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Who owns my Friendships?
Back in the day, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we had a Dayrunner. The Dayrunner had an address book, and all was good. If you met somebody you wanted to track, you simply put them in the address book.
Nowadays we have all sorts of cool systems to keep track of our friends. This should have made that old Dayrunner obsolete, right? Now our friends should be with us wherever we are.
Think again.
I got to thinking about this today reading some posts and comments over on news.yc. Suppose I built a Facebook App that connected to MySpace, and let me see and do all my MySpace stuff from over on FaceBook, one commenter asked. That would be a really cool thing, no? It would make these social networking sites almost like the commodities they should be, instead of the portals for the universe they want to be.
Heck yeah that would be a cool thing. I don't know about you, but I've got accounts on MySpace, LinkedIn, FaceBook, and God-knows how many other social sites.
The social networks would have a fit before they let you get to this information, however.
So why aren't all these friendships freely available to me?
It would destroy their profit model. Instead of locking me into one App where i can hang out with the peeps, each little site sants me to have separate groups of friendships. Remember Bob that we met last year at the conference? Let's see, was he on MSN, FaceBook, ICQ, MySpace, AOL, Paltalk, --- the list goes on and on. I've been using so many sites that I've made friends on, I've forgotten some of the site names, much less the names of the friends.
This is getting crazy. I mean, who's friendships are they, anyway? They certainly don't seem to be mine. I'm not able to call an open web service and download all of their details. One of the side-effects of this, for instance, is that if I don't keep visiting these sites, my link with the other person goes away.
It's almost like instead of having on DayRunner, you have 17. And your contacts are sprinkled throughout all of them. You have to remember which contact is in which Dayrunner. If you don't carry them around all the time and open them up, then wham, sometimes they'll just dissapear.
Did somebody say computers were supposed to simplify our lives?
I wonder why most people think it's totally immoral for companies to add DRM to songs we listen to, yet have no problems with companies owning all of our friendships? Seems to me who my friends are is a lot more personal and proprietary information to me than a song.
But there's no doubt: the terms of service of all of these places strictly forbid the type of cross-pollination that makes the most sense, that gives the biggest value to the user.
Somebody should fix that.
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