Woo-hoo! One of the the things I hate about online social networks is the social lock-in factor: if you want to leave, you lose your network. Looks like that’s going to end.
[quote=“Wired: Slap in the Facebook”]
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are taking the web by storm because they make it easy to manage your personal data and keep in touch with people you know.
[…]
When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
Some social networking companies are starting to build open platforms that allow your personal data to be exported and put to use anywhere you like.
On Monday, the contact management service Plaxo will launch a new social network called Pulse. Offering a customizable profile page, the service will allow Plaxo subscribers to manage their interpersonal relationships and show off their interests.
In many ways, Pulse will offer the same all-your-data-in-one-place approach as Facebook, but with one crucial difference: It’s not walled off. Anything put into Plaxo can be retrieved and used elsewhere, and any data made public will be accessible across the wider internet: Viewers will not need a Plaxo account. The service will be rather limited initially, but it’s a step in the right direction.
However, Pulse is no panacea. What the internet needs is a way to take the features of the popular social networks and make them available to the world at large. [/quote]