I first remember hearing about the term "social graph" in May while Mark Zuckerberg was on stage announcing the Facebook Platform. That probably wasn't the first time the term was used, but it seems to be the time it entered our collective conscience and started being used with more regularity. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, "wait, what's a social graph?" It seems I wasn't alone in my confusion. The social graph is a reference to graph theory, which in general, if I understand correctly, models connections between things. There's really nothing wrong with this term, but it's math or computer science phraseology and doesn't do very well as a marketing term, in my opinion.

"Now if you showed that diagram to most educated people, they probably would call it a network, and before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." -- Dave Winer

Not everyone agrees with Winer. Robert Scoble posted a response today in which he says that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc. "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes. "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."

Scoble might be right. Or Winer might be. But semantic arguments aside, I think the first commenter on Scoble's post sums it up nicely:

"When I first heard the term social graph my thought was 'what now?', graph did not resonate at all. It still doesn’t." -- PXLated

Everyone already understood what a social network was -- it's a term we've been using for years. Everyone knows about networking. When you go schmooze with your peers at a party you're networking, not graphing. Most people don't get "social graph" the way they do "social network."

As Tom Morris, a commenter on Nick Carr's post on the debate says, "The fact is that the phrase 'social network data' describes everything that 'social graph' does without having to explain graph theory to those who don't understand it." Yes! Social graph may be a valuable way to talk about this stuff with mathematicians, but it is still a poor choice as a marketing term. I think it's time we retire it (at least in anything that isn't targeted toward computer scientists) and return to saying social network. How about it?

To get started with Nexus, add the app to your Facebook profile. You can choose to generate the graph in either a light theme or a dark theme, as you wish. Once the graph has been generated, you can hover any node to view your friend connections. What's really interesting, though, is that you can click on any node on the graph and view information about your friends and how they relate to other members of your social graph.

A Nexus Graph

For example, clicking on Richard, I discovered he shared commonalities with Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, and Robert Scoble. For the most part, these shared interests were in the form of groups that they both belonged to, but they also could be shared activities, music, movies, etc. (For example, both Richard and I are fans of the movie "The Matrix.")

Discovering common interests

You can then click on any one of those shared commonalities and discover other members in your friend graph who also share this interest. You can even click a link to search all of Facebook to find people outside of your friend graph who are interested in the same thing.

Another thing that Nexus can do is help you discover friends who are most similar to you. By clicking a provided link, the application compares your interests with those of your friends to determine who is most like you.

Not to worry, though - the information gathered is restricted to the permissions you have on Facebook. If you were to share a friend's page with someone who was not that person's friend, all they would be able to see is the graph itself, not the common interests and how they relate to others.

The graph generated by Nexus can be created as either a radial graph or a spring graph and can also be downloaded in one of three different sizes.

Why It's Useful

We can thank Alisa Rowan of the iCrossing blog for this find. She reminds us that Nexus isn't just fun, it can be helpful too, saying:

For those working in a space (social media) - where CPM, click-through rates, and other traditional digital metrics fail to provide a total picture of consumer interaction, involvement, and intimacy - you know that constantly seeking out new data, and new ways of looking at that data, are critical to understanding and quantifying the qualitative.

Agreed, but it's also a great way to waste hours on Facebook in a more productive fashion than ever before.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

I spoke this morning to Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks (whom we interviewed in December), and he showed me a demo using his blog as an example that shows how strong each of his various online presence points are connected. I.e., how his blog is connected to his Twitter account is connected to his Flickr page, etc.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.

Note that Berners-Lee wasn't specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):

1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents -- "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.

The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:

"So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."

Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "...at each layer --- Net, Web, or Graph --- we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.

"Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Conclusion

I'm very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I'm not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term 'Graph' or 'Social Graph'. It really doesn't matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this 'next level' of the Web. That's what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.

Incidentally, it's great to see Tim Berners-Lee 're-using' concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it's fantastic he is reaching out to the 'web 2.0' community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.

Related: check out Alex Iskold's Social Graph: Concepts and Issues for an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex's latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).

The company is clearly full of great ideas that unfortunately get a maddeningly geeky explanation today on the Six Apart blog. There's an experimental product alluded to as well, but that's not being released right now.

The whole manifesto-lengthed blog post is worth a read, but he best part is the statement of the following principles.

• You should own your social graph
• Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
• It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
• Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn't always be connected
• Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems

That's really nice to read from a software vendor. I wish decision makers at Google said things like that. Someday the social graph and all of our Attention Data are going to be brought together and those are some great statements to serve as a policy foundation.

For now, though, we'll have to all get up on our bidirectional XFN links, FOAF and hCard so we can ride towards the glorious sunset of user-controlled data portability and a better experience online. To think that I just found the kickstand on my TCP/IP.

That said, it's a great start. For some more accessible background on the questions raised by Six Apart, micro-format and Identity savvy dude Chris Messina recommends checking out the social network portability discussion at microformats.org, Robert Gaal's Making OpenID Your Only Online Profile and The Future of Everything is Social: Consolidate and take back your social network at the blog Four Starters. Mark those puppies "to read" because this stuff is here to stay.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/six_apart_releases_statement_about_opening_the_social_graph.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/six_apart_releases_statement_about_opening_the_social_graph.php Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:00:22 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Interesting video presentation from Kevin Marks, Google's main evangelist for the OpenSocial project. Marks explains more about the theory behind OpenSocial, in what he calls "the social cloud". This seems to be a variation of the Social Graph concept, which Alex Iskold analyzed for ReadWriteWeb last September. See also Sarah Perez's post today on a new search engine called Delver, which "leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections."

We're seeing more and more products that utilize the social graph, and so Marks' explanation is a useful primer on the concepts behind them.

Video from LIFT

Related: ReadWriteTalk interview with Kevin Marks, Dec 07; and Alex Iskold's analysis of Why Open Social Really Matters.

Once you open your Google Profile, you might start seeing some suggested links at the bottom of the page (as usual, it seems Google is rolling this out slowly) and, as far as we can see, these links are pulled from your Social Graph. If you don't see anything there, you can help your profile along by, for example, adding a link to your FriendFeed account at the bottom of the page. After you do that, Google will suggest adding the feeds you import into FriendFeed to your profile and, from there, it draw even more conclusions about your online habits.

hCard

Also, as Chris Messina points out in this video, the profiles now also support the hCard microformat, which makes importing them into other products a lot easier.

Privacy

When Google first announced the Social Graph API, we had some concerns about the privacy implications of this. After all, nobody on the net knows more about your behaviors than Google. For now, Google seems to be moving slowly and by just rolling out suggested pages for your profile, it doesn't startle users with too much information.

The Grand Google Profile?

Google, so far, never really pushed the profile. Right now, it is only exposed in Google Maps. However, if Google starts pushing it a bit more, especially now that it is linked to you social graph, it could potentially start marketing the profile as 'the' central repository for your online identity.

Google is already a member of the DataPortability workgroup, which also advocates the use of microformats like hCard and XFN. These additions to the Google Profile could suggest that Google does indeed have greater plans for it has let us to believe so far.

If you are not quite clear about how the Social Graph API works, here is a short video of a Google engineer explaining how it works:

This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.

FBFriendFinder has take the much maligned approach of actually requiring users to pay for the service. Users are charged around one American penny per friend found, give or take. The site integrates with PayPal, so the process is quick and painless.

After we paid our fee, we were able to scroll through a slideshow of our social graph (albeit with a lot of same-name duplicate accounts) to find and add those friends to our Facebook network. This process was a tiny bit buggy and required some back-and-forth navigation (it seems our friends at The Next Web had the same problem), but overall, the experience was well worth the five bucks it took to find these friends without having to manually hunt them down ourselves or rely on Facebook suggestions.

Also, we appreciate the app's acknowledgement of our "crazy lifestyle." And now, we're off to ditch these pajama pants we've been sporting since the weekend and just go bananas. It's our crazy lifestyle calling to us - the crazy lifestyle we never knew we had.

A sincere congratulations to the FBFriendFinder dude for creating a handy and monetizable application.

We told you about the new social search engine Delver earlier this year (see: "Delver Reinvents Search"), but at that time, the site was still under development. Today, Delver has finally launched their service.

When you do a search on Delver, the service taps into your social graph to return its search results. It organizes and ranks publicly displayed content that comes from various online services like social networks, web sites, blogs, bookmarking services, and photo and video sharing sites that your friends belong to. A 'breadcrumb' is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, so you can see how it's relevant to you. What Summize is to Twitter, Delver is for your entire social graph.

At the moment, Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious. Other sources, like Facebook as well as other blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months. Facebook is harder to tap into because of their privacy controls, so to add Facebook content to Delver they're building a Facebook app. The app will permit you to explicitly share select items from Facebook - like photo albums, for example - with Delver's service.

Some Search Results on Delver

Search Buddies

A feature makes Delver even more useful, though, is the "search buddies" feature. This option lets you add certain friends as search buddies which will prioritize results from their networks higher than others. This way, you can give information sources you trust and value more weight than others. In addition, those you add don't have to be friends you're connected with on social networks - you can add anyone as a search buddy and they don't need to confirm the addition - it's not a "friending" feature, exactly, just a way to see more personalized results to your queries.

This feature is also useful for those people who aren't as active on social networks themselves, but have friends who are - they don't need to rely on their particular social graph per se, but can tap into sources (people) whose content is relevant to them.

Add Search Buddies To Make Search Results More Relevant and Personal

Save Your Stuff

Delver lets you save items you find interesting or informative to a sidebar of "Kept Items." The system automatically categorizes them as web items, images, music, videos, or people. In a month or so, Delver will allow for sharing these items more publicly through the addition of a Kept Items widget which could highlight findings on your own web site or blog.

Saved Items

Partner Program

Along with the launch of the search service, Delver is also launching a partner program that will allow sites that host user generated content to integrate Delver's technology into their web site.

Social Graphs - Social Media's Next Frontier

While the big networks like Facebook, Google, and MySpace all fight for control of your social graph, services like Delver provide an easy workaround to tapping into the power of your social network. In addition, you can also use Delver to discover interesting "friend-of-a friends" that you may want to follow, as Delver digs deeper than just who you are connected to yourself.

Your Social Graph on Delver

Delver is still at a very early age of development, but even so, the service demonstrates a lot of potential to become the next step in the social web's evolution.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web.  Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.

We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.

Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.

You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer

A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!

Gmail Labs already has a feature that allows users to view multiple inboxes at the same time, so this new feature could potentially be built on top of this, with an inbox with high-priority messages at the top and the rest of the messages at the bottom.

Is this a Useful Way to Organize Mail?

Whether this is necessarily a better way to organize mail is a different question. After all, there is also a lot of implicit information in when a message was sent. That said, though, a lot of us have hundreds or even thousands of unread messages (at least those of us that haven't become a slave to the inbox zero philosophy), so it will be interesting to see if this new feature (if indeed it is real) will be able to help us to organize our dysfunctional inboxes.

Note: we searched the Gmail code for the references to the 'Magic Inbox' ourselves and came away empty-handed. Chances are, that Google is only testing this for a small number of users right now.

Note: This is a shortened version of the Wrapup, due to Thanksgiving in the US.

Here is a sample of our best posts this week:

• Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle, New Internet-enabled eReader Device
• The RWW Guide to the World's Most Popular Twitter Clients
• Social Graph & Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee's Graph is The Next Level
• R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters)
• Firefox 3 Beta Hits the Web - Faster, But Still a Memory Hog
• Study: Web Will Slow by 2010
• SpiralFrog Loses $3m in 3 months: Not "Getting It" is Getting Expensive
• The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks
• The Rise Of Hyperlocal Information
• Deconstructing the Business Social Network
• Visualizing Social Software Best Practices: Three Approaches
• Is Facebook Really Ruining Christmas?
• Newspaper Ad Sales Up Online, Down in Print
• Poll: Will You Have More Business Contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn, in 6 Months? (results below)

Poll Results

In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn?

Yes, Facebook will have more 26% (116 votes)
No, LinkedIn will still have more 68% (307 votes)
They will be even 6% (29 votes)

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.

We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.

Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.

You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer

A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!

This post originally ran under the title Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes and was very well received. See that link for extensive conversation in comments.

The below graph shows minutes spent on site. Once again it's sorry reading for digg, which is trending downwards while Buzz goes up.

Finally, here are charts showing that Buzz is almost identical to the mainstream men/women Internet split, while digg users are 61% men.