Picture 23 « Diagramming the Social Ecosystem. Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph. I've been thinking a lot about the social graph for awhile now: aggregating the graph, decentralization, social network portability, etc. If you've seen me at any conference recently, I probably talked your ear off about it. I've gotten good at my verbal/visual presentations, showing my slides, pictures of graphs, and adapting my delivery to you based on your background, facial expressions, questions, etc. This is all a lot harder to do in a blog post where the audience is so diverse, so I've been lazily putting it off. I was also afraid that if I left anything out, I'd get flooded with comments like But what about __________? Clearly then all you say is wrong. But it's time I braindump this, so here goes....
First off, before I explain what I've prototyped so far, and what I want to build (or see built) next, let me declare the problem statement, as I see it, and the underlying assumptions I've been making: Problem Statement:¶ Goals:¶ Non-Goals:¶ Assumptions:¶ Development Status:¶ Future: ¶ Explaining what the “Social Graph” is to your Executives. Many are talking about the Social Graph at the technical level, leaving many business folks with many questions.
The following, using clear business language (void of tech speak), will explain what is the Social Graph, why it matters, and what you should do. In respecting your time, I’ve boiled down the entire post to seventy words: Executive SummaryThe Social Graph is the representation of our relationships. Today, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social websites. Unfortunately, we’re duplicating our same Social Graph on multiple websites, resulting in inaccurate data and time spent managing it. Despite many challenges, our Social Graphs should be self-managed from a single trusted source, replicated to websites of our choosing, thus resulting in accurate, efficient, relationship management. Want to be able to have an intelligent conversation with others on the topic? [Definition: The Social Graph is the representation of our relationships. Benefits. Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph.
George Stephanopoulos. Wolf Blitzer. Ana Marie Cox. Three powerful people that you might want to get in touch with, especially if you’re in D.C. One man who has the ear of all three of those powerful people is Tony Fratto, known as @TonyFratto on Twitter. These days, it’s all about who you don’t know. That’s the theory behind a group of very interesting software projects being built on top of the giant graph of friend/follower connection data that Twitter exposes about its users. Using People to Find People Name 3 people whom you admire, despise, work with or otherwise pay attention to and tools like HiveMind, Follower Wonk and Twiangulate will quickly calculate who all those people are following in common on Twitter.
Services like this stand in an interesting place online: they aren’t too hard to build and they delivery huge value to their users, but so far they have had a hard time getting people to try them out. The Fabulous Uses of Friend Network Analysis A more benevolent use case? Danah boyd.