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Surfing the Social Graph

A couple of weeks ago I posted about group relationship management, "entity-based social networks," identity 2.x, p3p etc - thoughts about decoupling data about you and your social network from specific applications so that you an control it and use it across the web. OpenID was a start, a way for you to store your identity in one place and authenticate against that, as opposed to creating a new identity for each application. OpenID is a great step but not very robust.

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has been talking about the "social graph," which is "the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." So the social graph is the bundle of who you are/who you know data some of us had talked about making portable; now a couple of major players, Google and Six Apart, are going to move in that direction. This is significant; it takes us so much closer to the Web 2.whatever sense of web-as-social-operating-system. (Good news for my new company, Social Web Associates; it gives us more to work with in helping our clients establish and extend web presence).

Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly at Six Apart and currently at Google, published a problem statement that's a good summary of what's up:

There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.

Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It's a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

Image: Brad Fitzpatrick's "social graph" sketch.

jon posted this at 7:55 AM
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