The other day Brad Fitzpatrick (co-founder of LiveJournal) wrote an excellent piece on the evolution of social networks on the web. Brad’s main point is the issue of portability of the “social graph” and being able to transport your friend relationships across multiple social sites as you please. As Brad explains, there is no decentralized “social graph” service, and web users have to struggle to find the same friends on every new website they join. Additionally, small startups with a cool product lag behind because they spend too much time having to redevelop their own version of a social graph.

At Rapleaf, we fully agree with Brad and we are working hard to help create ‘online identities’ for web developers to benefit from. One of Brad’s future hopes is for a “reputation/trust API” that can be used, for example, to prevent comment spam on blogs. The Rapleaf API is a step in that direction – you can lookup the email address of blog commenters on Rapleaf and learn who they are. Additionally, the Rapleaf API can be used to leverage online identity across commerce sites, forums, and other web services that benefit from having a reputation/identity aspect. Over time, we also hope to unleash further aspects of our API that can provide a greater depth of benefit to web developers.

We also help users directly, not just web developers. Rapleaf helps you identify friends who you didn’t know had a profile on another social network. You can easily add them as a new friend on those networks to maintain that relationship. We’ve made this as easy as possible – all you need to know is your friend’s email address, and we’ll find them on the web. A great example is someone who you are exchanging emails with – search that person on Rapleaf and you can now find them on any matching social network where you both have profiles.

The social graph is an important part of the internet, and we’re excited that Rapleaf has a place as an online reputation and identity engine. Thanks Brad for helping define what a social web will look like.