Wow, that’s one of the best comments I’ve seen on my blog in a long time. I agree that the ability to bring your friends to new applications is a key to the future of social media applications.

There are two questions I have, though. I am “old” by web 2.0 standards and you could bootstrap my social network just by looking at my email inbox. Even if you didn’t have access to my message stream, you could just give me a nifty contact importer and I would be all set. Why isn’t coarse contact information sufficient to make this bootstrap work? If Facebook is the only place you have friend information, you could be screwed – I’m assuming people keep up with people on IM, email, phone, etc.

The other argument/question I have is whether people are going to re-invest in creating social maps to take advantage of an open platform. So, if people don’t recreate open social maps, will developers build applications with the expectation that people will migrate? And if there aren’t any good apps, will people work on creating open maps? How do you crack that cycle?

But I think the point of the open social graph isn’t necessarily to just beat Facebook. It may seem like Google is trying that, but I’d guess they’re just trying to make the next leap. What is the next killer app going to be? I’d argue it’s not a social network at all. It’ll be something else, some other experience or focus that we don’t even know yet. What’s different about this new killer app (and, for that matter, every new app once a distributed network is deployed) is that it will come with your friends already built in. Other developers will build new, great, easy-to-use closed apps on top of this open social network. The social network will become the utility, like a development framework or drive backups – it’s just there.

Now Facebook would love to be that provider. But they also can’t let go of their core business – they’re not rolling in enough cash to really try and dominate new areas at a loss yet. So I can see a scenario where Google et al release an open social platform, many many people start developing on it (many more than are currently developing Facebook apps, since these apps can run anywhere and be monetized any way and aren’t at the whim of Facebook as to how they can contact their users) and then Facebook is left either having to open up entirely and compete with Google on how easily they’ll give up their users and pageviews to 3rd parties, or face irrelevance as people migrate on to the next big thing that isn’t fundamentally squeezed into the interface of a social network.