New Social-Network Mapping Tools Compared

Roland Piquepaille writes "There are many new visualization tools around us which try to map our social networks. In this column, I examined Inflow, a datamining tool digging through your email repository to discover and find trends to know more about your networks. Here is a quote: "Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups." I also peeked at TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which uses Amazon or Google Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to visually describe how books and Web sites connect with one another. Finally, I took a look at a brand new way of visualizing Google search results, from anacubis. If you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story."

POV-Picture style.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this is interesting, but only half the equation. How does one interpret these graphs? Without that these are just pretty pictures.

Having lots of "visual brain cells" != usefulness

[Captain Beefheart]

"Considering that more than two thirds of our brain cells are dedicated on vision, these tools make sense."

Erm, no offense, but I don't think A necessarily follows B here. Putting abstract constructs in visual terms doesn't automatically overcome the fact that you're still dealing with abstract constructs.

Re:how...

[Squidgee]

It's different because _YOU_ are datamining _YOUR_ own email, not someone else mining your email.

Antispam applications?

[descil]

This kind of a thing could potentially be used as a more sophisticated "exclusive filter" to counter spam propogation - emails that do not appear connected to a social network could simply be blocked entirely. This would require the "social network" to require two-way links - thus sending an email would not create a connection between two people, but sending and receiving an email would.

In any case, it's another way to look at spam protection.

Google+Blogger=Go_Ogle, SocNet Search For Dates

[fruscica]

Online dating is big business. Consider:

• 26M Americans visited an online dating site during 12/02

• "Personals Comprise the Largest Paid Content Category on the Internet: According to a [12/02] study...the Personals category grew 387 percent to become the largest online paid content category among consumers in the third quarter of 2002, surpassing Business Content." (source: comScore Media Metrix)

• "'I have 43 employees, and we'll bring in $43 million this year. That's $1 million per employee,' [uDate president Martin] Clifford said. 'We have zero cost of sales within our business ...The margins are almost super-margins.'" (source: MSNBC.com)

Google+Blogger is an ideal combination for serving this market.

Here's how I think Go_Ogle will happen:

Soon, Google will improve the searchability of "blogspace" by making it easy for bloggers to annotate their blogs with information about themselves and their blogger friends. This information will be encoded in an RDF dialect called FOAF (Friend of a Friend).

It will then dawn on people that the FOAF file is effectively a static online profile, while the associated blog is akin to a living profile (in the 'living document' sense).

With this, Googling people will come to encompass both researching people you have met -- already a common practice -- and researching people you would like to meet.

The upside potential of this, as introduced above, will prove too substantial for IPO-bound Google to ignore. (In addition, I believe leadership of the market for online matchmaking software is the gateway to early leadership of the market for lifelong learning and career services, which will be worth hundreds of trillions of dollars in the coming decades. Toward understanding the relationship between the two markets, consider: according to a recent American Demographics survey, couples in the U.S. meet primarily at work (36%) or school (27%). More on 'online dating software -> LLCS' here [opportunityservices.com]).

Google will then acquire the best makers of RDF query tools and launch Go_Ogle, the mother of all online dating sites.

But you wouldn't run it on one inbox

[0x0d0a]

OK, so if I run that on my email inbox, I guess it'll tell me I have some long-running business relationships with penis enlargement companies, herbal viagra distributors, and various shady people in Nigeria...

If a tool like this is intended to be anywhere remotely useful, it would look at incoming and outgoing emails. Two people that have no two-way communication would, I imagine, be rather unconnected.

Finally, running this on the email inbox of a single person would be quite useless. You'd get a hub with spokes coming out. Whee. The real purpose of something like this is when you can run it on a massive collection of everyone's email throughout an organization. At this point, it starts to become a bit of a privacy issue. I mean, people on Slashdot scream horribly when the FBI thinks about doing something like this, but the moment the local network admin (someone who I in general would far *less* rather have digging through my email, and who I personally feel has much less right to do so) starts running social analysis software, it's okay because it's "neat". Sigh.

Google needs a moderation system.

[revmoo]

One thing I really wish google would implement is some sort of result-moderation system. People could sign up, and would be able to moderate search results, so that when other people searched for the same thing, higher rated results would appear towards the top. I think it would cut down on a lot of porn spamming and such that is extremely common on google. Some things, you just *can't* search for, because the results are so badly spammed by porn sites.

Pajek

[Medieval_Thinker]

The only thing I have played with to map social networks is Pajek.

I was inspired to mess with this a little at school after being inspired by the book _Linked_. It worked OK, and there was some literature about it on the web.