How OpenID Is Critical For The Future Of Social Networking

There has been a lot of press around how OpenID, the effort to create the single-sign on, is gaining traction by adding some major players such as AOL and Digg to their pre-existing roster of Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia. Having a single sign on is only the first step. How about a single portable buddy list?

Taking OpenID one step further and allowing people to have a single buddy list does three things:

1. Solves a huge problem for new online communities by allowing people to quickly create their network.

2. On the flip side, solves the huge barrier for people who don’t want to go through the buddy list creation process for the nth time.

3. Opens the next door in possibilities for online social networking.

Sites have tried to solve this process by allowing people to import their contact lists from gmail, hotmail, yahoo, outlook, etc., but it only solves a small part of the problem.

There are a few things that OpenID would have to resolve, including:

1. Allowing different groups of buddies.
Your network on LinkedIN is much different then your network on Facebook. Being able to apply the differences is important.

2. Two way communication with the publishers.
For the system to be complete, not only would people have to be able to import their buddies, but the publishers would have to communicate with openID when they add new people to their network. This allows for on the fly, automatic editing, instead of having to always go back to one place to manage your list.

This is one step closer to my ideal prediction, where the entire internet will have some kind of universal underlying social networking component. It’s without a doubt that anything on the internet is always more relevant, useful, and interesting when your network of friends, family, and people of similar interests is applied to it.

To reach this vision requires one other important aspect….critical mass. In my opinion, in order for OpenID to reach critical mass, a hip site with critical mass in the non-early adopter market such as Facebook or Myspace will have to support and promote OpenID.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Online community, openID, facebook, myspace, critical mass, Brian Balfour[/tags]

Thanks to Mark at MarksGuide.com for suggesting this topic.