The Social Graph is Neither. The Social Graph Is Neither I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further.
The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer. At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try and recreate the same web of relationships, over and over, by making people send each other follow requests. The second was that this relationship data should not be proprietary, but a common resource that rival services could build on as a foundation.
How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel - Jared Keller - Technology. In a nondescript building in Virginia, analysts are tracking millions of tweets, blog posts, and Facebook updates from around the world How stable is China?
What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of question, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media. The Associated Press reports that the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency's Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as "vengeful librarians," are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad. Google says Apple's Siri threatens search. By Jonny Evans Google [GOOG] chairman Eric Schmidt has admitted his company may have bitten off more than it can chew in its war with Apple [AAPL], and is running scared of the serious search threat posed by Siri.
From the horse's mouth I can already hear the Android fans argue against this claim, but it's not me who is saying this, but Google.