It’s been 12 days since Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon published a white paper “Thoughts on the Social Graph”. In it they talk about a notion of a non-profit that would keep a ‘master graph’ of all relationships between on-line friends which any vendor or developer could use in their social web application or service.

I’m not sure if a single database will suffice or if it has to be a series of DNS-like servers - distributed around the world - but aggregating all these graphs makes total sense to me!

This sort of shared database of resources could be applied to micro-content (events, reviews, etc.), media or even bookmarks/links - but it makes sense for it FIRST to be deployed for people.

Its a great idea and I wanted to spend some time noodling over the idea and do some research before I blogged my reaction. Initially this idea reminded me of the PeoplesDNS that Joel DeGan and I proposed back in 2004. But then when I read deeper and caught up on the mail list - it looks like this initiative could be a real catalyst towards making something happen - now.

And that’s what leadership is all about.

It seems like NOW is the time for this kind of idea.

As the portable social network meme spreads from Wired magazine to teachers to Swiss bloggers to the Toronto Star - it’s great to see new solutions appear for the same problem.

Dare Obasanjo is so into it - he’s posted a bunch of posts in the past week or so on more or less the same subject (and Facebook), corresponding to Microsoft’s announcement of a deal with Bebo and the new Windows Live contacts APIs. He’s even created a post as his contribution to our DataSharingSummit - since he’s getting married and can’t be there.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people are confused between OpenID and Windows Live authentication, or micro-formats and APIs or Bebo using MSN Messenger to connect to Windows Live contacts or Brad’s idea for SNIP and the attribute exchange. This is a complex puzzle and quilt that we’re trying to weave here.

Brad Fitzpatrick’s leadership, with help from David Recordon has started a flurry of great ideas and collection of other great ideas - on a Google Groups list called ‘Social Network Portability‘.

Dave McClure is collecting links on Brad’s post and peopletagging on Facebook. I hope that this post makes it into his ‘meme-o-sphere’.

Well about time - is what I say! Welcome to my world. Where were you when we tried out this sort of interoperability with the FOAFnet - 3 years ago?

Clearly what Brad Fitzpatrick groks the most (probably learned from his two years at SixApart) is that no one technology, platform or vendor can win the so-called ‘portable social graph’ sweepstakes. The solution - BY DEFINITION - has to include many different vendors solutions, protocols and formats - all coalescing into some sort of ‘distributed’ mesh.

And the only way to prove any of these theories - is for the marketplace to decide.

Right now we have proposals for micro-formats, rdf, Liberty Alliance, Higgins (a Harvard/IBM effort) and universal widgets to help solve this problem. I myself have been ranting about this very topic. Others think that interoperability between systems, a unique namespace , new kinds of portals or aggregating message boards are the killer app or feature. And there’s no end to ‘proprietary attempts’ at solving a public problem.

As Brad theorizes:

the goal is to build the guts that allow a thousand new social applications to bloom

Well I gotta say how much his warms my old software nerd soul. Clearly nobody wants to see Facebook, MySpace or Google domineer. But there’s no way that we’re all gonna wake up one day and say “OK - this is the exact and only way we’re going to inter-connect our data, content, social graphs and presence together”.

It ain’t gonna happen.

And Brad adds:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.

Well right on to Brad I say.

His dream of a non-profit seems a bit idealistic to me - and it’ll be fun to see what his new employer - Google - does about this vision. We’ll have to wait and see.

I may call it ‘digital lifestyle aggregation’ and Tantek Celik may call it portable social networks. And Brad calls it a “social networking interop protocol” (SNIP) - even though he doesn’t think one protocol will win.

Doesn’t matter what we call it - just so they all connect to each other. Lets all get together and talk about this - at the DataSharingSummit - Sept. 7-8 in Richmond, CA. Kaliya will be there

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 12:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.