Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks

Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal and OpenID among others, posted an interesting look at what he call the social graph — a decentralized means of handling social data. As we hinted in our call for an open social network, the tools to pull this off simply don't exist.

Fitzpatrick writes: “Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.”

And end users are increasingly sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every new social networking site. And rightly so, there has to be a better way.

Fitzpatrick outlines the steps necessary to begin building an open network and even claims to have working prototypes of some elements. But even he knows it won't be easy.

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.

But perhaps the most interesting part of his plan is that he wants to create a non-profit and open source software “which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph.”

The centralized data would then be made available to other sites (or users) via both “public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users)”

He goes on to say that while this server needs to be centralized in the beginning it also needs to “ensure that the design is such that others can run their own instances, sharing data with each other. Think ‘git', not ‘svn.'”

One of the complaints about my Facebook article was that many people assumed I meant you should open up and share your data with the world, which is not at all what we mean here. However, because public data is easiest to work with that's generally where the concept takes off. As Fitzpatrick notes:

The social graph contains a combination of public nodes, private nodes, public edges, and private edges. The focus is only on public data for now, as that's all you can spray around the net freely to other parties. While focusing on public data doesn't solve 100% of the problem, it does solve, say, 90% of the problem at 10% of the complexity. Private data can be added later, perhaps at a higher layer. For now, only public data.

There's also no need to get rid of sites like Facebook, MySpace and other networks. Though, as Fitzpatrick says, this is far more likely to begin with smaller sites.

There are both cooperative sites and uncooperative sites. Almost universally every small site I've talked to wants to cooperate, realizing their graphs are incomplete and that's not their speciality… they just need the social graph to do their thing. They don't care where it comes from and they don't mind contributing their relatively small amount of data to making the global shared graph better.

I would interested to see what prototypes Fitzpatrick has come up with, but so far he doesn't have anything publicly available. I'd also be interested to know what Compiler readers think about this plan — is it a good idea? Does it solve the main problems of isolated social networks? Let us know your thoughts.