BarCampBlock was packed yesterday, with close to 1,000 in attendance. The session on Opening the Social Graph was packed, as expected. Brad Fitzpatrick (who is heading to Google), David Recordon (who is heading to SixApart), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect), and Tantek Celik (until recently at Technorati) did a great job laying out the case for a new approach to assembling the social graph by traversing the linkages between various services. I assert that this is my blog, and on this blog, I assert that I am “johnmccrea” on Twitter, and so on. Using such information, a decent portion of the social graph (the public portion), can be stitched together by one or more entities, and then surfaced via APIs to a variety of social web apps. At one point, someone brought up Facebook. “Is anyone from Facebook here?” Silence. “Anyone?” Kinda odd, since the debate was taking place two blocks from Facebook’s headquarters.
The Real McCrea 
John,
I admit, I was the one to ask if Facebook was there, because frankly, given that a established company like Plaxo is very openly participating in this open standards effort, I wanted to see if at least anyone from Facebook was there to listen. Maybe they were and just didn’t want to speak up as it was quite a large crowd at the session.
Tantek
Thanks, Tantek, for reminding me. I guess I need to work on my “citizen journalist” skills. Given the importance of this discourse, and the key role that Facebook will play in it, it was disappointing that they either weren’t there or, if there, didn’t speak up. My personal view is that their current policies are not sustainable in the face of mounting pressure from users and the industry to given people ownership, control, and portability of their identity, their personal info, and their piece of the social graph.
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