Six Apart’s Dave Recordon has a long essay on Six Apart’s site announcing a new effort to open up the social graph. For those that aren’t speaking social networks all the time, your social graph is the result of all of those friend requests you make or accept on sites like Facebook or MySpace. You can visualize a social graph as a hub-and-spoke diagram with your name at the center and your friends around you. Then, their friends connected to them, and then their friends, etc. These sorts of interconnections exist in real life (the folks you email, the people you IM when you find something cool on the Internet, for example, or the folks you grab drinks with on Friday).
Taking advantage of these interconnections is a key part of a using a site like Facebook. You can plan events or share what’s going on in your life just to the people you have on your friends list. Some sites, like MySpace, are more public and just give you easy communication tools, while others like Facebook are more protective about your privacy.
The problem with all of these sites is that when you belong to more than one, you’re very likely duplicating information across all of the sites. My buddy Josh is my buddy Josh whether we’re on Facebook, Linked In, or Orkut. The fact that I have to add him in is a bit annoying. Beyond that, it limits my ability to use the products I consider best of breed to manage my online presence. The limits come from the fact that the knowledge that Josh and I are connected is kept and owned by the site I’m using. In other words, Facebook owns it.
Dave Recordon’s essay takes on this particular point and proposes a solution that he claims Six Apart will champion going forward. The result is interesting. While Fanzter is still in stealth mode (no, the Facebook app isn’t what our business is about), I don’t think I’m giving anything away saying that we will have some notion of social networking built into our products. Hardly any site can get away without some subset of this functionality these days (take a look at Digg). We’ll consider incorporating this functionality, both import and export, in our software, including OpenID support.
I always get excited when I see something like this because it makes so much sense. As a user of these sites, I hate the duplication of effort it always entails, re-adding my friends, building up profiles here and there over and over again. As a developer of similar technology, I know that the social graph makes it hard to compete by simply making a better mousetrap. It’s a big barrier because most users are like me, they don’t want to recreate the same network on 18 platforms.
That’s why Facebook’s move makes sense for Facebook, while this move makes sense for the best-of-breed providers like Twitter, Pownce, Six Apart, etc. While Facebook is about the social graph, in other words, that IS their key asset, these other vendors are about the services they provide. The graph is just something to be leveraged, or something that helps enhance their products. There’s a benefit for them to work on this infrastructure, and I’m hoping that we can help build that out.
