It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Every [new media] publisher I know already thinks this way. Social networks are a great way to build community, so every content provider can benefit from all the features of a social network. Right?

By default, I don’t buy it. But there are cases where site visitors would benefit from the content recommendations of friends. That’s one example.

To get the content recommendations of friends, you need friends. And to get friends, you need a social network. Right?

Err…

The success of a social network (bolt-on or otherwise) depends on members getting past the set up. Visitors need to register, elaborate, personalize, search for friends, request authorization from friends, authorize friends, and repeat.

It’s a lot of work to go through to be able to recommend content on one site.

Here’s a better way to handle this

Let the social network travel with the member rather than require them to garden yet another walled social network.

OpenID handles identity, kind of. Today, it’s more like sign-up, but it could handle a hell of a lot more. Like who I consider a friend, which communities I’m part of, and what content I find interesting for starters.

In other words, the member would own the community activities versus the reverse (the community owning the member activities).

It’s not so crazy to imagine. Each time OpenID jumps you past the registration for a site, it could store the community as a record inside your [decentralized] account. OpenID could also store records of your friends. And records of content chunks (form of a content id) you like.

From that data, you’d be able to share content with friends at any community / site you frequent. Providing, of course, that your friend(s) frequent the community / site as well.

OpenID won’t be implementing this anytime soon. But it would be very straightforward to build a companion app that lets you organize your communities, friends, and the content you find interesting (more later on why this isn’t a privacy concern).

A few adjustments at each site (authentication / markup) and the content provider would be able to provide visitors with the content recommendations of their friends. Again, one example.

Portable social networks are good. In whatever form they take.