Bearded Joe [dot] com

The creator of Livejournal, Brad Fitzpatrick published a rant/solution/manifesto for the Social Network problem.  The problem, succinctly put is:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

His idea was to develop an open-source, non-profit piece of software that aggregates the "Social-graph" into one place.  Social graph basically refers to a virtual map of who everyone is, and how they’re related.  This way, if a new social site pops up, and offers new or unique features compared to the current monopoly of social sites, a user could sign-up, and have access to all the same "friends." Fitzpatrick has begun work on these protocols, and has started development of API’s, as well as a Firefox extension to make the process even easier for users.

If this catches on, it opens up huge opportunities for startup social networking sites, who would’ve had no chance in the environment we have now, due to myspace/facebook dominance.  Who knows what will happen in the near future.  Especially with google hard at work on their own social networking site.

This presents a great opportunity for all the major sites involved as well.  If I’m on myspace, and have 100 friends, and I know 3 or 4 people who are on Facebook, I may just sign up for Facebook if I knew I could easily access all my friends on both sites. The best thing that could happen for everyone, would be for this protocol to significantly increase the user base on all the sites using it.  Sounds like win-win-win-win.