It will be a grand world once we break free from the walled garden. It will be a world where I can walk across and talk to my friends on MySpace without having to force them to join Facebook. A world where I won't need to put pictures up on one socialnetwork and wonder if my friends on another socialnetwork had a chance to view them. It will be a wonderful place, not controlled by some Beacon watching me walk across the world. It will be a wonderful world, where my interests and desires are given higher priority. Joyful and child like dream, not expected to happen for a long time, but if it were to come true imagine the possibilities.

Spam could be a thing of the past, as you would only receive emails from people who have a strong connection to others within the social graph. I could share a document and work on it with anyone on any domain or network. Developers could innovate without being held back in the bounds of a single company.

A truely open social network would be analogous to free email: offered for free by many providers, but not restricting you to only send emails to the same provider. There might be 100 million hotmail accounts, but how useful would it be if all you could do is email other hotmail users. Email might be a very simple and maybe a naive comparison, but it can give us hope that it is possible to break free of the confines of an overbearing overlord. Two of the main technologies are in place for this revolution to take place: OpenID to authenticate across domains and RSS for newfeed to keep updated with your friends. Standards do exist and can be easily extended to add friends to your personal list, and to upload pictures which can only be viewed by only your friends regardless of where they are coming from.

The key to success are open standards with a healthy adoption among many providers. I am sure this is already in the works, obviously it hasn't been powerful enough to gain my interest. What do you think?