

The Social Web is Splintering (ftw) - jrlevine
http://www.jakelevine.me/blog/2011/08/the-social-web-is-splintering-ftw/

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wccrawford
How do you splinter something that was never cohesive in the first place?

Unlike Email, IM, and many other things, social networks have never integrated
with anything. (Not that IM did a great job of it, but at least there's more
than 1 IM client for a given network.)

People should be able to sign on with any social networking provider and be
friends with people on any other provider, just like email. There should be
open, standardized protocols that allow each network to talk to each other,
and route the appropriate information around.

~~~
esrauch
Unlike email, there is a very significant divergence on what exactly a social
network should entail and most of the networks don't mesh.

How could you merge twitter with facebook for example; you couldn't show most
of the posts made on facebook on twitter because of length violations. And
what, you go to twitter.com and you can see content that you couldn't see on
facebook.com because twitter is choosing an public-only asymmetric model and
facebook isn't?

~~~
wccrawford
It's an unnatural restriction. Email has no such restriction! In fact, email
has gone on to break many of its restrictions, enabling attachments, inline
images, HTML formatting, and more.

But lets say that the 140 character limit is desirable... Have a protocol for
statuses (short) and posts (long) and networks that can only handle the short
ones get links to the long version.

As for public/private... Anything posted as 'private' wouldn't end up on
public-only networks. That's a limitation that network has chosen, and they'd
have to live with it.

Email has adapted to users' needs, instead of laying down rules and refusing
to budge. If there were a social networking protocol that was widely adopted,
anyone who didn't adopt it would slowly die out... Unless they found some way
to differential themselves that other network couldn't copy. And really, what
couldn't they?

