In the early days of computer networking, email systems weren’t interconnected very well. You might be on Prodigy, Sprintnet, Compuserve, attmail, BITNET, DECnet, uucp, X.400 or SMTP or some other email system. If you learned the magical incantations, you could manage to get a message from one network to another, sometimes traversing intermediary networks.

If you weren’t connected directly to the internet, you could send an email to an FTP email gateway to get files send to your email. More recently, people have talked about how to interconnect IM systems. They’ve looked at adding in chat rooms and even SIP based phones.

At Personal Democracy Forum, a new type of interconnectivity came up. How do we interconnect our online social networks? What might this interconnection do for us?

One early effort was FOAF, or the The Friend of a Friend project. Various people tried various things with FOAF. Tribe.net supports FOAF. Some of the early software in the Dean campaign supported FOAF. There were a few FOAF crawlers around, but none of this really got off the ground. It hasn’t proven useful for adding remote friends.

At PDF, Chris Messina brought up XFN, the Xhtml Friends Network. I’ve made changes to my support XFN. I’ve tagged my links accordingly and submitted my site to Rubhub, which is one of the few XFN tools out there that I can find. Unfortunately, Rubhub isn’t listing my site yet. So, I haven’t found anything useful from XFN yet. However it does have potential.

I went through about 25 of the social networks I’m part of and added up the links I have in all of them. The total number of links was nearly 1200. A few networks dominated my list with Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Twitter and PartyBuilder accounting for over half the links. Change.org is the one that is climbing rapidly right now, after just coming out of Beta.

Now it is worth noting that there is probably a lot of overlap in these 1200 links. It would be really interesting to see what that overlap is. Perhaps more interesting is to find where I have friends on multiple networks, but don’t know where they are on other networks. Beyond that, it would be interesting to have an amalgamated friends list, showing all my friends, which networks they are on, and a summary of all that is going on in my networks.

Can we use XFN, FOAF or other tools to better connect our social networks? What changes can we bring about by making better connections? It will be an interesting thing to explore. Until then, if you are friends of mine on one of the networks listed on the right, and on any of the other networks, but not my friend there, please give me an add. Likewise, if your not on some of these networks, and want to get started, please join up and let me know.