This Tuesday, January 29, I'm speaking on two panels at WebGuild's Web 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. I blogged about the first panel, The Power of Crowdsourcing last week. So that nobody gets jealous, I'd like to talk a little bit about the second panel: Understanding the Social Graph.

My guess is that our panel will target the importance of finding a solution to our current lack of a centralized social graph." Yes, social graphs currenetly exist in a number of places like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and MySpace. However, most are "walled gardens" and don't allow for cross-site portability. As more and more consumer sites adopt "social" features, it will become increasingly burdensome for users to have to find/invite in friends and colleagues with whom you'd like to connect every time they sign up for a new site or service.

Given the companies that my fellow panelists represent -- our moderator, Neil Patel, works for ProNet Advertising, Kent Lindstrom, is the President of early Social Networking site, Friendster, and then we have Todd Rosenberg, a BusDev guy from Userplane, our main focus will be on unlocking a common social graph from a consumer angle. In the spirit of providing best practices back to companies that are working on a social media or community strategy, I'd like to ensure that we cover the relevance of a social graph for the enterprise as well.

If you haven't had a chance to read much about the social graph, LiveJournal and Social Graph advocate, Brad Fitzpatrick, does a great job of explaining the social graph. In this seminal and oft-quoted post, Brad talks about how a social graph differs from a social network and why it shouldn't be owned by any one company. A few other reads on the social graph include David Armano's "Social Systems" and the Social Time's "Defining Social Platforms."

Following the panel, I will write a follow up post detailing the high points of our discussion. In the meantime, please comment if you have thoughts on questions like:

• Who will own the social graph (will it be Google through Open Social?)
• Could it be non-profit Portability.org - recent announcements by Microsoft, Google and Facebook that they were joining the organization would lead one to think that is a possibility?
• Will Internet Explorer or Firefox create a plugin solution?