Facebook -Time for Open Social Networks?

Gotta say that this article put into words some of the unease I feel about Facebook. And I'm on Facebook: I was invited when it was a student network by fellow students on the PGCE course. And I must admit that I find it a bit claustrophobic: I'm not keen on being in a proprietary system which seems to be making a kind of 'gated e-community'. So when I read this I was helped in my thinking.

"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. Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod."

And so, I tend to agree with this sentiment:

Facebook would be better if you could link to friends' pages on MySpace and Bebo. Social networking should be based on open standards, just like e-mail.

And even better to learn that there is the beginnings of an open social networking tool:

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.

But there is a downside, as the article points out:

At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce -- an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers -- is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.

As many of the commentators point out, however, the privacy dimension is part of the attraction of Facebook: the fact that your stuff (and you control how much) is only available to those whom you have approved.

Wired have issued a call to open-standards-sympathetic programmers to work on the issue.
In the meantime, they offer some ideas for going as far as you can,

With a little savvy, anyone can create a page that includes all of the fun stuff found in a Facebook profile.

Meanwhile, I'm going to have a look at Pulse, if I can find it ...
Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up: