Thoughts on the Social Graph

Jamie found an excellent story about the trouble with social graphs. The author discusses the proliferation of social networking websites, the annoying problems this creates, and proposes an open solution to much of the problem. Essentially he is talking about an API for all those relationship systems not under the control of any single commercial entity, coupled with a shared login system. Had things like this been popularized a half a decade ago, we'd be looking at a different internet.

IP

[PresidentEnder]

So if I write a little app that I point at my friends page on Facebook or you point at yours on Myspace, which then steals our friends lists and adds them to this wide open free social graph, do Myspace and Facebook have a right to be mad at me?

Re:Yawn.

[Red_Foreman]

I agree, a centralized API would make it far too easy for stalkers. But the article makes a flawed assumption - that people on Facebook want to be connected on MySpace and vice versa, and you (IMHO) can't make that assumption.

Re:IP

[mdwh2]

Whilst IP laws can cover "collections of data", it's hard to see it enforceable in this sense. I mean, by the same logic, would they be mad if I recreated the same friends list manually on a different site? Of course not - it's not unreasonable that my friends are still going to be my friends on a different site. I don't see using an automated tool changes that.

Is it an IP infringement if I list my phone number, email and address on one site, then put it on another site too? Of course not. No matter what their TOS might say, I think it'd be hard to argue they own the IP of your personal information, and you don't.

anti-human

[m0llusk]

People change their social networks all the time. With this in place, you wouldn't be able to just "wash that man out of your hair", but you would have to go online, identify yourself, proceed with authentication, and then click around to make the changes. In addition to big changes in social networks being laborious to enter, their implications grow as well. What about the folks who relied on your network to reach others? Will they give you negative feedback for moving on? This idea seems to be based on a hackneyed understanding of how human relationships grow, evolve, and sometimes just fall away in large numbers. Very young or socially challenged people seem like the only potential customers.

To really try to solve this problem the representation of relationships would have to be automatically generated, and that gets creepy really fast since it would mean having computer applications track all significant interactions with others.

Re:Security Issues

[kebes]

TFA only briefly mentions the possible downsides of aggregating all of the social networking sites. It says:

It's recognized that users don't always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a "friend" on one site has a very different meaning of a "friend" on another.

My reaction is much harsher than this. I don't merely want the option of syncing/not-syncing... I would want (ideally) complete control over how widely distributed my "friend-connections" become. Frankly I hate having to maintain all kinds of separate username/password/accounts on different sites. But, I would hate even more if all those different accounts were automatically identified with each other.

The people I communicate with on Facebook are not the people I interact with on Linux forums or on Slashdot. The meaning of a "friend" (or whatever) on each site is totally different. Not only do I not want these connections treated identically... I don't want those separate accounts to be related to one another!

Frankly the downsides to having my online social activity interconnected are numerous: spamming, ease of monitoring me, etc. The end result is that I will either reveal personal information I didn't intend to, or conversely I will use the sites less freely because I'll be worried about revealing information (e.g. if I know potential employers will easily find the information).

Considering the numerous downsides, I have trouble seeing the benefit, to the end-user, of having a comprehensive, widely-accessible 'social graph.'

Re:Yawn.

[makomk]

Actually, it's more about having multiple centralised social networking providers doing different things, and how to keep friends in sync between them. (So you can use Livejournal for blogging, Facebook for keeping track of people you know from college, Twitter for micro-updates, some other site for photo sharing, etc, and it'll help keep your friends in sync between them.) It'll still encourage the growth of centralised social networking sites and still require people to get accounts on several different sites, it just makes it easier for them to do so. As commenters on Brad's journal have said, it's the equivalent of a multi-protocol IM client rather than Jabber.

Re:Security/MS Passport

[mdwh2]

Particularly, the use of OpenID. I believe this was the intent of Microsoft Passport (centralized login to all other websites), but I would hardly trust my ONE internet password to Microsoft.

OpenID is decentralised. Being open or a standard doesn't imply centralised (think email - you can email people on other servers, without needing some centralised trustable email server).

Mugshut

[bjourne]

Mugshot [mugshot.org] seem to be what he's looking for. It is an open, free software, community, meta site. It tries to create a interconnect all different community sites and place them under one roof so to say. With one centralized user management system. Seems like a very, very ambitious project because it is damn hard to anticipate human behaviour and social patterns. In the broad sense, an internet community is everything from mailing lists to MySpace to Slashdot to various forums and even BitTorrent trackers.

He identifies the solution is out there...

[alexhmit01]

Facebook has made it possible for people to build the applications that people want and tie them into Facebook. A Web 2.0 site could accept log-ins, or allow Facebook users to simply add the application, adding them as users. Conceivably, Myspace will add a similar feature before going bust. The article's author gives a lot of non-sense about developers not wanting to be slaves to facebook, but they have it backwards.

I subscribe to Netflix. I added a Netflix app to Facebook, it let's my friend's see my queue... yawn... It also let's my Facebook friends, if they get Netflix, quickly add me as a Netflix friend (subject to my approval). The Netflix app mirrors some of Netflix's UI, but not everything. I still go to Netflix to manage Queue's and add movies, but I can see what's going on quickly on Facebook.

The problem is that most Web Developers suck. If your data store for your web-app is good, then you can EASILY create a Facebook front end. If your front-end has all your database calls (no stored procedures in the database, not even a DB functions file in Perl/PHP/whatever you coded in), then you see it as "be a Facebook App OR a website."

The promise of HAVi in the AV world was that we would connect our equipment via Firewire, and they would export a front-end in Java that our TV or Receiver would render for us. The data in MPEG-2 with fixed compression caused content producers to go ape-shit, but the idea is valid on the web.

If you want to process information, you need to collect it and do something with it. The days of a "single HTML interface" are now over. You need a mobile version, an iPhone version (possibly, we'll see adoption rates), and now a Facebook version.

I collect my photos in iPhoto on my Mac. I upload them to Facebook via an iPhoto plug-in to show my friends. I upload them to Shutterfly via an Export Plugin (well, did until they haven't supported iPhoto '08 yet), so my extended relatives can buy pictures.

I have other friends that are into photography, they use Flickr. However, there is a Flickr "interface" for Facebook, so their Flickr Albums are viewable on Facebook. Sure, if they have pictures that they want the Facebook features (tag a friend), they need to upload to Facebook, but if they want Flickr sharing (tags, etc.), they upload to Flickr and put it on the Flickr App on Facebook.

Open APIs will let US aggregate OUR data, not have one site steal it from others.

Conclusion?

[Tribbin]

I always skip to the conclusion before I optionally read the whole article.

quote:

Conclusion:

I'm excited about this. Start thinking about how you can take advantage of stuff like this. It's going to be cool.

How 's that for a conclusion?

Re:And we want this *why*?

[ryanvm]

Call me a Luddite, but it disturbs me greatly to think that we have diluted the term "friend" to nothing more than a form of moderation roughly translating as something between fandom and "I like something about your web page".

Hmmm - what scrumptious irony it is that I have added you to my Slashdot friends list because I completely agree with your post.

Re:Yawn.

[bar-agent]

Even if everyone supports one standard, the bottom line here is that the data has to centralized somewhere in order to maintain data consistency.

Not necessarily, the data could be distributed, redundant, and synchronized.