Yesterday, TechCrunch had an article talking about Google launching Open Social on Thursday. Today, Open Social has become a hot topic on various mailing lists I’m on. People want to know how they can connect with Open Social, how it relates to other open connectivity efforts, and why it matters in the first place.

On one list, I put some of my thoughts about the importance of this into a historical context. I wrote about interconnected small-scale white-labeled social networks.

Back in 2003, a bunch of us chatted on an IRC channel about how to use social networks to help out Gov. Dean's Presidential bid. Initially, we called ourselves Hack4Dean. Later, we chose a more mainstream name of DeanSpace. After the election, DeanSpace morphed into CivicSpace and then CivicSpace hooked up with the CiviCRM folks.

The goals of DeanSpace were to make it easy for anyone to create their own websites with powerful tools and the ability to interconnect with other similar sites. In essence, what we were talking about was small scale white labeled social networks with an open api.

Now, social networks have become mainstream. Several companies provide white-labeled social networks. Yet the interoperability is still anemic.

In the early days, we looked at FOAF to exchange friends lists, hacking events to be RSS feeds to share events and using Drupal's shared signon to enable something closer to a single signon.

Now, the open source folks are kicking around XFN and microformats as a way of sharing information. They are exploring OpenID as a shared signon. People still kick around ways of sharing events, but none of them work very well yet.

Is there a value in creating small scale white labeled social networks that can easily interoperated? Some of us old folks who worked on Hack4Dean years ago thought so then, and still think so.

So, what will the ‘Open Social’ initiative do? How open will it be? Will I be able to link it to Drupal? To Second Life? Will I be able to create a Facebook app to utilize it? Will it take advantage of current tools like OpenID, XFN, FOAF, and so on? Will any of the white-labeled social network providers adopt this? I suspect that even if it is done poorly, which I doubt will be the case, it will be an important step forward towards interconnected small-scale white-labeled social networks.