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I agree with this statement. I'm creating a product right now which connects you to people who are friends of your friends. Since we need to have your friend graph, we currently require Facebook connect. We'd like to do without this and will look for ways in the future to do so. For now, Facebook connect is crucial to our product.

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I dont think facebook will last that long.. and then theres linkedin which I think is also a large blip.

So how to do this with some horizon? Maybe it needs to be an open API that many social network sites implement/agree on. [ but one that allows me to share or not share my social graph orthogonally to using a sign-in user handle ]

What happens every time this is proposed is that the largest networks never join, since the last thing they want is to hand their best competitive advantage over to the competition. And then the project dies.

I think the bigger problem is maintaining the data. The advantage Facebook has is that your profile is always kept up-to-date implicitly by the act of you using it. You "like" something because you want your friends to see it, you add and remove friends because you want or don't want to communicate with them. The side-effect is that your data is actively maintained and therefore relevant to share. A dedicated identity provider that doesn't have avenues for continuous interaction will quickly render your profile stale, except for the most resolute users who are willing to manually duplicate all their interactions from all other social networks.

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