Tim Harford

[Commentary] We should ask ourselves if we can find a way to re-introduce serious competition in social networking. Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik of the University of Chicago have proposed an intriguing idea. They build on the concept of “number portability”, the principle that you own your own phone number, and you can take your number with you to a different phone provider. The idea has promise in retail banking. Zingales and Rolnik suggest an analogy: social graph portability. The idea is that I could take my Facebook contacts with me to another service — call it “ZingBook”.