One of the most discussed topics on the social web is the portability of all the information we create on social networks. Users have to keep inserting all their information and build a new friends network, searching for friends on the new service. All the solutions already available are somewhat limited, from scanning all your e-mail contacts list or even giving a XFN file, they can’t really capture the real relations we have built so far. It’s not just a technological problem. It is as complex as human relations are.

By ario_j at Flickr.

No two social networks are the same and so, the friends we have in each one can’t be simply compared and shared on all of them. Besides a small/medium group of core people we normally already met and know for a long time, online friends are circumstantial. Much has been said about the different kinds/degrees of friendship. If I have made a friend over at a music related social network, I would listen carefully to his musical recommendations, literally. However, I probably won’t know any thing more about him but his musical taste. The same effect happens on every other service. This simply demonstrates that online friendship is based on what is called of objects of sociality.

Objects of Sociality

A social object can be something as small as a line dropped on twitter, a comment on a profile, a recommendation on a book or a song, a story digged, an experience like a game both played together. The collection of social objects we have in common with someone makes them objects of sociality. They’re the real connection on online friends and the value we all find on social networks.

Joshua Porter recently discussed about them on Bokardo. A quote from his article:

This notion of “objects of sociality” helps explain the success of sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Netflix. [...] What these services have done is to create a system that supports relationships around the objects of videos, photos, and movies, and slideshows. And as I wrote about the other day, their success seems based on their ability to make the activities of uploading, viewing, and sharing as painless as possible.

The problem is that this objects are normally very specific to the platform we used to create them. We can extract a list of our friends from a service, but we would end up with a list of names that wouldn’t make much sense without the context, the real value. So is there a way to share them, to make our friendships really portable? It’s not just a problem of identification, it’s about maintaining the context throughout the web. That way, all companies can focusing on making one thing really well.

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