Wired on Opening Social Networks

Wired takes Facebook and other social networks to task for locking in users, advocating open standards for constructing relationships among users.

Wired attempted to recreate all of the functionality of Facebook by pulling resources from Flickr, Last.fm, LibraryThing, etc. into a Wordpress blog, ultimately failing because of the lack of an open standard. (They make no mention the Friend-of-a-Friend project, which is odd since it seems to aim to be this missing standard.)

Most interesting I suppose is that it underscores the core value of existing social networks — social networking, not the service addons. If the networking component can be commoditized then the existing social networks would compete on the merits of their feature bundles with sites specializing in those kinds of functionality.