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c h a p t e r11: THE SOCIAL GRAPH■maintaining multiple profiles, friends lists, and activity feeds by collecting it all around
an individual and then plugging an appropriate identity into specific social applications
as needed.
Of more-than-trivial consequence, the fact that most social networks require
individual participants to create an entire, complete profile for use exclusively inside
that specific social network actually limits cross-network participation. As a practical
matter, how many profiles do you really want to maintain? This is a question that more
and more social networking participants are beginning to ask, and eventually you will
have to address this in the design of your social business applications.
As an alternative to the network-centric profiles of Facebook and similar net-
works, consider Ning. Ning members create a single identity, and then use that as the
basis for membership across the various Ning communities that they choose to join. A
Ning member may be associated with one or more sports communities, a professional
group, a college alumni network and one or more lifestyle- or cause-based Ning com-
munities. Regardless, it’s the same individual that is linked in all of these. This is simi-
lar to the approach of Looppa (referenced earlier in Chapter 4) in the development of
its connected communities, wherein members of specific communities are able to create
and share content across linked communities rather than only within one community.
Very important here—and a key in understanding the differences in potential
implementations between a Ning-based presence versus Facebook, for example—is
that Ning is not simply a “single sign on” protocol applied to a collection of individual
networks. Instead, Ning is an example of an approach to social networking that begins
with the personal profile, and then attaches that profile to the various social applica-
tions that have relevance to the individual represented by that profile. This is definitely
a trend to watch as it is yet another push in the movement away from centralized social
hubs and “websites-as-islands” and toward a social experience that is defined first by
the identity of the participants (via the profile) and then second by the context (specific
social applications) in which they participate.
The take-away from this discussion is this: As you set out and plan your social
technology, consider how (and if) members of your support forum, for example, will
join it and share content as appropriate outside of that network—for example, in
another community where they may be advocating the use of your products for which
they are (also) seeking support through your support forum. Whether through a mech-
anism like Facebook’s Open Graph, Ning’s approach of “one identity, multiple com-
munities,” or the use of OpenSocial (a social networking toolset developed by Google,
MySpace, and others), you will want to make it easy for your participants to share
experiences and move content across social networks just as they do within a single
network. As business applications involving social technology develop further, the abil-
ity to easily traverse intersecting social graphs will gain in importance.