The in the last two days we have seen two exciting news: Google and Facebook joining Dataportability.org and Google, IBM and Verisign agree to support OpenID. Together with Apache's Shindig, an open source implementation of Google's OpenSocial engine (see this Youtube Video for an interview with Brian McCallister who explains what Shindig and OpenSocial are) we are witnessing what will evolve to true social network portability.
- With OpenID you are able to transfer your identity from one network to another. No need to enter the same information about yourself over and over again. You are even free to create multiple identities if you would like to separate some aspects of your digital life.
- With DataPortability.org you are able to transfer the social graph from one network to another. This means you do not have to find your friends on each new network again and again.
- And with OpenSocial have application portability. If there is a nice widget in one network that you would like to embed into another network - no problem with OpenSocial.
As a consequence, the costs of joining yet another social network will shrink dramatically. As you have portability of identity, social graph and applications, you can start cherry-picking by joining many specialized networks, selecting the parts of the application that are most useful and aggregate them in your main OpenSocial container. But this also changes the rules of the game for social network vendors. You do not have to build up your user community from scratch, you do not have to convince your users to jump the high sign-up-and give-away-your-private-information barrier anymore, no you can create a highly specialized niche social network that serves only a small fraction of the population or that has only few, highly specific use-cases. This will lead to the generation of thousands of nice social networks, some standalone, some embedded into larger websites, but all will be able to interchange users, social graph and widgets with each other.
As for the big players Google and Facebook: They will have to compete for the best platform for running these widgets. Facebook can benefit from the large number of existing Facebook applications and the really neat integration into the site from a usability point of view, but Google's hold on the desktop with Google Toolbar and the ability to display desktop widgets in the web and vice versa could lead to a completely new way to see the web.