XDBE Project Promises to Present Global Social Graph in Early January

A reader has recently suggested that I review a new open-source project that is promised to completely change the way social networks work once it is actually launched. The name of the project is XdbE and I thought I’d take a look at what the guys promise – especially since they told me the private preview will available as soon as in the early January so it is not a long time to wait and definitely a good reason to take a look at the project in advance.

So XdbE is described by the team as “an open, simple, powerful, robust and speedy Global Social Graph aggregator” and is intended to aggregate user data and share it between online communities over HTTP protocol. The idea is to stop continuous process of duplicating our social graphs every time we register with a new social network and declare our connections with the same people.

Basically XdbE can be described as a database that contains information about every user who happens to be registered with at least one of the contributing social networks: user alias (or different user aliases he has on different services), friends this user is connected with, basic information about this user like age, gender, and location. No personally-identifiable information will be included in the database.

But the most important part is that the idea is not to let the social graph to be owned by a corporation or a group of corporations: the XdbE project is based on an open principle where the aggregated information about everyone’s social graphs is not owned by any single person or company and can be accessed and used by anyone who feels like using the information to improve the experience for their users.

Another big thing is that the database is supposed to be updated in real time so once a user changes some part of his or her information on one social network (adds a new friend, for example), the same updated information will be instantly available to all the other participating social networks for them to update the information accordingly.

The project is currently at the working prototype stage with the private technical preview promised to be available in early January. In the meanwhile the team invites everyone willing to participate to join them as this open project is built on their enthusiasm only and any help will be welcome.

Here is the presentation of the XdbE project where the guys behind the idea of such an open database explain why XdbE could be just the right solution for the problems we are now facing with all our multiple social networking accounts everywhere and how it will work:

Of course the idea sounds like a good and very reasonable one but the potential problem here is quite obvious: the usefulness of the entire project will largely depend on how many social networks will join the project to fill the proposed database with user information and to use information available from other social networks. Of course if the big players are somehow persuaded to support the project, it will mean a lot to everyone but will also help small players build their own networks and this is probably not something the big networks will want to contribute to. But I do hope that with enough support from the technical community this project will actually turn into reality and we will see a global social graph idea implemented based on total openness and transparency.