Given Google’s purported openness, some tech commentators have speculated that Google+ seeks to force Facebook to be more open. Insofar as Google+ competes with Facebook, it should have a positive effect, likely leading FB to interact with more third-party applications. But there’s a much bigger issue with large-scale social networks: users do not own or control their own content. Why is this a problem? Google+ illustrates this: users will have a choice of social networks. We will want to use one or several, move from one to another, or take content from one and feed it into a web site, blog, or another social network.
But, there is no way to a take all of our Facebook content and move it somewhere else. Of course, FB wants it that way. But what if a new social network came along that used a standard protocol to store and share content? When blogs took off, RSS became a standard way to share content. An open social protocol would go a step further by defining and managing content. So a user’s social ‘profile’ could be stored virtually anywhere (a private web server, a cloud server, or any open social network) and it would be fully portable and fully controlled by its owner. As new social networks arose, users could ‘activate’ their profile within the network, and just as easily deactivate it and plug it in somewhere else.
Why would FB and Google adopt such a protocol? They wouldn’t. But AOL never grasped broadband either.
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