There has been a lot of talk about the social graph and the best practice for extending, enhancing, and sharing it. Something which we’re following very closely here at Crowdstorm due to the role this graph can play in improving the product research process. Let’s say you are looking for a new 27″ LCD screen for your bedroom and have no idea where to start – a few recommendations or comments from friends and colleagues you trust will help point you in the right direction, especially if they are actually knowledgeable in that space.

Now to get to this kind of implementation, there needs to be that motivation and incentive to use “the crowd” in this way, but firstly you have to provide an easy way to bring in existing social graph connections without having to force people down the “add this person” route over and over again. So, this has led us to heavily research the space of importing connections from other applications and sites into the Crowdstorm registration process:

In an Mark Zuckerberg interview about data portability on facebook on ReadWriteWeb, he stated that “data portability is an important direction in which the web is moving and that fundamental openess between sites is inevitable, yet Facebook must be strict about privacy controls”. The argument is that other applications should not be allowed to share user data as the user loses control over it, which is actually a load of codswallop.

The fact is that you should give people free choice and enough good information to help them make it – which would include whether or not to to give your data access to a piece of software or application and allow what it can do with it. Zuckerberg knows this but is actually stalling while they try and figure out how a feature like this would stop a competitor replicating their site and making it better, porting all that data across.

In my view, the user controls the data, not the site. The process should go along the lines of:

1. Import the social graph data from any chosen site or service
2. Add value to it by enhancing the data within (such as adding trust between people or contextual shopping knowledge)
3. Utilise that data as part of the service to improve the consumer offering
4. Allow that enhanced social data set to be exported again to any other source

This process continually improves the social graph data set through collaboration and sharing. So, back to steps (1) and (4) here, what are good examples of sites that allow exporting of social graph data?

	Twitter	You can bring back a list of people you follow and those that follow you, and while you can’t invite them into the new network – you can get it to find existing people on it and connect with them.
	Flickr	As per Twitter, you can find existing Flickr contacts on the new network and agree to connect, but can’t invite directly via email.
	Gmail	You can authorise access to the gmail contact list and then manually select which of those contacts to invite into the new network directly or connect to people already in it.
	Yahoo Mail	As per gMail / googlemail.
	Facebook	As far as we can tell, you can import most bits of user data from their API except email addresses which means you could at least match up people on the Crowdstorm network who are also connected on Facebook, but not invite them directly.
	OpenSocial	Google’s api specification allows the importing of people relationships and emails depending on what is allowed by the site that implemented the protocol e.g. Bebo
	hCard	A microformat that can be imported into the network and link to other relevant hCards.
	CSV / VCF	Text based file formats for manually uploading lists of contacts and email addresses – only for tech savvy users.

We’re still looking into the Hotmail and AOL mail side of things as it’s not entirely clear what data services they have available for contact importing. So what have we missed? Anything important?

I’ll follow up with another post on our implementation of this and other good examples from around the web – just as soon as we’ve figured it out ourselves!

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