[dododo]

w3c should create open standards for social networks.

i don't think these companies are going to do it, and this seems exactly what w3c is meant to do. so why not? seems more productive.

[arethuza]

I don't exactly rejoice at the idea of reading another W3C standard document.

[rapind]

Well there's FOAF (RDF Ontology for Social Networking). You may want to use a proprietary backend to manage your data as a social networking provider, but the w3c schema already exists to share your graph.

Here's Tim's foaf data as an example: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card

[pyre]

Why not? Because I would rather not have yet another xml-based standard.