Close Friends is one of Instagram's most useful features. It lets you share updates among a trusted group that you would never share publicly.

Why doesn't this exist more broadly across social networks?

Social networks strongly prioritize publicly visible content and accounts in order to attract, retain, and monetize users through content discovery, advertising, and sponsored messages. 

But not all sharing fits into a public model. Many situations call for semi-private sharing.

For example:

• Letting trusted contacts know you are open to a new role without broadcasting it to the world

• Sharing a photo or personal update visible only to close friends

At Icebreaker, we believe the most important updates are only shared among trusted groups. The problem is that Close Friends and other forms of trusted contacts are locked inside social networks.

Your Close Friends list on Instagram doesn't help you share semi-privately on LinkedIn, or signal openness to opportunities on a job board. Every social network requires you to rebuild your close friends from scratch.

As a result of recent technical advances that enable adversarial interoperability, it is now possible to port these lists across social networks. We are using these advances to build the system that allows you to pull important parts of your social graph (like Close Friends) out of social networks so you can overlay them elsewhere on the internet. For example, discovering your past colleagues on a new social platform, or seeing only the products recommended by your close friends on an e-commerce site.

As AI systems harvest and reuse public content, many users are pulling back from open posting altogether. In a recent conversation with a fellow founder, we heard what many are feeling: there is less appetite for putting personal or professional content into the public domain.

The answer is not silence, but selective sharing.

Semi-private sharing opens the door to a more expressive, useful, and human digital environment where users retain control over what is shared and with whom.

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