Thoughts on the Social Graph
The world won’t switch en masse to anybody’s “social networking interop protocol”, pet XML format, etc. It simply won’t happen. This must all work supporting any and all ways of data collection, change notification, etc. Cute new protocols and XML/YAML/JSON formats for cooperative sites will help (and have already started to be deployed with a few early cooperative sites), but by and large, most sites won’t be cooperative at first, and some (e.g. MySpace) might not ever ever support this. This is going to happen one site at a time and without everybody speaking the same protocols. That said, this project will use open standards, microformats, etc in all data that is republished in, say, widgets (for those users who like widgets)
Taken from Thoughts on the Social Graph written by Brad Fitzpatrick. A long reflexion on sharing social data across networks.
