A Study on Relationship Migration among Social Networking Providers

User profiles backup and migration among social networking providers have become more urgent after the conflict between Tencent, the largest Instant Messaging(IM) service provider in China, and Qihu360, the largest antivirus company in China. So far, exchanging contact list among emails has been wildly used. Mainstream email service providers commonly make use of Comma Separated Value (CSV) files to export/import contact lists. Meanwhile, XML format is popular to transfer information among different platforms due to its rich hierarchical data structures. By using CSV files and XML files, we propose a new method to do relationship migration among social networking providers, which consists of three stages: 1) information retrieval from original social networking provider, 2) information storage and re-processing, and 3) relationship migration and recovery in the target provider. In order to evaluate our solution, we have designed and implemented a real experiment to test the migration from RenRen (the largest social network in China) to my Elgg (our test bed server).