Rockchucks – Innovation Incubator

People want to know how they’re connected. But we don’t have a clear-cut means of doing so yet.

Google is developing a social network aggregator. (This, of course, means that social sites existing as walled-gardens would be out of the loop. I wonder how many will open up after this?) Google wants to be the main provider of a social graph (a big visualization of how everyone is connected). Google also realizes that “[p]eople are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing ‘Social Applications’ is too much work.”

The man who founded LiveJournal left for Google, and he has some ideas for the social graph himself:

• Open-source software for such graphing
• Decentralization of information for such graphing
• Right-after-sign-up addition of “old information” to new network
• Syncing multiple sites for a user
• Not to replace _____

And has anyone heard of FOAF, the Friend of a Friend Project? It’s going to try to show how you’re related to everyone else, which sounds like XFN, the XML Friends Network, which links people by metadata.