My contention is that users *say* they are frustrated by having to recreate their profiles every few months or years, but that if we give them what they want we will both destroy whatever fun they get from social networking *and* we will undermine the business models of the social networks themselves.

You are also lumping people into one pile: people who create lots of social networks that are difficult to recreate. Skim through the social networks today and I think you’ll see most people only have a handful of friends. They’re hardly invested in the same way you and I might be.

And what, praytell, are the “real social interactions their services provide” besides, ultimately, “friending”? If you mean the blogs and photo postings and such, well, you don’t need a social network for those and I wonder how many (%) of social network users actually do go beyond the friending stage? 5%? 1%?

The sites whose services are valuable are those whose social networks are secondary — far, far secondary — to the services themselves. Flickr, for example. Social networks work best as glue for services, building community around a tool. The networks that result from this are tool- or service-dependent, and for many people this is is what they want. They want to control who gets to be part of their social graph *in a certain context* — blogging, their resume, their photos, twittering, whatever. It’s not the same network on all services. Social networks will, in the future IMHO, be seen as features, not products.

The desire for a portable social graph seems to be linked to the ongoing existence of web-based social networks where the networking is the product. I don’t think that model will persist. Facebook, in fact, may prove to be the death of it insofar as the “app platform” has proven so distasteful to many, and so incompatible with entrepreneurship that people would rather build tools and services elsewhere, thank you.

Again, the PIM based approach seems fine to me. Don’t even think of it as a portable social graph for use by social networks, just think of it as an address book with link information and some ability to share information across the net. But then again, when was the last time PIM data evolved in a standardized way? Email, ical, vcf, these are all a complete mess of ancient standards, competing open standards, and proprietary junk.

I am being a little deliberately contrarian here, but honestly I find it hard to swallow that this idea will ever catch on since friendship is so dependent on context and is not a template.