In “Turning the Social Web Inside Out,” I mentioned some calls for social network “portability” and a more open technical infrastructure for what people are calling “the Social Graph.” In the meantime, energy behind those ideas seems to be building. LiveJournal co-founder Brad Fitzpatrick laid out “Thoughts on the Social Graph” which synthesizes his long experience in the domain into essentially a project plan, ready for critique and elaboration.

I also learned of a Carnegie-Mellon HCI design project called Social Stream which was tasked with “rethinking and reinventing online social networking,” eventually leading to the goal of “creating a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.”

Google sponsored the aforementioned project, a capstone project for CMU Master’s students, and Google is reported to have recently hired Brad Fitzpatrick. Meanwhile, one of Fitzpatrick’s collaborators has returned to work for Six Apart, who own LiveJournal, MovableType, and TypePad. While blogging itself shouldn’t be confused with social software, there are a lot of use cases for the Social Graph in blogging applications.

While this post has been gestating, I joined the Social Network Portability Google Group and found some explicit consideration of the potential for “evil” abuse of social graph information, which is heartening to see raised as a key issue at the outset. Also, I found a thread which seems to lead where I was headed, with the suggestion that the project should be less about a portable data format and more like an API or system infrastructure, somewhat in the way that Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) hides a lot of security complexity.

More to come, no doubt, but first I should read the stuff that started the API thread more closely…