At the end of my explanatory Portable Social Graphs post, I said that I would talk about ‘getting there’ in another post.  Here’s that part of that promise.

There are three technologies that are coming together to make portable social graphs happen: OpenID, Oauth, and Higgins.

• OpenID and CardSpace is the distributed framework for single-sign-on across multiple sites.
• OAuth is a protocol that lets users grant sites the ability to access their data on other sites using tokens (instead of storing their user/pass).  The first draft was just released.
• Higgins is a very loose data model for storing nodes, node data, and link information (ie: a social graph, among other things). 

Put these things together and users can very-easily login to numerous sites (OpenID), can allow those sites to share data amongst one another (Oauth), and the those sites can communicate data in a standard way (Higgins, in conjunction with a schema dictionary/translation service to explain the differences between site’s data models).

I should note that all of these things have been around for awhile.  OpenID is really old, Higgins is moderately old (2003), and oAuth is about six months old.  Why do they matter now?  Because they needed each other.

[One technology I’ve left out of this document is Microsoft’s CardSpace/InfoCard.   Even though I find it one of the most compelling and most-easily-understood identity concepts (we all understand business cards, credit cards, club cards, etc), it’s backed by Microsoft too strongly to succeed amongst web developers out there.   Higgins seems to have subsumed part of the idea on its own and although it might take longer to get the code going, I’d guess it’ll have wider adoption than Microsoft’s initiative. Note to self: Read more about I-cards and Higgins…]

So now that we’ve got the tech, all the big sites will switch over tomorrow we’ll all have portable social graphs?  Not so fast.  Users need compelling reasons to use the technologies above.  Time to create them.

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