Earlier today Plaxo announced a new open source tool for those looking to begin developing an open social network. Plaxo's new Online Identity Consolidator, as the company calls it, is a script that reads and harvests XFN microformat data to discover all your various identities on social networking sites.
The tool is essentially a web crawler. To use it you'll need to have at least one rel=”me” link on your page. It starts with a URL you enter and looks for rel=”me” links to other sites you use. It then crawls them too, and so on until it runs out of links to follow. It then looks for bi-directional links between sets of URLs, which establish a “verified claim” that the same person is indeed controlling both sides.
The Online Identity Consolidator is part of the toolset Plaxo uses to aggregate your data into its Pulse social network.
Earlier today I spoke with Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect for Plaxo, and John McCrea, VP of Marketing for Plaxo about the new tool, and where Plaxo sees itself fitting into the coming open social network.
Plaxo sees the connections of an open network happening largely through the address book and contact information. That is, the best defined relationships are, according to Plaxo, in your address book. John McCrea says, “what we see is that for a lot of people the main ways they're [maintaining relationships] are e-mail and address books — that's the primary source.”
Of course the company has a vested interest in address book data since it currently has that data for about 15 million users.
But selfish interests aside, Plaxo has a point. As more people are starting to communicate through Facebook e-mails, blog comments, Twitters and other disparate means, the address book becomes one of the few common threads. In fact Smarr thinks “the line between social network and network address book is blurring.”
But the problem right now is that many of these sites don't use tools like the XFN microformat, and even the best aggregating tools simply can't access the data you've entered.
But Smarr thinks that will change, and indeed already is. He sees Plaxo leading the way, out of the “walled garden” of Facebook and into an open, manageable network of relationships. “Plaxo is trying to figure out how we can put control back in the hands of users… how can they use this data, and move it between services, so that the data follows them and just works.”
While large established sites like MySpace and Facebook seem to see an open network as a threat to their established dominancy, Plaxo doesn't think that's the case.
Contrary to seeing an open network as a threat Plaxo thinks the open future will boost traffic, particularly to smaller, recently launched networks. “The reason there's so much momentum behind the idea of an open network is because — except for the entrenched folks at the top — by making it easier to discover and use the sites, everyone is going to use them more.”
The new Plaxo Online Identity Consolidator isn't a panacea by any means, in fact it's a very small tool in the grand scheme of things, but it just might represent the first surge of momentum that encourages other sites to open up their data and provide their tools as well. While they wouldn't name names, Plaxo claims to be working with a number of social networks to develop ways for users to regain control of their data.
And finally, since it always comes up whenever we write about the debate between open networks and walled gardens, keep in mind that no one is saying your data ought to be all public, rather that it ought to be yours, to take and do with as you see fit. As McCrea says, “people have the mistaken notion that by open we mean public, which isn't true. We see a distinction between data that's public and data that's portable. You want to be able to compartmentalize — share with some and not others — and still maintain that portability.”
