Man oh Man - I’m like a kid in a candy shop. Where do I start?

Fred Wilson aptly points out that one’s social graph is everywhere - in Twitter, in your blogroll or MyBloglog - and especially in your email contacts list. Hopefully Fred knows that my open letter to Zuckerberg was just a heads up to the Google onslaught headed in his direction.

I believe that MySpace is watching all this and ignoring the trends. They’ll probably go the way of Friendster. I guess the question is what will Multiply Bebo, hi5, Xing, Mixi, Cyworld and tier other next tier down networks do?

And Yahoo and Microsoft.

Meanwhile my good friend Dave Winer has attacked the term social graph, saying that we should still be referred to it as a ’social network‘. Stowe Boyd and others - agree.

Humph - well, as a well known respected expert - who gets paid LOTS of money by big companies to tell them what to do (which then gets ignored) I’d like to throw in my three cents here.

Social graph is the data representing the relationships. The nodes and arcs.

Social network is a service, which has (besides ‘friending’) lots of other activities, APIs, constructs and services - like blogging, groups, messages, widgets, facewalls, galleries, sharing, testimonials, commenting, rating, etc. Social networks are an environment, an application or service - depnding upon how you look at it.

This would be as opposed to social media - which doesn’t have all the classic features of social networks - like groups, friending, internal messages, etc. But social media IS about people - like social networking. Though some social media apps and services do have SOME of these social networking features - they often twist and turn the paradigm, feature set or end-game.

But a social graph is JUST the data that represents the relationships. The nodes and arcs. OK?

Done with that one? OK so moving on……

I believe that there are these basic ‘interface domains‘ - which make up the majority of activities in this world. These domains are a nice way to cluster and keep track of all the startups and new kinds of social media and social networking going on out there. I also talk about ‘interface domains‘ in this white paper I wrote last spring.

It is the real activities, business models and constituencies of people - that we should be focusing in on, not on buzzword du jour mentality. Serious heartfelt proposals and manifestos are being made, and folks at nipping at verbiage, terminology and grammar.

This is a big area - identity, social networking, social media, sharing, blogging, News Feeds, RSS, events, podcasting, reviews, microcontent, IM, widgets, content management and moderation, citizen journalism, Twittering (or shall we say shared SMS/IM/Presence micro-publishing?) to name a few buzzwords we banter around every day.

So why can’t we have a term which explicitly refers to the list of friends and friends of friends? A social graph - that’s what it is.

I also LOVE the notion (as naive as it is) of sharing a public domain database of social graphs - as long as we build up walls against the spammers. Having Google and others sponsor that could make it a reality. But they need to do it - in conjunction with Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace’s support. Only by working with others can Google be trusted. IMHO.

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s goes off on Google, and takes a negative contrarian approach, saying that we should fear Google and ‘enveloping’ of all knowledge. I really think that Google’s efforts behind Google Scholar, Earth and their altruistic investigations (including sending an unmanned mission to the Moon) should NOT be considered an intrinsic part of their underlying social networking strata - or efforts behind a suite of productivity apps.

Yes they need to work on their message and yes - opening up has all sorts of gotchas and ramifications - but isn’t it ironic that altruistic Marshall Kirkparick’s post on this subject, is followed up with an add from Kickapps - right below the post?

I mean come on dude - ‘money makes the world go around‘. Richard MacManus LOVES KickApps cause they give him some of their $20M they raised - to place ads influential altruistic blogger’s pages.

If we can get Google to do good things - be happy with that!

Google is figuring out how to bring social to software - which as I’ve said before - is gonna be a big theme for 2008.

Those who read my blog know that I have been fairly anti-Google in the past - saying that we can’t really trust them, etc. But know what? That mistrust was because we didn’t know what they were up to - really.

We knew that Google was just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

Maps stuck, GoogleBase didn’t. Orkut was ignored, while all sorts of broo hah hah was attached to Google Video - only to have it abandoned after the YouTube purchase. This is not a company with a clear direction and strategy.

All I’ve ever wanted Google to do is give us an indication as to what their strategy is. I called it MyGoogle - long ago. I’ve ASSUMED they were gonna build a social networking strata and connect all their apps together around one’s profile record. iGoogle and Gadgets is part of MyGoogle and their suite of apps will be exciting when its all glued together.

Bu it had BETER connect to the outside world as good as it fits within their own world - for it to succeed.

It looks like they’re finally doing what I knew they’d do all along - create a ‘digital lifestyle aggregator’ - a Portal 2.0, new start page, home of everything, web service to the world - bring it all back home - while keeping it distributed and open. A least I sure hope they are!

Coolio I say. Too bad when I told Jerry Yang to do that almost 3 years ago - he didn’t implement it - then.

I’m headed to London tomorrow so I won’t be able to directly track any response or comments to this post, but I am sure that I’ll get push back, criticism and insults - as I usually do. What I really like is when people correct me on my mispellings (thank you to Scott Lawton!)

Lots of folks seem interested in opening up user’s data and Google seems to be proposing to do that. That’s a good thing.

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have gone 98% of the way towards true and openness and my instinct tells me they’re not done yet. So these moves by Google may force them to go that extra 2% of the way. While Microsoft has shown incredible willingness to act allot like a new Microsoft - which is not surprising given who’s taking over (thanks Ray!) And Dare!

But we all know it’s MySpace, Bebo and hi5 who count. Bebo has a deal with Microsoft - but will they open up further? MySpace seems to be stuck in an ego driven battle with Chris and Tom demanding huge compensations - as if selling out for $540M wasn’t enough.

Well YO Rupert! Just let Chris and Tom quit and I’ll take over!

And then there’s Yahoo. Ah Yahoo - we all had such high hopes for you. When IS Jerry’s 100 day report coming out?

Me - I’m just a vendor with a platform ready for downloading. We’ll support ALL these standards - including oAuth (congrats to Eran Hammer-Lahav et al) and whatever Google comes up with.

Build and run your own Ning or Facebook - NOW!

Go to update.peopleaggregator.org and have fun. php5 required.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.