This year there will continue to be a big discussion about portable identities on Social Networks. The ability for people to bring their identity and friends from one network to another is going to be one of the next stages of the evolution of SN's. As Jeff Weiner from Yahoo (they're having a bad day) said at EconSM last week, people will eventually get sick of signing up for network after network (paraphrasing). I agree that most people, like me, are not interested in spamming their friends with invites every time they join a Dodgeball or Twitter, but I disagree that the users of niche social networks are reluctant to invite their friends.

We see that on networks that ONEsite powers, such as WWE and Univision, members are highly motivated to invite their friends. Further, we see that our members are motivated to include their friends and family, and are driven to make *new* friends that share similar interests, expanding their networks. Not only are our members highly active, they're excited about a network that speaks to their interests and jump at the opportunity to communicate their enthusiasm to their out of network friends.

Getting back to the point, I join a lot of networks just to try them out. The thought of bringing my friends from one to another is intriguing, however I would need the ability to assign context to each of my friends. For instance, I wouldn't want to bring most of my LinkedIn contacts over to Yelp, because all of those friends have different context. Currently many networks let members import contacts, but the import mechanism often insists that everyone you know that's active on the site should be invited to connect, or it makes you browse through hundreds (if not thousands!) of contacts to pick and choose people to connect with. Even if this were perfect, and I assigned context prior to importing, I'd still end up spamming the same people over and over again with invites every time I want to try out the latest and greatest. Let's call the solution "Context driven portable network identities." I'll work on an acronym-friendly version later.

My experience is a much different experience than our members joining a ONEsite network, but down the road we'll see this issue moving more mainstream. Being on the forefront of the evolution of the social internet helps our company anticipate changes in the marketplace. We strive to be at the sweet spot of the market - providing clients with the tools they need to create meaningful experiences for their members, while making sure our clients stay ahead of the technology curve. It's a pretty sweet job :-)

I need to make a confession. I'm addicted to food porn. I do have self-control, more or less, but when I see pictures like the one below, the foodie in me can't help itself. Red Velvet Cake Balls? Com'on. That's just unholy. Someone tell me its OK.

It's one thing to have a great view from your office. It's another to have a view AND the responsibility to be on tornado watch. Such is life here at the home office in Oklahoma. Thank goodness we have Robby and Dax on the lookout for flying cattle and all. While it's great to be out in OK with the team, you can give me an earthquake over a tornado any day.

Update 4/07/08 5:29

Andrew just sent a tornado warning 2 minutes after I submitted this blog post. And its sunny outside. My head just exploded.

All of a sudden LA tech is exploding. Finally we may be seeing the marrige of the Valley and Hollywood. The cultures have clashed over time, but they're in fact very similar. Recent events here in LA prove that theres activity bubbling under the surface, and its finally all coming together. ONEsite's activity here is not going unnoticed, and we've been greeted with open arms.

You guys are kicking some serious $^%#^ with the datacenter move and the roll out schedule. The Dev and Ops teams are putting in some long hours making our software and services even better and deserve some recognition from those of us not involved with the day-to-day technical ops. Let's have a round of applause for the guys and gals that make it happen! Mad props.