Dare Obasanjo blogs about Brad Fitzpatrick thoughts on the Social Graph (definition). Brad has this to say:

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

Dare Obasanjo hits the nail on the head when he says:

I’m skeptical of a lot of the talk about social network portability because the conversation rarely seems to be user centric.

However I disagree with him when he says:

As for the various claims of social network overload only the power users and geeks who join a new social network service a month … have this problem. A real social network is a community and users don’t change communities at the drop of a hat.

I think that he is narrowly defining a social network. I think that Flickr is a social network that is really great for sharing photo’s but not so good for staying in contact with friends. YouTube is a great site to share videos, but I am not going to carry a conversation there like I would on my blog.

Brad’s idea of have an independent way of maintaining a universal social graph is a good idea. Provide a consistent way for access to the data in much the same way openID has standardized the process of authentication.

I think the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is a good step in this direction. The FOAF project is working to create machine-readable pages describing people, their relationships, and the things the create and do. Lofty goals I realize, but necessary for the next evolution of the web.

There is a good conversation going on about this at Brad’s blog.