Google and MySpace: New Social Networking Application Might Become the Standard
Google is coming out with a standard "social graph" called OpenSocial. This social graphing tool would store users' information and who they were friends with, then all the social networking applications (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) could use that data instead of asking you to recreate it each time.
Until now, Google was just one of many people trying to solve the social graph problem. However, they just signed up MySpace as a partner, as well as others like LinkedIn and Plaxo, so they now have a very good chance of succeeding!



For what it is worth, Stormy, the stories I’ve seen suggest that this does not tackle opening the social graph- rather, it is more about opening the application or “widget” platform. See some discussion in comments here.
Thanks, Luis. It is disappointing that no one person is hosting the data or graph but I think standard APIs to the data will lead to more access to the data which will lead to the possibility of a social graph.