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The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery
by forwardslash

    Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren’t motivated to join new social networks which aren’t already large. It’s a paradox where if people haven’t already joined, people aren’t motivated to join.

    The trouble is that while building a social network is hard, most interesting software today is acutely “social.” Even privacy enhancing technology, which seems anathema to the aesthetic of social networking, is tremendously social. For people to effectively use private communication software like TextSecure, they need to be able to know how to contact their friends using TextSecure.

    Access to an existing social graph makes building social apps much easier. Traditionally, social apps turn to services like Facebook or Twitter for their social graph. By using “Facebook connect” (sign in with Facebook) or “Twitter OAuth” (sign in with Twitter), it’s possible to write applications on top of an existing social graph (owned by Facebook or Twitter) instead of having to create a new one.

    The migration towards mobile devices is in some ways a threat to the traditional monopolies of the social graph. Mobile devices feature a social graph that isn’t controlled by any single entity, and which anyone can access: the device’s “contacts.”