DO

Just read Bob Blakley’s Antisocial Networking:

Opening the social graph will destroy social networks, and turn them into sterile public spaces in which formation of meaningful and intimate relationships is not possible. Opening the social graph is a bad idea. Relationship information is not the property of individuals - it held in joint custody among all parties in a relationship, and it cannot be used or disclosed in violation of the rules under which it was brought into the relationship - or else the relationship will die and the individuals in it will be harmed. If you don’t understand this, or come to understand it, you will never have any real relationships, and neither will the software you write.

This guy knows his stuff (really! :)) so you might want to read the whole thing.
I also agree that opening up the graph is a bad idea!

The whole rationale for “opening up” is wrong!

We have a small group of people trying to solve the problem of having to invite your friends to yet another social network (YASN), and incidentally the same small group of people that are trying to relief us from having different usernames/passwords across sites.

Well… a recent pool I’ve made with my surrounding non-geeks (frequent internet users) didn’t show any of these problems. Who knows… maybe these are localized problems and it might be a good idea to chillout before creating a worldwide solution for them.

The current social network portability approach is trying to solve a problem: easily moving your data around. Is this a problem you want fixing?

One fellow commenter states that opening up the graph is possible if there’s “some level of federation between social networks sites […] within a proper governance model” which means “a group of social networks behaving while sharing access to your data”. As that federation grows (to include your “Cricket players of 66″ social network) you’ll have to trust each one of the sites to behave. But what if one of them doesn’t behave, who’s responsible for your stolen identity? Who’s going to cover the damages?

As far as personal control over my data and privacy goes, I’m better off dealing with walled gardens than with open deserts, thank you very much.

It’s just a matter of perspective: mine is that the real problem is the proliferation of social networks - which further split our social graph across the web.

Kill them all, I tell you! Kill them all!