Six Apart announced it’s opening social graph. A social graph is pretty much a unified list of friends and connections that are otherwise scattered on the Web on various social networking sites. Social graph as a concept has been started a couple of years ago with the idea to transfer the ownership of a user’s social profile (graph) to the user, rather than the current situation where connections and friends are stored only within the social network the user’s on. If you’re member of multiple networks, there is no easy way for your connections (and content) to be shared with others if they are on a different social networking site. Unless they actually join that particular network, you’re pretty much stuck.

Six Apart defined what they call “OpenID”, some two years back, which they say was successful because it embraced the social graph concept from the beginning. Here’s a short list ways Six Apart looks at social graphs:

• You should own your social graph
• Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
• It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
• Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn’t always be connected
• Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems
• We’re (Six Apart) going to release code and demos soon

This is good news. On the other hand, Six Apart are not alone in this quest. Plaxo introduced Open Identity Consolidator a couple of weeks ago, as a move in support for the Open Social Graph effort.

What this means, should open social graph reach the mainstream, is that pretty soon individuals with social connections are going to be the means of platform independent sharing of information on the Internet, rather than social networks as they are today. In other words, our connections will become the valuable asset, transfering focus from social networks to social networking individuals. Social platform-independent networking will become the main thing, while social networks (as they exist today) will be a collection of tools for social networking. People around the world will become the social network.

Ok, now back to reality. With the social networks only just coming out at the top the Internet hall of fame, I think we still have some time ahead of us before we enjoy things like open social graph, but changes such as these certainly bring a ray of light onto the future of social networking and the Internet in general.

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