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Facebook, MySpace and Friendster took the web by storm because they filled a gap in how people wanted to interact over the web -- they offer a way to keep all your data in one place.
Facebook especially recognizes "all-your-stuff-in-one-place" approach is one of
its greatest strengths, which is why they too have created a platform to allow outside developers to feed their data into Facebook.
But, where other services offer an Application Programming Interface (API), Facebook created an Application Programming Wormhole -- your data goes in, but nothing ever gets pulled out.
What happens when the next Facebook comes along? How will you migrate your data? Facebook offers no export options -- you, and your data, are bound up with the services and limitations of Facebook.
So why tie all of your personal data to Facebook's platform when you can build your own and control your data forever even after Facebook goes the way of Friendster?"
Phase two of social networking is here, the DIY solution has arrived. Here's how to roll your own.
This used to mean learning some programming languages to build a website, but today, with tools like Wordpress or Movable Type that's no longer necessary. And while Wordpress and MT may have started as blogging tools, they're much more than that now -- in fact they're all you need to develop your own data aggragating platfrom.
Wordpress especially, with its massive community of plug-in developers is perfectly suited to rolling your own social networking platform capable of storing your entire online existance in one place -- just like your Facebook page.
First off you'll need a domain name, then you need some sort of content management service -- Wordpress is a great choice for its extendability. And while web hosting isn't necessarily free, it's pretty cheap and there's even a number of hosts that offer Wordpress pre-installed.
What we're going to do is pull in same data Facebook is pulling in, but what are we really gaining? Are we trading one big black hole for a series of smaller ones? As it turns out no, all of the services below offer some sort of way to retrieve your data, whether through an API or a bulk exporter.
The drawback to badges and widgets is that they just display your data, the don't actually save it anywhere. So if these services disappear will your data go with them? Yes, but it will be just a small portion of your overall web existance.
If you know what you're doing, it's a far better idea to stash your data in your own database, but since that's beyond the scope of the average web user we'll stick with the cut and past solutions.
Now let's look at Facebook's main feature set. There's the "wall," which is essentially a blog/comments thread folded into one confusing list. No need to fret here, the blogging capabilities and built-in comment system of Wordpress more than cover your bases here.
So now you have your own domain and anyone can see your content even if they still believe Facebook is actually a book with pictures of incoming freshmen.
Want to know what your friends are up to? The wildly popular Upcoming event notification service has a dead simple code generator that will create a "Badge" listing all your public events as well as those from any groups you belong to (groups on Upcoming are the equivalent of networks on Facebook).
Then there's Twitter, the micro-blogging and status update service for keeping track of what your friends are doing right now. Twitter also offers badges and widgets for displaying your twitters to the non-twittering world, or pulling in those from your friends so you can keep track of them.
There are also a number of third party apps which use the Twitter API to offer more options. There's even a ready-to-go plugin for Wordpress.
Other potential friend management tools include Plaxo for contact information, MyBlogLog for including snippets from your friend's sites and any number of RSS badges which can pull information from just about any feed source.
Need somewhere to store your photos? Flickr, Picasa, Zooomr and more offer all Facebook's photo functionality and loads more.
Not only can you retrieve your images from these services and display them anywhere you want, in the process of uploading and sharing them with the local site community you just might make even more friends.
And there are far more web service outside Facebook than in. Share links on your site with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, list your music at iLike or Last.fm and post about your favorite book at Shelfari or LibraryThing -- all of these services offer cut-n-paste simple ways to draw data out and display it on your new, customized platform site.
So far so good. We've replicated most of the features of Facebook without getting sucked into the black hole, but what about the concept of "friends" and "networks"?
Well here's where it gets a bit tricky. We can pull in info from friends, but we don't have an easy way to manage friends or to define the relationship between our site and theirs.
The internet lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people. This absence is what gave rise to social networks in the first place, and while we've outgrown the limitations of social site, no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on internet at large.
One possibility is the microformat XHTML Friends Network (XFN) which provides ways of defining the relationship between the linker and the linkee, but while these convey the information they don't provide any way to utilize the information.
Some developers are beginning to offer easy-to-use tools which can create XFN code (Wordpress and Movable type both offer some templating solutions), but use of XFN isn't yet widespread enough and doesn't offer any tools for managing friends.
Which is why we'd like to propose a humble idea, the next big leap in social connectivity is going to be an open, free way of defining and connecting with people that isn't locked inside a particular domain or service.
Think of it as a language or structural way to link individuals sites along friendship lines, a way of defining micro networks within the larger network of the the web.
Ideally this micro-network, or microwork, would be open and discoverable. There would be ways of defining multi-tiered relationship and creating links between individuals and their sites.
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