ClaimID has announced new feature: contacts (see also Fred’s blog post). This makes ClaimID, originally an elegant service for keeping and verifying links about oneself, a social network a bit like LinkedIn, Orkut, Myspace… The big difference is, that to connect with someone, he does not have to be a ClaimID user, he just needs to have an OpenID. This makes the social network possibly very open, depending on the OpenID adoption.
I have always wanted this kind of openness in social networks. I thought that FOAF will eventually evolve in this kind of network (I even wrote a scraper transforming LinkedIn account data into FOAF). Now I have to admit, that maybe ClaimID’s approach is more user friendly and also more secure and verified (after all, anyone can write FOAF about anyone, but stealing OpenID is difficult).
The only disadvantage compared to FOAF distributed files is the little lock-in. In ClaimID, you don’t have to lock yourself or your contacts in the service, but you still lock the relationships in. If one day ClaimID disappears, so will the relationships. Even worse, if you want to build similar competing service, although both will be open to all OpenID users, the relationships will never mix-every user will have some of them in one service and other ones in the other service never seeing them all at once.
XFN solves the problem a bit. Still I think marking the relationships with FOAF and RDFa would make the service even more transparent, allowing anyone to make SPARQL queries over the social network and possibly several social networks following the same approach, making the social networks part of the semantic web.
Even without FOAF/RDFa integration, ClaimID seems like a very good social network offering. The problem is, most of the people I know, don’t use OpenID, so my ClaimID will stay contact-less until OpenID goes massive in this part of the world. Considering most of my friends are only recently discovering LinkedIn and using it as their first social network, this might take a long time. Or does the sudden interest in LinkedIn among my peers have something to do with the actual situational relevance as most of them are now (like me) graduating and starting careers?