Data portability and distributed social networks: concepts that could be applied to social shopping

Every time I hear about a new or emerging social shopping site, I usually repeat the same operations:

• Create an account, and set up a user profile by adding my points of interest and preferences,
• Upload a couple of products I own / I like / I want to buy, to start testing the features of the site…

Ok, I’m not the average user, as I don’t think a lot of shoppers use more than 2 or 3 social shopping destinations. However, who knows which new sites will emerge and gain traction in ‘08? For any user (average or advanced), the question “how to export all your data from your current social shopping site to the new hype one” can become a tricky one. In reaction to the success of MySpace or Facebook social networks and the concerns regarding privacy and openness of those sites, two concepts – data portability and distributed social networking – are emerging to avoid data being stuck into those silos.

The first concept – data portability – is all about developing open standards to export / import data from one site to another, including authentication, attention data (what you are interesting in), profile definition and relationships between people. If some of those open standards have yet to be invented, some of them are becoming more and more popular: OpenID for user authentication and RSS for syndicated contents have almost become mainstream in ‘07. Some others have been drafted but haven’t been widely adopted yet; I’m thinking about the hListing microformat for shopping applications for instance, that could be an easy format to exchange listings between shopping sites.

The second concept – distributed social networking – is more linked to the privacy concern: how could you trust a site that hosts all your personal data? Why would you invest time on a page that you don’t really own? Also, how to manage / synch your data on various networks (for myself, LinkedIn, Facebook, + social shopping sites). Some projects are trying to see how a personal blog could become your page on any social network. When social shopping sites allow you putting some widgets on your personal blog, it’s a first step towards this vision of a distributed social network.

To illustrate the benefits of those concepts applied to social shopping, here are a few examples:

• I’m a shopper and started using SiteA, a social shopping destination, a couple of months ago. It took me quite some time to manage my product bookmark on this site. Now I see most of my friends are using SiteB, a new fancy social shopping site, and I want to use it by reusing my data from SiteA. Unfortunately, SiteA doesn’t provide a way to export my data to another site.
• I’m SiteB, and I want to easily attract new users. I developed tools based on open standards, to let users from SiteC or SiteD for instance upload their content. To show my new customers they own their data, I also provide export tools. Even if it could incite users leaving the site, it’s a way for me to track users that are eager to leave, and for instance send them a survey to ask them why.
• I have a personal blog dedicated to photography on which I wrote my own product reviews. I’m using SiteB and its APIs / widgets to push my own content to their site and pull price data and related content to display on my blog. It’s a win-win deal between SiteB and me: The content I produce is completely mine, even if it is enriched by data from SiteB ; my original content is available on SiteB and seen by other users of the network.

And you, do you believe in those concepts for the future of social shopping?