Google, Carnegie Mellon, and The Grand Unified Social Network.

Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. For Google, it's directed to improve their online community Orkut, but the project's scope is much broader - to rethink and reinvent social networking - enabling social content sharing / interaction across multiple networks (!)

Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them. A USN would, in practice, be invisible. All participating sites would simply share information through it. While the centralization of social information would enhance all applications that use it, the USN's own interface would be very simple, perhaps only focusing on preferences and privacy controls that applied everywhere. Socialstream represents one possible way of accessing the information spread across participating networks.

I guess this is what happens when Facebook is actually a class project instead ;-)

read more | digg the project here