I get a lot of email from designers of social network sites. They write me to tell me about their new sites, their unique angles on SNS, and how they are going to beat MySpace :). I like getting these emails – although I’m not always able to respond, it always inspires me to see so many people working on creative ways to connect people.
In the past, I’ve done a good deal of writing explaining how to design better and more relevant SNS. Today I offer designers of social network sites my single most valuable piece of advice: Adopt OpenID.
If you are a designer of an upstart social networking site, you know the key problem: attracting critical mass. Even if you design the most relevant, most blogged about SNS in the world, it is difficult to attract users into your network. However, the cool stuff doesn’t start happening in a SNS until the people are there. People need to find their friends, they need to be able to send messages and pokes and whatever. Social networks are, well, social – and if you don’t have the people you don’t have much.
The critical challenge in bringing in the people is convincing them to sign up to your site. And that is a challenge. First, they’ve got to hear about you. Next, they have to have a reason to join your site. And finally, if you’re really lucky, enough people will join your site to give that segment of users a decent user experience. However, people can’t and don’t want to be active on too many social network sites. We simply don’t have the time to spend checking messages and keeping up with all the action in all those different walled gardens. So that’s why we all join Myspace and Facebook, and not your social network.
So the “build it and they will come” proposition is false. That worked for a few sites but it won’t work for yours. So how do you innovate? You think outside the box. Imagine if when you signed up for a gmail.com email address, you could only email other gmail.com users. That’s completely silly, right? Noone would use gmail because we want to be able to email people at yahoo, hotmail and AOL as well. When I sign up to a social networking site, I’m not able to message people on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo. I am only able to message people on the SNS I join. This is fundamentally flawed. The good news is that you have the power to change this.
Our SNS profiles are little URL-based identities. It just so happens that there is a huge movement gathering steam called OpenID that is entirely based around URL-based identities. Imagine this scenario: I have a Facebook, by my friend has a Myspace. If these two sites were enabled with OpenID, I could add my friend’s Myspace to my Facebook. They would show up as a friend on my list, I would be able to message them – they would be a part of my social network. Now, of course, when you clicked on their profile, you would be transported to their Myspace page, but you’d also see me on their Myspace. There would be true cross-pollination, and we’d be able to establish our identity on the SNS that best reflects our interest and personality. We wouldn’t have to join a SNS that makes us feel uncomfortable simply because there was a large network there. This is fundamentally the same thing as allowing us to all have our own email addresses – which is a system I think we all agree works to our liking (no we don’t wall want Gmail addresses – we want choice!)
So, the problem here is that the big players – Myspace, Facebook – they have no incentive to open up. They want to keep their sites walled gardens, and they don’t want to offer you choice. But as we well know, there are lots of other social networking sites out there – and they are looking for a foothold, something new and interesting that would let them get a foothold against the big players. So what if they did something revolutionary – they sort of worked together. If these SNS players adopted OpenID, people would be able to join a social network, and start adding their friends from other networks. They’d get a user experience that is a lot more satisfying than other sites. Designers of SNS – you just have to make peace with the fact that people want different things, different SNS – once you make peace with this OpenID just flows naturally.
The beauty of this system is that it is simple. We don’t need huge overarching schemas or new protocols. All you have to do is leverage OpenID, and be a little creative. The OpenID 2.0 schema has a robust namespace, so you can use it to do things like exchange messages, profile pictures, etc. But you don’t really have to do all that much. You’ve just got to let people connect.
OpenID is a ground-up, democratic system. This means that the small guys have to adopt it first. If Myspace or Facebook want to play, that’s awesome, but I don’t think they will. So there is a little leap of faith, but it is a great gamble. Since we added OpenID support to ClaimID, it has only been extremely positive for us. The best news is that the OpenID community is growing, and companies like JanRain and Verisign will even help you get up and running (they even offer OpenID hosting!). There’s a ton of open source code out there – and if ClaimID can retrofit their website with OpenID, I know you can.
The walled gardens will stay with us, but walled gardens in social network sites need to be a thing of the past. Imagine the pitch – you can add friends from any OpenID network to your SNS. This has huge, democratic possibilities. This feels natural for SNS – walled gardens don’t. If you’d like to find out more about OpenID, you can refer to this primer I wrote about it on the ClaimID blog, or you can email me and I can help put you in touch with folks who will be able to help you. Once you grasp OpenID, and see how naturally it works with SNS, you’ll see what a valuable direction it is to take your product.
OpenID is coming – the tipping point grows closer each day. This is a tremendous opportunity – and I do hope you’ll consider it seriously. This is the way of the future.
