> All social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph.
This reminds me how importing your email contacts was major component for Facebook—or any social network at that time, for that matter—to grow its network. It made sense then since all your communication (weather with friends or family) happened over email; email was your social graph. It's scary how Facebook now holds the key to every (close) connection you might have with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
I think people forget or weren't around when Facebook was aggressively importing not just email, but anything with a contact list (like AOL IM), then would spam the entire list. They got away with stuff that wouldn't fly today.
> All social networks should be required to enable social graph portability
Not just that, they should be required to export all public data/posts in a neural interchange format, so that othwer apps/companies can buitl on nthier data.
This reminds me how importing your email contacts was major component for Facebook—or any social network at that time, for that matter—to grow its network. It made sense then since all your communication (weather with friends or family) happened over email; email was your social graph. It's scary how Facebook now holds the key to every (close) connection you might have with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.