Ryan MacMillan

Are you sick of people asking to be your friend on Facebook? Or are you, like me, sick of people telling you that they are sick of being asked to be someone’s friend on Facebook?

Either way, you’ll be intrigued by Michael Geist’s recent blog posting about the interoperability of social networking sites. Geist, Professor of Internet Law at the University of Ottowa, argues that:

While not quite spam, the steady stream of requests for Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, Dopplr travellers, or Plaxo contact updates, highlights the lack of interoperability between social network sites and significantly undermines their usefulness.”

Geist holds that social networking sites are like “walled gardens” which demand a new set of information from us everytime we want to join one. The benefits of Facebook, thus he argues, are limited by the inability to link your Facebook page to a friend’s MySpace profile. This is particularly problematic when you consider the international vagaries of social network popularity…For whilst Facebook is the leader in the UK, Canada and South Africa (is there something Commonwealthy about Facebook’s benign inoffensiveness?), the situation is different elsewhere. MySpace dominates in the States, Mexico and Italy, whilst Eire loves Bebo along with New Zealand. The Koreans like Cyworld, but their Japaense neighbours much prefer Mixi. In Indonesia and Singapore it’s all about Friendster (which is just too receherche for words…) but for Thailand and Columbia it’s Hi-5. The Germans prefer the in-no-way-awfully-named Studiverzeichnis, which the French and Senagalese abjure in favour of Skyblog. Brazil and India meet up on Orkut, and the Russians canot be torn away from Vkontakte. And none of them can link usefully to one another.

The potential for furiously laboured racist jokes about national social networking site peferences is, clearly, unlimited, but Geist makes a good point - social networking is increasingly localised, and the companies running the networks must (like music corporations realising that their downloads should play on all players) work to ensure greater interoperability between sites.

Or, and this is just a suggestion, Google could buy them all and make everyone use the same site, thereby eradicating the problem entirely.

Totalitarianism: it’s not just for dictators!