What's the bigger problem?
Not all having all the professional contacts you know on LinkedIn or LinkedIn not providing enough utility?
Not having all you friends on Facebook or Facebook apps in general being pretty lame?
Do you wish all 150 of your Facebook friends or 800 of your MySpace friends used Twitter? I don't.
How much time in a day to you spend actively managing, syncing, adding to your online friend networks? Not much? Yeah, me either. I spent more time trying to get two calendars to sync to my phone... porting the contacts themselves around has been pretty painless.
What I'm getting at is that Brad Fitzpatrick's call for innovation around the social graph is a solution for something that isn't really a problem.
I have disconnected, partially overlapping social networks both online and off. Some of my friends use Twitter, some don't. Most of them are on Facebook, but some aren't... and a lot of people I connect with professionally are at least on LinkedIn, regardless of whether or not they actually use it.
Here's the thing... I can't really think of any application whose main barrier to being incredibly useful is the lack of connectedness of my social networks or people on the web. Typical barriers include people's issues with privacy, or the ease of use of the app, etc. Would I like to be able to see where my friends are actually eating via their credit card data? Sure... but that's not a social connectivity issue... its a business issue/risk for the credit card issuer and a privacy issue for my friends. Solve both of those problems in a really compelling way and that problem will definitely go away.
And frankly, the gaps in connection serve purposes. I like the fact that there's some barrier to discovery and usage for services like Twitter. It allows communities to develop norms of behavior--atmospheres. Frankly, it bothers me that all of these people are just barging right into Facebook--my Facebook world--and expecting me to connect with them.
100% seemless connection to everyone... and the ability to see how everyone is connected to everyone else... that's a wall I'm not sure should come down. I like the fact that the barrier to finding me means that you have to be aware of the blog world or nextNY or be on LinkedIn or whatever... its a nice filter. On top of that, its the gaps and hurdles that allow me to be successful--it gives my network an advantage because not everyone is tapped into the same people that I am.
And, no, I don't particularly care that Facebook is a walled garden... because it's open enough. They built enough of the right hooks in such a way that was far beyond what anyone else had put out there. Would a completely "open" world be better? I dunno... what would it give me that Facebook isn't giving me now? Am I worried that they'll steal all my data? What data? I'm not banking through it, or paying my taxes. And frankly, my friends are my friends regardless if Facebook knows about them or maintains that data or not. I'm not worried about losing them.
I guess I just don't see what the big glitch is. Social is not the bottleneck. It's utility. Build something easy and useful that plugs into what's out there and people will use it... and if the masses demand that it work with some other app, it will happen. The world is too competitive for it not to.