If you don’t know what happened then check Techmeme.

I’m not sure about this announcement. First of all everyone who has said that no one is actually committing to anything here is absolutely right. Just because people who work at Google and Facebook are on the committee it doesn’t mean that data is going to be portable from Facebook to NewSocialNetwork.com anytime soon.

I think that the issue is being clouded though. If you could move your information about friends etc (your social graph) right now would you? Where would you move it to? Moving your social graph is not going to be useful unless all of your friends (or at least some of them) move too. In this way making data portable is not really going to change anything about the lock in with social networks. People are going to stay where people they know are. Similar arguments debunk the significance of Open Social. People don’t switch networks for applications or widgets. They move because of their friends.

What is needed instead is to make the rich experience of a social network standardised. I think Google knows this. The real future is ONE social network for everyone. I see social networking as an extension to email. From Gmail I can email people on Hotmail and they can email me back. There is a communication standard there. So what we need is a standard account type (that is OpenID) and then standards for feeds of activity (that’s RSS), and standards for everything else you do on a social network. Once the social networking “scape” is fully open in this way people can use their own bit of the network (essentially their network provider) like Facebook, or Google, or Bebo, or whatever. And it might have slightly different features just like the way that Gmail has different features to Hotmail but it would have all been the same network. So I can switch from Google to Facebook and I’ll see a different interface but can browse my friends on whichever network provider they’ve chosen.

OpenID and a standard social graph is the key. As far as I can tell there is no benefit in the “half-way” solution where I can move my data from Facebook to Orkut. My friends will still be on Facebook. Fingers crossed this can go all the way.