Some interesting thought’s on Alan Steel’s blog on the evolution of open alternatives to walled garden social networks.

alan’s blog: The open alternative to LinkedIn

Following Phil’s lead, I’ve added XFN support to my Links to other people’s blogs at right. Phil is right on the money in describing the difference between XFN vs. similar things like FOAF: if someone as lazy as me can make it work, then it’s got a chance at big-time success on the web.

It’s too bad they called it XFN, though. Unlike Phil, I didn’t mark any of my contacts as “friend” or even “coworker”. It’s not that I don’t like them… I
never had any use for Friendster and the like, and I have no use for it in this context either. I have been a big fan of LinkedIn, though - all my Links at right are labeled with rel=”colleague met” which is precisely the relationship that I express by linking someone on LinkedIn…

While blogs may be the way this linking gets initiated, it doesn’t seem like the logical place for XFN to evolve. It would be way cooler to have a site that would allow me to post my professional profile there but open it up to XFN linking (and make it point-and-click simple to create XFN links). And in true Internet style, it doesn’t have to be just one site: many sites could support this with different “flavors” - the mass-market Yahoo! Profiles vs. a more professional-oriented site, etc.. One would simply store one’s profile at the site that most closely reflects your life on the Internet (more professional vs. more personal) and they could all link together.

The missing ability right now, to my knowledge, is the ability to do a full text search of XFN relationships out to some number of degrees, but this problem will be solved.

When it is solved, the search will be far more compelling than what social networks currently offer. Instead of search the users essentially static profile, you get to search the living content they author on the web.

You can imagine decoupling the search problem from the communication problem.
Once you have an open market for each of the different problems, the market can devise an optimal menu of solutions to each of them.

An XFN search engine would allow me to figure out out that somebody interesting is, say, 2 degrees from me. I would then a variety of ways that I might seek to get in touch with that person.

I could talk in an ad hoc fashion to the colleague in the middle via email, I could use a linked-in style relay system, I could use an email reputation system we both trust, I could connect through a shared community, I could pay a small fee to get past their spam filter if they like that system, etc, etc.

It’s a great weakness that the social networks attempt to impose a single, members-only solution to the communication problem.