The limitations of current implementations of social software
In a recent post on a new relationship capital group weblog - “Centrality”, Eszter Hargittai discusses how the limitations of sites which try to organize social networks constrain users’ connections - in the case she mentions because on Facebook you can only specify one school affiliation when many of us have three or four.
I have been complaining for years about a similar issue - the way American sites often make US-centric assumptions about their users (not bothering to specify when they don’t ship overseas, requiring a province/state as well as a city and country, etc).
But one of the bigger issues about social network software is not strictly technical and not fixable by a single firm. It is that with the proliferation of different social tools it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage who belongs in which groups and to get friends to sign up for them where necessary. I already have email mailing lists of my friends, Flickr profiles and more recently LJ friends lists to manage. They are not in sync and almost every time I add a new social software tool I have to get my (often technophobic) friends to sign up to that service too. So now I can’t remember who has access to what and who I have told what to where. It’s a problem that is only going to get worse unless social software companies get together and make it easy to build central profiles which people can use across different web applications.
Wasn’t the Liberty Alliance Project supposed to solve this problem? Or P3P? Or (heaven help us) Microsoft Passport? If this doesn’t get solved there may be increasing lock-in as it becomes easier to use, say, the Yahoo suite of applications like Flickr and Yahoo 360 just because you don’t have to remember multiple logins and neither do your friends…