Today, an individual is likely to participate in multiple environments, each of which facilitate friends, followers, subscribers and other types of social interaction.

The graphic below is a partial rendering of my own footprint. I have 602 friends on Facebook, 577 on Linkedin (with a very low crossover between the two), only 2 on MySpace because I don't use it. 439 people follow me on FriendFeed (I follow about 140). And Xobni tells me that I have a whopping 18,625 unique contacts in my email.

When I examine the interactions with these people, many take place in only one environment. Friendfeed, as a meta-aggregator, often sees these. But Facebook doesn't know about my Linkedin interactions and vice versa.

No one entity has a real grasp of my true social graph. Apart from myself of course.

So, as in real life there are multiple instances of "me". The real life versions are the work "me"; the home "me"; the parent of school children "me"; and so on. Online there is the facebook version, the linkedin version, the twitter version, and so on. All these versions share in common the fact that they are partial. And the data each has about me reflects the partial character of my existence inside their environment. My email archive and the information mined from it actually comes closest to being a picture of the whole.

Here's the graphic:

In the future it will be possible for me to be at the center of the network. In practice that means that a service provider will have to request access to my data from a service that I control, possibly on my blog or through my operating system, or even through a control panel in my email client. I will be able to control what I share and with whom. And the one place you will be able to discover me fully is on the service that I run and control.

For this to work I will need to be able to create, or rent, a services hub that allows me to manage both my presence, my data, and access to my data. The data I leave behind in a service – like FaceBook, or Google, or any other, will be a partial set of data, usable by that service for its own goals of monetization. But the true ability to know and understand me will be richer, and fuller, on the service I manage.

I will also need to move that service (hence the need for data portability) either to another that I own and control, or to a service provider. For the purposes of a service binding to me and my data, should such a move occur, the network will need a piece of infrastructure that I call a “People Location Service”. This is like the DNS root server for people. If my primary service changes from my Wordpress blog to a Typepad blog the PLS will be notified, and all requests for data will now be routed to Typepad, not Wordpress. There may be other ways to achieve the same end goal, but this one seems simple and elegant. Of course it plays well with OpenID and OAuth as well.