The Social Graph Project attempts to map all the relationships between individuals in current social networks.

Pretty ambitious project, don’t you think? The problem, as Brad Fitzpatrick explains, is the lack of of consistent framework that would allow for global mapping:

Unfortunately, there doesn’t exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that’s comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

This has a great impact on usability. As he continues to explain:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

Faced with this scenario Brad argues that a non profit organization should exist to manage all of the user’s information (personal profile information, friends, email, address, etc.) Then when the user goes and register in a new site he is prompted with a message such as: “Hey, from sources available to us through public means we know that you have all these friends, blogs and personal info. Would you like us to fill your profile for you using all this information?”

If you are in the mood for some reading go ahead and read the full article about the social graph project.