Opening up the social networks

Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, is working on an open standard for social networks called the Open Friends Format. Mashable is all over it. This is hugely important for breaking out of the walled gardens that current social networks create. But even more importantly than saving people the hassle of having to re-register and re-connect with all their friends on every site (which is what Mashable's article focuses on), it has the potential to open up social networks so that people can make connections to whomever they want using whatever tools they want and share any content they choose from their friends (or the candidates they support, or issues they want to encourage activism around, etc.).

Once we get there, watch for some really interesting things to start happening. Instead of political campaigns (electoral, netroots fundraising, issue campaigns, etc.) spreading their resources amongst the top 2 or 3 social networking sites, they'll be able to organize the "social Internet." And, even more interestingly, anyone will be able to do it. The promise of the web (and why we need to keep the Net neutral) is that anyone can put something on it and be on the same playing field with corporations, political parties, and the mainstream media. However, an open "social Internet" would take that promise a lot further into reality because while not everyone knows how to write HTML and upload it to a server, everyone's on MySpace (or Facebook, or Flickr, or YouTube, you get the idea).