Salinger and Kerouac

I recently came across this interesting juxtaposition of J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac in the New York Review of Books. I especially liked:

There's no alternative "lifestyle" for Holden Caulfield or the members of the Glass family to retreat to, as there is for the Beats, no group of like-minded adventurers. Salinger's characters aren't after thrills. Their quest is for an impossible purity that drives them away from the workaday world, toward a dangerous, self-burying seclusion. "We're...freaks with freakish standards," says Zooey Glass to his sister Franny. "We're the Tattooed Lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed too."

Exporting the Social Graph

In a recent blog post Jason Calacanis suggested five ways Facebook could improve its position with regard to customer privacy. Although it is not clear from the post how serious these suggestions are, in this post I will take a closer look at the first suggestion, namely "add an export key".

To understand this, we need to consider what Calacanis means by this suggestion, and further, what it would mean for FB to allow this kind of export. Fundamentally, the value of a social network is contained in two things:

1. The User Profile. This would typically include some kind of identity information (such as reliable contact information), personal information about the user, and personal media, such as photos and videos.
2. The Social Graph. That is, some definition of who the user's friends and family are, or more generally, who they wish to communicate with.

What Calacanis is suggesting is that users be given the ability to "export" these things externally so that they may be used to participate in other social services that would make use of them. Before addressing the likelihood of such a feature, let's first consider why the social graph is so important.

Social networks are about sharing information. Regarding the content I create, I don't always want to share everything with everyone. Some things, such as family photos, I may only want to share with family and friends. In the language of Twitter, these are the folks that are following me. Regarding content I consume, of all the content created, there's only a very small percentage I actually care about. This is typically content created by friends, family, colleagues, etc. These are the folks that I am following. Together, these make up the social graph. In other words, the social graph is a realization of folks and things I care about, and folks I am comfortable sharing my content with.

Any time a user logs into FB for the purposes of either sharing content or managing their social connections (or social graph), FB wins. From the user's perspective, they are building (at least part of) their social community around the FB ecosystem, and becoming more and more "locked in" to this network. This is in fact the primary goal (at least for now) of FB, namely, getting users to invest time and energy into building this relationship.

Based on all of this, it may seem counter-intuitive for FB to share this kind of information with outside parties, but that is exactly what they are doing with Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows external services to access profile and social graph information for consenting FB users. Of course they expose this not for the purposes of "exporting" the data for use in other social networks, but rather so that other services can build on top of this existing "social infrastructure", further strengthening their position in terms of having the end user "locked in" to their FB profile and social graph.

What Calacanis is suggesting is something very different. He is questioning the concept of ownership and the underlying closed nature of FB. He is suggesting in fact that FB support a more open environment where users are free to "pack up" their profile and social graph information and take it to another (potentially competing) social network.

In short, FB will not do this. And the bad news (at least for proponents of an open web) is that it doesn't really matter whether they do or not. Even if such an "export key" existed, there's no really compelling reason for anyone to use it. For this to be compelling to consumers, two things are needed: 1. Something about FB that makes them want to move out, and 2. An alternative place for them to move to. Or, as Mickey Roarke said in Rumble Fish: If you're going to lead people, you have to have somewhere to go.

Alternatives are possible, such as Diaspora, but it's still too early to tell whether or not such "open" efforts can overcome the network effect FB has so obviously achieved.