Building a number of social networks we are acutely aware of how much of a frustration it is to sign up to a new site. Entering user details freshly for each one loses its charm pretty quickly and locating friends just makes it downright frustrating. I’ve been on the lookout for a solution for a while now to reduce this cost of signup.

There are a few key pieces to the puzzle. Personal details are important as the key parts of a user profile. Friend relationships are slightly more difficult to represent between differing networks but none the less, important.

Over the years there have been a few attempts to solve this signup pain. So far, the social net has been content with walled gardens but slowly with the number of social networks growing by the week, this problem is now becoming an important one to solve.

The few alternatives that have appeared are:

FOAF
From the FOAF project site:

“The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.”

FOAF has been around for quite a number of years but so far hasn’t gained much of a following. It has the benefit of describing both a person’s details and their friends, the downside is that its built using RDF making it difficult to use. So far, it hasn’t taken off. Before its time? Perhaps but from the looks of it a few other technologies are creating more of a buzz.

OpenID
The focus of OpenID is primarily authentication, another area closely intertwined to social network portability. It does provide the ability to send a person’s details along during signon. The current implementation is limited in the sort of details it can send and no understanding of friend relationships. It is being actively worked on and future releases are looking promising.

Microformats
hCard and XFN, two microformats, are now being explored as another alternative for portable details. Recently some loose guidelines and patterns have been published utilising and a few sites authors and sites have started exploring. Like most of the microformats, this is a lightweight alternative, using technologies familiar and already established. It also doesn’t tie into any one technology or platform and so the could be work well together with OpenID.

When we launched 3eep, we made sure that our user profiles were hCard enabled and friend relationships used XFN. This essentially allowed the public details to be used by any microformat parsers. From that sort of base we are now exploring ways of importing details from other sites.

Satisfaction has already created a very nice system for importing details from a number of the microformat enabled sites. It looks to be user profile details only, so there is still need to a good system for importing friend relationships but it certainly offers a good vision of what can be done.

Our team with a new product are looking at the issue of importing the friend relationships. There seems to be a few hurdles to overcome, especially in the matching of friends between networks. Without unique identifiers it becomes hard to know who is who from one network to another (email would be the logical choice but how many sites are silly enough to let machines read email addresses). We have come up with partial solution so keep an eye out for invites in the near future.

There are a number of options that are looking like options to reduce the signup pain, although it is still early days. The microformats push, seems to be heading in the right direction but it only time will tell if it will really take hold. At least while we are waiting we can add the hCards to get the ball rolling.

This weekend kicked off a successful BarCamp in Sydney. A first for Australia. For the first one it had a good turn out with a number of interesting discussions. A few heated debates, a few talks about the startup life and one talk that cruised pretty well over my head. Congrats to Russ and everyone for putting it together. I’m looking forward to the next one.

For those who came (or those interested) I have uploaded the presentation I had put together on Identity 2.0 and OpenID. It’s brief and only intended as an introduction so I was happy to see a good debate around it. There seems like a lot of sceptics although certainly not surprising being so important to the online experience. Download the PDF (3.55Mb)