I really think that the Semantic Web, and especially FOAF and SIOC can be an answer to the social graph and distributed social networks, as explained (and drawn) there: do not rely on proprietary APIs, but provide data in a way that can be universally linked and understood by software agents.
Gunnar asked this morning on #swig how to handle Flickr feeds, and especially images and thumbnails with feedparser. I remembered I hacked it once to make it work, but lost my changes with a server crash ...