Just Browsing

The Social Web Browser

Despite the explosion of all things social onto the internet scene, it is becoming clear that current mechanisms for sharing information among social groups are nothing more than a stopgap measure and not an inherently satisfying solution. Users complain of Facebook fatigue and Twitter overload, as well as the unappealing privacy implications of entrusting your precious data to a third-party motivated mainly by profit. Even the Economist is on the case, with a recent article questioning the value of social networks:

The problem with today’s social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks’ lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users’ information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Now the A-list blogosphere is chiming in. Loic Le Meur recognizes the value of a service like FriendFeed that aggregates disparate information shared by people he finds interesting, but laments the lack of control he has over his own data. He would rather have this data amalgamated on his blog, the center of his online existence. Mike Arrington hypothesizes that more open data accessibility through something like the Data Portability Project may be the soluton.

Mike and Loic raise intriguing questions, but their answers are incomplete. The very existence of something like FriendFeed is premised on the availability of open data feeds from various services. We might wish that some sites (like Facebook) were more open, but the truth is that the Data Portability Project will provide only incremental value on top of what FriendFeed already offers. Meanwhile, Loic approaches the problem from the point of view of a publisher, understandable for someone with such a large audience. But most of us are primarily information consumers. We want something to filter and control the stream of data flowing from others. It wouldn’t be particularly difficult for Loic to centralize his tweets, Flickr photos, Seesmic videos and so forth on his blog, however this wouldn’t address the fundamental problem.

What we need is some way to bring together diverse data feeds in a way that we control. The web browser may turn out to be the perfect vehicle for achieving this. Browsers can already pull down and parse XML data and are increasingly capable of storing that data on the local disk. Why not add features to manage social information?

Imagine that wherever you surf, your browser provides you with a dynamic list of contacts in a sidebar (something that my now defunct company AllPeers experimented with). These would include people I want to have constantly available (very much like an instant messaging buddy list), but could be augmented by web sites if they so choose. For example, Loic could ask to be added every time I visit his blog. He provides access to his data, but I decide whether I want to view it. If Loic seems interesting to me, of course, I could add him to my list of contacts with a single mouse click. He could even expose to me the entire list of people currently visiting his blog, so I can interact (chat, share, etc.) with them if I so choose.

Managing this information in the web browser would make advanced filtering techniques more tractable because they would not have to scale across potentially millions of users. Each user could choose which contacts are most interesting to them and their browser would restrict the volume of data displayed for others. I might want to see all of my family’s photos, but only highly rated or commented photos from people I don’t know as well.

It would be easier to track my blog comments since my browser could detect whenever I post one and poll the associated feed for new items. And I would be less likely to miss important news since my browser can alert me any time something arrives that I have designated as important. No web site can do that since I have to actively visit (or stay on) the page in order to get notifications.

More open data is undeniably a good thing. Giving publishers more control over the information they expose to others is a good thing, too. But the real problem is empowering data consumers to find, filter and store stuff that interests them without having to outsource this task to a third party, with all the drawbacks that entails. If I am going to have the capability on my local machine to manage my social data feeds, the web browser is the logical place to put it.