I’m at the graphing social patterns conference in San Jose, California. Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations at Facebook, is speaking on a panel about opening up the social graph. During the panel, Chamath said that Facebook believes that there is one social graph. I agree but this signals Facebook’s intention to be the sole owner of that social graph. A week ago, I suggested that Facebook will have to open up if they intend to to own the social backbone. By opening up, they will have successfully extracted the social layer. Without opening, I see the size of Facebook being limited since not all social activities online will reside within Facebook.

I had the opportunity to ask Chamath during the panel about whether or not he believes Facebook will have to allow the social graph to be transportable across the web. His response was that Facebook wants to accurately map the social graph without opening up. He also stated that Facebook wants as much information as possible that’s flowing across the graph. Whether or not they want to, I believe that Facebook will be forced to open up and make the “graph” transportable elsewhere.