Joining social networks and linking up with all your friends and associates is a lot of fun. What happens though when you want to migrate to a new social network?

Isn’t there a way to re-establish contact with everyone you knew before, without having to “be-friend” everyone again, one by one, at your new social networking home?

The answer may be in the form of the Distributed Social Network, which, in short, aggregates the publicly available information of social network members, and allows it to be transferred to other social and networking websites.

The Distributed Social Network - or DSN - is the idea of bringing together disparate user information easily and interoperably between social services. It’s often used synonymously with ‘Portable Social Network’, which is a term more focused on moving data between services. The motivation of DSN is not about being able to ‘dump’ social networks for others. This isn’t about being able to effortlessly quit Facebook and join Bebo. The motivation is to let people use different services with less effort - being able to get set and running with Dopplr and Flickr without having to find friends and contacts by hand every time.