Interesting article from The Economist on how social networks may be falling into the same trap that AOL and Compuserve have done in the past.
Two of the biggest online phenomena of the past couple of years—social networks such as Facebook, and virtual worlds such as Second Life—look an awful lot like AOL did in 1994. They are closed worlds based on proprietary standards. You cannot easily move information in and out of them: try shifting your Facebook profile to MySpace, or moving a piece of clothing or furniture from Second Life to Entropia Universe.
Ringside Networks are addressing this problem with the “first open source platform” for social networks, Ringside Social Application Server.
Glen Scott
I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.
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Glen, It’s an interesting predicament. I think that the various chat clients are an interesting thing to look at, along with AOL, and CompuServe, etc.
I recently found a company who makes something that will post your information and changes to all the major social networking site, so when you update something it updates everywhere.
As for the interoperability between virtual worlds, I think that ID portability would be a great thing. However, if you look at the differences in how various virtual worlds treat property, cash, virtual currency, etc. you’ll quickly see the snags to full portability. If you can make a million chairs, or outfits in Second Life, and then just bring them all to Entropia where you can actually sell them for cash it throws off the economy, right? I know that’s simplistic, but I would be interested in your take on that…
There have been a few posts on this theme, all of which seem to have been inspired by the venerable Stephen Fry in his column in the Guardian, reproduced in his blog:
http://stephenfry.com/blog/?p=34
Ringside’s platform is re-implementation of facebook’s platform to allow other sites to run facebook apps (glad that someone recognised this as a good idea..). As you say though, walled gardens will always fail, and all ringside offer is the potential for many walled gardens instead of just a few. The platform APIs may be open, but unless the data is also open and shared, the problem is still there. If we can access data from all the different web services people use through a nice consistent platform like Facebook’s, then we have something. This is where things like google’s social graph api (which pulls in friends data from any number of websites) comes into play.