Which will only happen when the majority of people who actually care about that are people who don’t call it their “social graph.”

The open-source transformation of social network couldn’t happen soon enough

There is no reason why Facebook be used to store data. The question arises when one of your real life friends refuses to join Facebook but you two want to share the digital world. If the two networks allow APIs for exchanging information then OAuth provides a way to authenticate such API requests without compromising authentication credentials.

It is very likely that large networks may see little need to participate in this. But given this methodology, there is no incentive to join any particular network. You could be running your own network. This is a breakthrough.

How about bigging up UK content and tech companies for a change? The more people talk about them, the greater the buzz, the more revenue streams open up, the more we can innovate.

TechCrunch UK ought to devote a corner to UK startups and help nurture them.

There are open source projects that are working on also freeing the data from your social networks (content like pictures, blog entries, etc.).

Check out http://silosync.com/wiki if you’re into that sort of thing.

The part of the movement focused just on the friendship-connections can be found on the google group:
http://groups.google.com/group.....ortability

seriously.

if i’m going to waste time on this shit, it should at least be fun to read the [wish it were] snappy repartee coming back at me. right now it’s pretty obvious you offshored to some dipshit faux-et laureate who can’t write an interesting line of prose to save his 3rd-world ass.

i hear Tamils & Bulgarians have a rich literary tradition… why don’t you look one of them up, and maybe this will get more interesting.

either that, or you’re a pathetic first-person hater who’s trying to write his way out of paper bag… one that’s made of that diploma you got in the mail from the University of Phoenix.

get with the fucking program, Yo… cowboy up or go home.

Thats exactly, what german startup http://noserub.com/ is working on.
May be worth a look…

On the web, all of your data is indexed, filtered, shifted, aggregated, packaged, and devilvered to mass marketers 2.0. Google takes a 40% cut so it is in their best interest to shove advertising at you wherever you go — your mailbox (email), your television (YouTube), and your newspaper (websites like TC). The current “web” which is chock full of in-your-face advertising is not what was envisioned by visionaries like Christopher Locke and David Weinberger when they wrote the cluetrain manifesto. What they envisioned were web forums, which have easily replaced RIP graphics and multipart newsgroup threads.

Take vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com/), the top web forum software around. It made it there by being simple, rugged, and fully customizable not by looking pretty and acting flashy. Forums are a one stop shop where you can start open threaded conversations, send private messages, track who is talking to you, play games, and read news on your favorite subjects. These communities were pioneers in the wild frontier of the web. In the beginning, many of these forums were open allowing people to post anonymous comments under fictitious names similar to newsgroups. The problem was that they were vulnerable to spammers and inflammatory posters. To start the filtering process, many forums began to require a username and password to access the site. Users could still be anonymous, but it gave the operator of the site a ring of control, to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand. In addition, content held within their walled gardens is often barricaded from the tentacles of Google’s advertising spiders.

What makes the forum world so special is that you become a real family that cares about each other, even if they show it in a very different way. You are surrounded by siblings — with a traditional male to female ratio of 200:1, that aren’t afraid to call you out on your BS, make fun of you for it, and never move on. The problem is that these communities work too well and users like interacting with people too much. As the web became populated in the web 1.0 era and through the cycle that has brought us to the end of web 2.0 era, bandwidth started to become more scarce. Much like the end of cheap oil in the 70s, the cost to operate these communities in the mid 00s substantially increased. The larger communities hung around with context ads, banner ads, donations, and other ways to defer the costs. Sadly, many of the smaller communities that had 20-200 members folded and they became nomads of the vBulletin circuit.

Enter Facebook which is special because it acts as a big, open, vBulletin forum. Their goal with the social graph is to reconnect with true internet friends and bring our offline friends into the simple web that made us early adopters. On Facebook, you can control how little or how much of your private information is displayed to other members — while remaining invisible to outsiders. This provides a safe location for you to discuss your next business idea with Jenny from high school who is now a banker, Mike from college who works as a software engineer, and Bill from the bar who wants to write you a big check. Why Facebook will succeed is that they are providing this service for free — including the bandwidth bill, in return for modest advertising.

Sidebar about bandwidth — has the web community forgotten that Facebook doubled their user base in less than six months, and only had one hiccup? What Facebook did is grew organically creating headroom for an exponential amount of new users, per user that they were adding. For example by planning for 100 people per user that they added in the beginning, with 5 million members they could easily scale to 500 million.

Facebook is trying to build a better web where its users bring the ideas and labor, and they provide the infrastructure to help you succeed. Take the fbFunds debate that has been on the minds of Uber Bloggers like Jason Calacanis. People like Jason want the web to remain open so that he and other like-minded businessmen can poach your ideas and build them out faster than you with his venture capital. The fbFund is not looking for the next widget builder, but the visionary that needs access to widget builders so that they can revolutionize the platform. What Facebook has done is bring old school (think Plato’s Republic) business to the web.

Business will not be replaced by an open web, but hire Vogon contractors to clear the path.

Thanks. Interesting link.

OAuth seems to be a way for the user to control access between applications. So leveraging this, will there be an “Open Graph” connecting OpenID users that is accessible by any social network? I’m assuming the networks would manage data about the users and relationships, but not the relationships themselves.

I’m clearly missing something here, but what it is about the facebook API that limits facebook from being the authority on the graph, user name, and password, and allowing 3rd parties to have full control of all other aspects of their network or application. Someone needs to own/store the social graph, right? Why not facebook?