The Mandelbear's Musings

The most recent items in this this collection are The Social Network Operating System and Using Open Standards to Free the Social Graph, both at O'Reilly.

They refer to XFN - XHTML Friends Network, and to Six Apart's claim to be Opening the Social Graph, though I'll believe that when I see it.

From a much earlier post by technoshaman (which I'm having trouble tracking down) we have Thoughts on the Social Graph by Brad Fitzpatrick, which leads to a couple of other useful and interesting places, including MoveMyData.org, and a couple of Wired articles: Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up and Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools

My earlier post linking to Don Marti's thoughts on online communities via distributed revision control is also very relevant here.