In the 1990s the cell phone number was the key component in our virtual identities. That number was the unique identifier that represented us, and was the main conduit of communications with our friends. We were asked to leave our name and number, as if both held equal claim to us. However, throughout the 90s and beyond, that number locked us in to a deal with a specific carrier. To change providers you had to jettison your old number, your old identity, and start again afresh. The price of this freedom was paid in lost friends and missed opportunities.

Much of the role of the cell phone number as the centre of our digital identity has been usurped by our social network profiles. Our unique identifier is now our URL, messages that once might have been SMS texts now find themselves on our Facebook walls or in status updates and the profile has become the main conduit of communications with our friends. Our digital identities have become much richer with the web of content and relationships our profiles display and yet the same problems remain. Our profiles lock us in to a specific provider and to change means jettisoning everything and beginning again with nothing.

The fight to make our cell phone numbers portable, to be able to change service providers without paying such a heavy price, seems remarkably similar to the fight to open up the social networks that we see today.

Throughout the 90s there was a rising tide calling for the right to take your phone number with you if you changed providers. The carriers saw number portability as a threat to their valuations and lobbied against it furiously; without it there would be few ways to compel subscribers to stay with their service. They knew one thing: lock in the number, lock in the value; export the number, export the value. They feared a commoditized, cut-throat world where the business of today could vanish by tomorrow.

Today, the social networks’ value is derived from the content (be it your words, photos or friends) with which it is populated. They also know one thing: lock in the content, lock in the value; export the content, export the value. There’s little chance that a $15bn valuation at such variance to performance could be sustained in an open interoperable world, and one might actually have to go back to calculating valuation in far more boring ways like as a multiple of revenue.

This is the crux of the problem that the large-scale social networks face, they know that calls for openness will only become more strident over time and that to survive in the long term they must open up. And yet if they lose the vendor lock-in and thus potentially have to recalculate their valuation, their investors will be out for blood. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they suggest palliative measures such as widgets being available across multiple networks and mutual email exchange between oligarchs. None of which really gets us any closer to an open interoperable network where we can move our identities to whichever provider best satisfies our needs.

In 1996, the FCC mandated that all cell phone numbers should be portable, and then the fight began in earnest. The carriers claimed that of course they would like numbers to be portable, but there were huge technical barriers that would cost $1 billion to implement. Unsurprisingly, these technical barriers turned out to be less than insuperable and the $1 billion estimate turned out to include such costs as retraining sales representatives.

Next they claimed that there was no demand as large volumes of subscribers were already switching carriers despite the lack of a persistent portable number. This was something only a few people really cared about and thus there was no need to spend money on a demand that didn’t really exist.

We seem to be seeing very similar arguments coming from the major social networks today. Facebook representatives regularly claim that they want to move towards openness but technical barriers and privacy problems are slowing them down. Technical barriers and privacy problems that smaller more nimble systems without the access to Facebook’s funds and engineering talent seem to have dealt with without issue.

We are also told that people enjoy being able to cut free from their old identities and begin again afresh. Apparently, being able to move your friends and content around with you to whichever service you want them to be on is a non-problem only found within the geek community, and those who push for it need to step outside the bubble. The same viewpoint suggests that people ‘enjoyed’ the opportunity to dissolve old social connections with the change of a phone number and found that a benefit of switching carriers was the ability to start again with a blank slate. Just who is in the bubble here?

The same problem, the same arguments and the same intransigence. The carriers fought tooth and nail to appeal the FCC order and it took seven years for number portability to become possible. Even after that, the carriers went out of their way to make the process difficult for their subscribers: AT&T customers complained that taking their number from AT&T to another carrier was taking several days, instead of the two to three hours it was supposed to take and that AT&T’s customer service representatives were not being helpful, with hold times on phone calls often lasting hours.  We’ve seen a similar philosophy behind the roadblocks put in place for those wishing to delete their Facebook account and there seems to be no rush on their part to improve this situation.

What made persistent portable identity possible in the cell phone sphere was overwhelming pressure from outside forces, in this case the FCC, and even then it took years. It seems that it will take a similar timeframe and measure of external force to compel the social networks to open up too. This time, though, that force is more likely to come from open networks invading market share, rather than from government intervention. However, the social networks can take a measure of comfort from the carrier experience too.

Since number portability was introduced, subscriber churn has not been as great as many feared. Customer service, price and network availability, strategies that facilitate rather than exploit their subscribers, have become the keys to retention. If the social networks were to open up, they might have to face more competition on quality of provision and innovation, but for the market, the users and their own long-term success that’s no bad thing.

For most people using the web on a regular basis, joining social networks has become an everyday activity. I’m certainly joining lots of them myself. When a new service sprouts up that sounds interesting, my curiosity gets the better of me and I dutifully go through the motions of signing up for it. The process goes like this: enter a username, choose a password, and in some cases even enter more personal information. After I do that, I go through the process of finding anybody on the service that I know. Chances are there are at least a few of my friends already using the service but I have no way of discovering them easily.

But then something interesting happens: I hit an invisible wall, tire of the service, and forget to go back. I call this phenomenon the Fade…as I slowly fade away from using the service regularly. And, days or weeks later when I realize that I’ve faded away from yet another service, it serves as a painful reminder that so much of my time is spent managing connections instead of enjoying being connected.

I’m not alone in this. This problem has become so widespread they even have a name for it: Social Network Fatigue (SNF):

n. Mental exhaustion and stress caused by creating and maintaining an excessive number of accounts on social networking sites.

What causes social network fatigue?

1. Repetitive motion: We do the same things over and over: create an account, add our favorite things to our profile, try to find friends, add some (but never all) friends, wait for something to happen. It’s a repetitive cycle that, when we realize we’re going through it yet again, reminds us that we’re not being productive, but repetitive.
2. Too many things to remember: After we sign up for a new network, we have to remember that we did and know how to get back there. If we do remember to check back, we have to remember the username and password that we used to create the account. With only a few accounts, this is easily done. But after you’ve joined a dozen or so social networks and the thought that you might want different passwords for some of them enters your mind, this becomes a real challenge.
3. Wasted time: With more and more social networks to manage, the time we have left to enjoy interacting with friends dwindles. The other morning I woke up, checked my social networks, and then realized that I had wasted 30 minutes simply managing my accounts, not really getting anything useful done.
4. Lack of consistency between networks: One of the biggest problems between social networks is that people we have signaled as friends on one network aren’t our friends on another. For example, my Facebook friends list isn’t even close to my LinkedIn contacts list, though both contain people who are important to me. This lack of consistency is incredibly frustrating, as it not only means more repetitive motion of friending them again, but it also makes us think twice about who is where.

The involved process of recreating our identities on multiple services leads to frustration and eventually exhaustion. Who knew that surfing the web could be so difficult?

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.

It took Europe 800 years to break the stranglehold of the feudal system, and the social networks six years to bring it back.

The feudal system gave Europeans their identity: you were a landowner or you were a serf. One was more fun than the other. Serfs were bound to the land, without freedom of movement. Their homes and belongings were property of the feudal lord and their labors lined someone else’s pocket. A serf could escape, but they would have to leave with nothing, never to see families and friends again. The barriers to freedom were intentionally high.

In the last few years the online world has seen the rise of personal identity. We are no longer just pistonheaddave or topcattone, anonymous monikers for flaming or gaming; we are Dave Morris or Tony Haile, we Google others and expect to be Googled, our flirting and romance is just as likely to take place online as it is in a bar. There are people whose perception of who I am is governed 20% by a shared flight and 80% by my facebook page. However, these identities that define us so much are bound to the company in whose site they were created, just as serfs were bound to the land in which they were born. We own nothing and if we leave we leave with nothing. Welcome to feudalism 2.0.

I don’t have the freedom to move the facets that make up my online self from Facebook to LinkedIn or Myspace, my content and relationships are the property of Facebook, as are the words exchanged with friends; I can’t message my Myspace friends from Facebook. My content is their content, my relationships are their relationships and my communications are their communications. I can escape and start a new life somewhere else, but if I do I do so faceless, barren and alone. My identity becomes fragmented as I move from site to site hemorrhaging the words, photos, messages and relationships that make up so much of my identity online. Old friends communicate with the ghosts of profiles past, not knowing that I have slipped away and begun (again) with nothing.

I don’t want to be too quick to judge the social networks, they have every right to do what they do, and we wouldn’t use them if they didn’t provide a valuable service. Going further, many would say that this post is a story about a pain that simply isn’t there. Most seem not to mind that who they are is owned by Mark Zuckerberg or Rupert Murdoch. However, might it be that, like the serf whose horizons did not extend beyond the fields his father tilled, we’ve not yet been able to conceive of anything better?

We need an Enlightenment online. An evolution of personal identity that says I’m free to throw sheep at people on Facebook or explore new bands on Myspace, but my content, my contacts, and my communications are in my control not theirs. I want people to be able to connect and interact with me  through one unique identifier that doesn’t change, no matter where I choose to host my identity. I want to own my identity, I’m tired of being owned.

A group of us have started Chi.mp to try and jump-start this evolution of identity. We are building a Content Hub and Identity Management Platform that can be deployed on any domain and puts the individual in control of their own identity. People using Chi.mp will have identities that are importable, exportable, interoperable, portable and most importantly theirs. By deploying it on the domain of your choice you can move from Chi.mp to another identity provider without losing the unique signifier that represents you. Oh and if you don’t have your own domain we’ll give you one (like everything else) for free. We’re turning the social networks inside out and making the Internet the Platform again.

This blog is an opportunity for some of us within the team, in particular Josh Porter, Brian Oberkirch, Myles Weissleder and myself, to delve into the area of identity online and engage with those who are interested in domain-centric identity and Chi.mp. After all, persistent identity online is the opposable thumb of the Internet; hopefully now we can all catch on. . .