Social Graph Foo Camp 

The reason I asked David if I could throw up a CrowdVine network is because I want to make it easier for people to meet and collaborate at the camp. I wanted to say that explicitly in case anyone thought I was pushing my vision of social networking (I'm much more interested in stealing your vision).

A lot of people go to conferences for the lobby experience and then end up in socially awkward situations where they are in a crowd of strangers with no idea of who to talk to or how to start a conversation. My experience running networks for other conferences is that if people have a chance to connect beforehand and put faces to names, they're more likely to connect face-to-face at the conference.

There's a couple of other benefits that I've seen at unconferences. You can encourage speakers to speak on certain topics. I think leaving a personal comment on someone's profile is a lot more powerful of an endorsement than leaving a +1 on a wiki page. Several speakers at last Summer's Foo Camp used the network to organize panels. And knowing who people are can often lead to more active discussions in the sessions.

I'm also committed to data portability and opening the social graph. But like everyone, it's a work in progress. For the record, CrowdVine is an openid consumer and exports rss, opml, hcard+xfn, foaf, and vcard. So if you do manage to extend your graph, you should have no problem moving it back to a permanent home.