My earlier post on Brad’s thoughts summarized the politics, technology and essence of Brad’s vision.

He hopes that a non-profit is created that would aggregate social graphs and make them available to all. Right on!

Now lets put Brad’s idea in context to other open standards ideas.

Brad isn’t the only person who realizes that aggregating graphs across disparate social networks is one way of connecting people together. The particular problem Brad (and David) use to describe their solution - hones in on “what friends of mine AREN’T here” - when I go into a new system. Brad himself has access to so MANY friends (and edges - which are the graph relationships) - that he was able to build a prototype showing off a solution utilizing his technique.

But this notion of a social graph ‘layer’ has also come up as a new kind of identity operating system ’strata’ that could be utilized to connect (for instance) all the disparate components of a large company’s offerings - for instance - blogging, dating, groups, finance, sports, news and calendaring. An ‘identity strata’ could extend the notion of a personal profile, and add friends and groups and become a new construct that could be utilized by ALL components of a large vendor’s systems.

So Brad (and David’s) vision could be utilized (by US!) as a similar construct - to unite all sorts of applications and services together - in a distributed, meshed, loosely coupled environment - rather than just within one vendor’s empire.

I’ve been using a ’stack’ chart to show all of the pieces of our open standards puzzle and how each interacts and relates to the other. Brad’s idea fits nicely into this metaphor and just happens to coincide with other efforts from large players like Yahoo and Google.

Who knows - if Dare Obasanjo is reading this - we might even find out if Microsoft is also planning on some sort of ’social graph’ layer.

The ‘ID Stack’ chart below now includes the notion of a ’shared database of aggregated social graphs’ - as spelled out in Brad Fiztpatrick and David Recordon’s recent white paper.

Based upon rumors and innuendo’s we can assume that at least Yahoo and Google, if not Microsoft are also working on similar constructed underlying constructs - which would serve as a social network ’strata’ that would be shared across a wide range of applications and services.

Lord knows, we can now connect up these closed stratas with our open stratas and rock the house!

In earlier drafts of this chart - focused in on describing the difference between single sign-on (OpenID) and moving your data, profile info, etc. between systems (attribute exchange.) Then I extrapolated a third layer - where all sorts of verbs and actions (like auto-invite folks into your new network) or ‘create a group’ (between networks.)

Now with Brad (and David’s vision) we can add an additional layer - aggregate social graphs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 6:44 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.