SixApart Announces “Social Graph”

Web company SixApart, makers of TypePad, Moveable Type, Vox, and LiveJournal, have prepared a demo of how the OpenID technology can be used to better manage your online identities.  Using a tool they’ve created, something which they are calling a "social graph" (see the demo here), your online identities can be mapped out and managed. According to SixApart, "no one company should own who you know and how you know them." With the social graph tool, you will finally be free from having to manage your various online identities "one piece at a time." On a blog post about this new tool, SixApart states:

• 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

The first step in this direction will be the release of this graphing tool (coming soon, they promise!) Later on, they will have ways to integrate the information provided by the tool into their products. As an example, they offer these ideas: "imagine using Movable Type to define your accounts
elsewhere around the web, and then allowing your friends on those
services to comment using OpenID and bypass your comment moderation
queue. Or using Vox to easily republish the content you’ve created on
Flickr, Twitter, and other such services and share it in one place with
your neighborhood." From the looks of the demo, you might also be able to widgetize your identities and integrate them into your SixApart blog.

What this announcement brings is, possibly, a cure for SNF - Social Networking Fatigue. No one wants to sign up for yet another social network anymore. Signing up and adding friends can be tedious and time-consuming; not only that, but it takes away from the time you can actually spend socializing! Giving you a way to manage and maintain your identities from one tool will be the true killer app of web 2.0dom.

For more info on OpenID, visit the site of an OpenID provider, such as the services offered by VeriSign, MyOpenID, and Vidoop.