Rockchucks – Innovation Incubator

Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal fame) is working on ideas for the interoperability of social networking websites, synchronizing who-is-friends-with-whom across most (if not all) social sites. Thus, one would easily be able to find the MySpace profiles for all of his or her Facebook friends, and vice versa. Brad is a really smart guy, and has obviously had prior success in social websites – LiveJournal is quite popular and some of the code involved (memcached) is also used for Facebook.

Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized “owner” of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I’m not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It’s a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn’t own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

- Brad’s Thoughts

We shouldn’t rule out a social application just because of the “who the heck would want to create a new profile?” vibe. It’s evident that there’s something coming… just don’t know what.