Raw

Paolo Valdermarin is "... thinking about how relationships are managed by current social networking standard and how this could evolve". In particular:

In an unbundled social environment, where I would be managing my relationships on my own tools and use them across the different networks I would belong to, I could be defining my own type of relationships, exposing them to the people in my personal networks and to the content management systems I would be using in order to let them distribute various elements of my digital lifestyle.

I believe this is essentially the right approach, with the proviso that many of the relationships a person might want to define for themselves have already been defined elsewhere, and generally reuse is preferable to reinvention. The distributed, "unbundled" aspect is a very good reason to use a knowledge representation language that supports independent but consistent and interoperable definition of terms across the web.

Without further comment I'll firstly point to the existing relationship definitions found in FOAF and Relationship vocabularies, as well as those of XFN (which are transparently interpreted by GRDDL-aware agents as RDF). Secondly I'll mention the use of personal namespaces in Semantic Desktop projects like Gnowsis. Thirdly I'll add that personal vocabularies are also supported by systems such as Freebase.

Ok, one comment: we have the technology...