A few weeks ago, one of our execs at work asked me to think about “open” social networks. Since my day job is working on the social networking platform that underlies Windows Live Spaces and other Windows Live properties, it makes sense that if anyone at Microsoft is thinking about making our social networks “open” it should be me. However I quickly hit a snag. After some quick reading around, I realized that there isn’t really a common definition of what it means for a social networking service to be “open”. Instead, it seems we have a collection of pet peeves that various aggrieved parties like to blame on lack of openness.

1. Content Not Viewable By the Public and not Indexed by Search Engines
2. Inability to Export My Content from the Social Network
3. Full APIs for Extracting and Creating Content on the Social Network
4. Interacting with People from Different Social Networks

some reasonable ideas how to preserve the competition while also locking people in less.

• Uncategorized