My “friend wheel” from Facebook, showing how my friends are connected to one another. From 4 o’clock to 10 o’clock–the highly-connected yellow/green part–are my friends from the library blogosphere. Edited 2007-08-2016:00MDT

Thoughts on the Social Graph is a very interesting essay/post by Brad Fitzpatrick. Here is what it’s about:

If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.

He states his goal like this:

Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner.

So the idea is to have “friend” information from social networking sites–the “social graph”–as a “community asset” that all applications could draw upon, letting social networks proliferate without everyone lining up behind Facebook apps.

Some of his explanation is a little too technical for me, but the examples he gives for the end-user experience is easy enough to follow for those who use social networking software:

A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like,

“Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we’re recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click ‘select-all’.”

Also every so often while you’re using the site dopplr lets you know if friends that you’re friends with elsewhere start using the site and prompts you to be friends with them. All without either of you re-inviting/re-adding each other on dopplr… just because you two already declared your relationship publicly somewhere else.

Sounds good to me. I don’t know if the big sites will want to play along, as keeping their information in a silo seems like part of the business model. This social-graph-as-community-asset doesn’t exist yet, of course; you can check the development status near the end of that essay.