Top 15 Features for an Open Social Network

With all the talks at the moment about Decentralized and Open Social Networks, I thought I would compile my top list of features. This has been an area of interest to me for more than 5 years and the initial motivation to build AllPeers in the first place.

1- Store all my contacts from all the social services I use (including IM contacts) on my computer and make that consolidated contacts list appear instantly whenever I need it.

2- Let me access that contacts list from any computer.

3- Let me broadcast my presence status across all my services at once.

4- Run inside my browser (I don’t want another icon in my system tray).

5- Give me ONE way to send a message to a friend or a group of friends and work out the most efficient way internally. I don’t care what route it takes, I just want my friend(s) to receive the message.

6- Use a peer-to-peer network to allow me to attach a 500MB video or a folder with 100 files to a message without any size or format restrictions.

7- Let me manage multiple facets of my profile and more importantly let me decide who can see which facet or subset of a facet.

8- Let me retain all the rights to my data. It’s mine, not yours!

9- Let me create dynamic groups of people and allow me to put the same person in multiple groups for maximum flexibility.

10- Let me decide who I want to receive information from.

11- When I join a new service, use my existing profile and alert me if people I know are already members or when they join that service.

12- Let me create private sharing communities on-the-fly for friends to join.

13- Allow me to add new functionality using some form of add-ons/extensions mechanism.

14- Let me “do things” while offline and automatically push the data to my social graph when I come online.

15- Make the communications between my friends and me completely secure and private.

Of course, this is only a beginning of what my ideal service would allow me to do but it gives me:
- a single consolidated contacts list and user interface to friends.
- Fine granularity of control over who has access to what.
- Unlimited sharing.
- Leveraging of existing data.

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2 Comments »

1. I’d invert 4: Run natively on my desktop—I don’t need more UI cluttering my browser.

   (Also, not enjoying the blind-people filter.)

   Comment by Greg K Nicholson — 9/7/2007 @ 2:27 am

2. Cedric - great post. Some really good ideas - with the right developers and marketing, just these features would draw a strong core of users. Here’s the “promotion” - you should consider putting your plan on paper in more detail and submitting it to the Knight News Challenge - which is giving away a bunch of cash as grants to develop projects like yours.

   Knight News Challenge

   Comment by Michael — 9/10/2007 @ 10:41 pm

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