Francis Irving of the Open Knowledge Foundation posts about how Brad Fitzpatrick, ex Six Apart and now with Google, plans to open up the social graph (the connections between people that build social networks). Currently the now numerous social networks all operate as walled gardens; the ultimate goal of Brad’s project is, via a a non-profit and open source software to:

make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner.

Rumour is that Google will announce a new set of APIs on 5 November that will allow developers to leverage its social graph data, with Brad leading the charge to make the project as open as possible.