Allen Hurff (of MySpace) talks privacy & portability from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

I did a quick interview with Allen Hurff, MySpace technical lead, while we were at Graphing Social Patterns.

John McCrea of Plaxo talks portability & privacy from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Talked a bit with Plaxo’s John McCrea at Graphing Social Patterns, just before our panel on portability and privacy. You should check out the new show John and Joseph Smarr are doing at TheSocialWeb.tv.

Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Today Chris Messina, David Recordon & I took a break while at Graphing Social Patterns, East and chatted about one of our favorite topics:  what to do about all this social data we are generating like crazy.

Once it becomes ‘the year of [something]‘ what was truly new & vibrant & interesting about that [something] has moved on down the road.  So it is with our year of lifestreaming.  Forgive me for thinking there isn’t a whole lot of life in lifestreams.  Dumb rivers of updates are a stop gap, surely better than what we had before (no centralized method for keeping watch) but not a durable solution for user or service value.  These dim aggregations cloak beautiful seams.  The next round of really interesting personal informatics services won’t have any hestitation over being made up of bits & seams.  A la Dopplr, they’ll strut about in a suit made of many services.

What’s interesting about our current round of science projects is the glue that holds them together.

Or, rather, what you could do if you started to really think about the various forms of data glue you could give your users.  Post It Notes use weak adhesive to make your information surface mobile and the medium more plastic.  Let’s not get hung up on form factors, but intstead look to the deeper needs this rash of feature copying is trying to meet.

• How can we centralize management of all these disparate personal points on the Web?  (Blog It, ping.fm)
• How can we easily view the activities that matter to us?  (FriendFeed,  SocialThing, Netvibes)
• How can we round up our publishing efforts and present various views of what we are up to?  (See Loic’s plaint, Mike’s extented discussion of the centralized Me, ‘enhanced’ Facebook Mini-Feed, FriendFeed, Action Streams)

By fixating on one or two specific types of data views (status messages, ‘life’ streams) we miss the larger point.  Adam Greenfield isn’t wrong when he notes that our current social software offerings are weak simulacra of the rich interplay we enjoy in our ‘real’ lives.  We aren’t going to give people richer experiences by mimicking a narrow range of interface ideas.

Instead, we should help people curate and cultivate their social lives.  Let them go granular, reuse bits, and, most importantly, remix and reglue those bits in contextually powerful ways.  Such nuance is likely to come from users.  We, in turn, should pledge to pave the cow path experiences they dictate.  Ma.gnolia’s announcement to go all 3rd party for its ID system wasn’t merely about championing OpenID.  The bookmarking service will also let users rely on their existing Facebook accounts for login and profile credentials and contact lists.  What is exciting about what Larry’s team is doing is that they are getting out of the identity game and focusing their scarce resources on a richer sandbox experience.

Or, rather, with all this stuff in one place, now what?

In the last year, I’ve tried to think about, write about, argue for and cajole people into building portable social networks.  I think it’s the richest direction for the systems we design, for service providers and for people who use these services.  I choose my words carefully, thinking that short-term worries are standing in the way of long-term value & creativity.  There are a handful of technical building blocks at the ready, but as Kara Swisher notes, the problems around making social networks portable aren’t really technical.

I will happily note Microsoft’s recent work around their contact API, creating  limited interop with some of the leading social networks.  I would also point to the creation of the Open Social Foundation.  I interpret these as further signs of the inevitability of free(er) flowing social data.  While some of my peers are overly concerned about getting today’s social gorillas to adopt our approaches, I’m more interested in researching, testing & promoting the building blocks of what will become the more durable infrastructure of the social Web.  Which is to say, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be built or mandated by today’s leading lights.

If you want to see the future of social network interop, watch smaller, more nimble and daring players like Matt Biddulph, of Dopplr.  Above is a screenshot of his recent test, moving beyond contact import to contact subscriptions.  Or watch what happens as Ma.gnolia mandates OpenID for all new accounts. Dopplr and Ma.gnolia aren’t on the hook to generate revenues to support an untenable valuation.  We’ll see truer results from such experiments.  We’ll note what works.  What doesn’t.  Who benefits.  How we have to tweak that solution for other contexts.  We’ll rinse.  Repeat.

In this muddled, two steps forward, one stagger back dance, an interoperable social ecosystem will come to life on the Web.   No shot heard round the world that they can write up on AllThingsD.  The open social Web, like life, will happen while your back is turned.

It is for this reason that I think globalized, generic, manifesto-driven approaches are unsound.  No one wants data portability.  They want to reuse their Last.fm contacts to find the right muxtapes.  They want to invite all their PHP tagged contacts in Highrise to a particular event on Upcoming.org.  They want to share ffffound objects with select groups.  And so on.  Instead of acting like graduate students, let’s be makers.

My hope is that OwnYourIdentity.com will become an open notebook for those efforts.  And I invite you to help us write this story.