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Social Networking Identity Mapping, and Open Source

Although social network platforms have been increasingly open to application development, spurred by Facebook's API and reinforced by the Open Social foundation, the approach has always been to enourage the development of applications inside the walls of the social network.

As I've written before ("Open Social is a start but not the whole picture"), however, improving application portabilitity won't in and of itself improve the experience for users, who would still interact with those applications in a series of silos, with a different userid and password for each social network, as well as a different set of friends on each social network.

OpenID can help with the user frustration at having to remember lots of usernames and passwords, but it doesn't help map the various identities to each other.

The Ringside Social Application Server, a new open source platform, aims to provide the solution. It provides a platform for building social awareness into applications, whether those applications run inside a container like Facebook or on your own corporate site.

See Bob Bickel's post on the Thoughts from the Ringside blog - "Identity Mapping" - which outlines the mechanism they've implemented for mapping user identieis across Facebook and a corporate site.

What the Ringside server enables is the opportunity to provide a federated view:

You can present them information from your website and Facebook mixed together where it makes sense, and update information to their Facebook account as it makes sense. You can also take data from them for your web site directly - for example an order for your product and their credit card.

We're very excited about the opportunities this opens up to embed social network functionality within existing environments.

I'm reminded of Charlene Li's argument that social networks "will become like air":

They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.

In order for this to truly happen, we need open source infrastructure and open standards - and Ringside's Social Applicaiton Server represents a critical step in that direction.