Opening the Social Graph

As you move from one social network to another, you're forced to re-declare not just your profile, but to find all of your friends all over again. Freely giving away the username and password to your online email address book has become a modus operandi when joining any new online service.

Fortunately open standards and technologies can help to solve this problem. OpenID is already taking root and helping to put control of your identity online back into your hands,

Microformats make it easy to exchange profile information in a standard fashion, and new technologies like OAuth allow for richer integration between services in a more secure and user mediated fashion. Each social network consists of people and relationships, making up a small part of the entire social graph spanning the 6.6B people in the World.

Shouldn't technology help you move your relationships between services as well? With a bit of glue between these standards, this is becoming increasingly possible with many companies and services working to make it a reality.