely hope significant progress is made in developing standards for easy migration of personal information across different applications and services. But it’s worth taking a slightly deeper look at the situation and understanding that portability is only a Band-Aid on the broken limb that is the social web.

As Umair Haque puts it, and as Yochai Benkler discusses more rigorously in the The Wealth of Networks (which I’d recommend taking a look at), the marginal cost of information is $0.00. That is, beyond the initial cost of producing information, there’s no additional cost incurred in reproducing it. So all that’s accomplished by the introduction of portability in social networking is the elimination of a fairly minor cost inefficiency. One that inevitably would’ve been eliminated in an information economy spiraling towards hyper-efficiency.

So the question is, once portability is solved, then what?

Let’s take a cursory look at what it is social networking sites actually do. Off the top of my head, I think of three things:

Protocol: They define and regulate how and where communication takes place across the network - so that you’re not trying to poke me while I’m trying to nudge you. Social networks are fundamentally just communications platforms, and protocol is the foundation of any communications platform

Indexing: They index all the nodes of the network, making it easy for one to find another. A social network’s index is typically accessed via search, but it could just as well be an alphabetical listing or what have you. Point is, if I can’t find a friend on the network, all the protocol in the world won’t make it easy for me to communicate with him.

Hosting: This is the most basic function of sites like MySpace and Facebook. If no one is connected to a network (i.e. no one’s information is available on the network), the network doesn’t exist. If no one exists on the network, who am I even socializing with?

So the Data Portability Workgroup is tackling the issue of protocol - and not between nodes in a network (that’s been figured out already), but across networks themselves. Awesome. Google and the rest of the search industry have indexing covered (though the world desperately needs an open source PageRank alternative). And looking at the last ten years of the Internet, we see massive amounts of progress on these first two fronts. But it’s the third, hosting, that’s still problematic. Why is setting up a website today barely any easier for laymen than it was on GeoCities 10 years ago. Consequentially, we end up with massively centralized communications platforms built on top of the most decentralized network on Earth. There’s something morbidly wrong with this, and it’s totally unsustainable. So if a lot of noise is going to be made about the inefficiencies of social networking, let’s start with it’s over-centralization. It’s a shame to see so many bright minds putting so much effort on applying Band-Aids when limbs need mending.

If all the pundits are right in saying “the Internet is the platform”, and I believe they are, than I think the complexity of hosting is a problem that’s holding up the entire sustainable, distributed social networking movement. And considering it’s one of the most essential Internet activities, it’s surprising no one’s figured out a way to make independently hosting one’s personal/social information and media as easy as using Facebook and as cheap as connecting to the Internet. Until someone does, we’ll continue limping through our socially networked lives.