Timo Heuers Weblog

Wouldn’t it be better, if we had our data such as gender, name, address and those things in one single place? In my imagination, a future service will offer to save our data in that single place and Social Networks like Facebook, XING and LinkedIn just extract the data they need from this source (for example current jobs, awards, also friends at other networks so you can synchronize). The advantage is, you know, that you don’t have to fill out lots of forms. You just have to fill out one form and the Social Networks will immediately get the data from there.

A kind of single data place would be useful. It could be hosted by a trustable company or self-hosted (like NoseRub already does it). Self-hosting is of course the better choise, because you have full access to all activities going with your data. You trust yourself more than a person you don’t know! Friends, gender, former jobs, current job, favorite music and more - everything’s hosted by yourself. A network that needs your gender, your name, (favorite) username and your favorite music just accesses to the single data place and gets the data they need. No need to fill out more than one form anymore! Also the network can access to your friends (their email addresses are also collected at your single data place) and check, if they are already registered. That’s called synchronizing. Maybe your friend Peter is already registered, so you can easily add him to be your friend. But your friend John isn’t there. You can easily invite him. It’s like the feature to synchronize your e-mail addresses as some Social Networks already do it today. But it’s easier for you and takes less time!

But every network has some data, which is its special field, for example “favorite destination” at travel communities. That information isn’t in your single data place, so you have to fill out what it is. Afterwards you should be able to export the special data and import it at your single data place, so that another social network who needs “favorite destination” doesn’t have to ask you anymore and automatically imports it from your single data place. It knows it, because your single data place knows it, after you imported the data.

You can also designate what data you want to share. If a network asks for name, gender and sexual likings, you don’t have to give access to your sexual likings. You just edit the checkmark and uncheck sexual likings. That’s a new way how to give away data. The Social Networks
are no longer able to charge the information they want, they now have to wait for your choice which data you want to share with them. That’s a fundamental change of data storing! I think that’s neccessary for the great idea of single data place.

An advantage is that if you settle to another city, you just have to edit your single place data “adress” and every social network requiring the address knows, that you settled. No need to nerve-racking hours of changing!

You probably realized that I don’t have the view of a technician. I am a user and I am a person with tons of feedback. I just brainstormed and noticed the things I thought about. I don’t know how to realize all this, but maybe Microformats would be a cool place to start. Also OpenID could be helpful in trying to realize this a way. They have built the needed infra structure for this.

In my opinion the future of Social Networks is, that you decide, what data you let to know and that you have the access to all of your data, not the Social Networks! And there are already solutions doing exactly or nearly that. The change has already begun…

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Journalistic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.