Brad Fitzpatrick and I just got off the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, where we talked about social networking love and hate. You'll see coverage elsewhere about what we said, though our slides can be found on SlideShare. Here, I'd like to take you behind the curtain and show how the talk came to be.
But first, what I hope will be the news: Today I announced a new service for developers that is a key piece of infrastructure that will help to open the social graph. Keeping track of friends online is not easy to do. You might let a service import your GMail address book today, but a week from that, the information is out of date. The Six Apart Relationship Update Stream is an endless feed of social relationship data, designed for Web services to be able to send and receive information when changes to social relationships on their service occur. This is a developer platform, not something for regular users. It launches today, streaming real-time public changes from LiveJournal and Ma.gnolia, averaging around hundreds of changes per minute, with updates from Hi5, GetSatisfaction, SmugMug, Plaxo, and Vox coming soon. (Disclosure: LiveJournal and Vox are owned by Six Apart, my employer.) This means that when I add a friend on LiveJournal, the feed I see on FriendFeed could be updated in real-time to start showing events from them as well.
