How Social Networks Should Be Made To Think “Open”

There’s growing discontent over the closed, “walled garden”-like approach to the development of social networks today. Every such website, after all, has its own system, its own way of operating, which often varies considerably from competitors across the industry. Few, if any, mesh with one another. This has come to be seen as a significant problem by some “cross-pollinators”: people who have chosen to take up residence in multiple circles structured within disparate networks. Because barriers have been put in place by the various companies that make up the current social market online, users are unable to maintain multiple accounts spread across different “platforms” quickly and easily, which, if I’m not mistaken, was the ideal generally implied when these networks were established.

So, should the Facebooks and MySpaces and Bebos of the world be forced to open up to one another in order to appease the growing mass of multi-tasking socializers? Or should they continue developing their own systems ignorant of the effects of their continued isolation from one another?

In my view, the answer is found somewhere in middle. On the one hand, no, companies shouldn’t be told that their road is a finite one if they so choose to keep other services in the same sector off their code. They should be allowed to work as they wish, whether it is to their benefit or to their detriment (excluding any legally anticompetitive behavior). On the other, I do believe a motion to “open” the industry would be very good indeed, but only if it’s done to a certain degree.

See, if today’s networks are pushed to open their doors too widely, things could get much messier, despite the honest intentions of public advocates to calibrate the market to work more in the users’ favor. What could ideally be seen as a consolidation of contact lists and messaging accounts and whatnot could easily run astray to become an erratic hodgepodge of components too unwieldy to bother with at all. And, well, that wouldn’t be good for anybody. Except those who wish to see the downfall of the social networking universe, of course.

If all networks were forced to “open up” and accept a system of standards, however, in which users could migrate to new websites they take a greater liking to (for any reason) without having to lose all connections made within networks elsewhere on the Web, effectively starting from scratch, the industry would most definitely be better off.

As of this moment, the “proprietary” element, inherited from the land of operating systems and all other sorts of deeply polarizing puzzles, is clearly pronounced in the social networking sphere. It’s what keeps many millions of people beholden to companies they would otherwise not remain so “loyal” to. MySpacers who wish to be Facebookers may not switch because it’s simply more trouble to migrate than its worth. And vice versa. The same goes for many other first- and second- and third-tier networks active today as well.

Apart from this much-needed change, there’s little else that needs to be altered. Sure, there’s always some things some networks could do better, but those edits will come as the market evolves and more and more users of these services demand more from the companies that build them. Open is good. Open is great. But open needs to be done intelligently and smoothly. An across-the-board sweep (not literally, of course, but you surely get what I mean) is definitely not the way to go in this case.