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.

Comments

Yawn.

[morgan_greywolf]

Yet another article about how all social networks should be standardized and have centralized user management. This is the Internet, folks. Decentralization is the name of the game. Get used to it.

Re:Yawn.

[mdwh2]

TFA says: A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet.

It seems to be talking about a system where anyone can run their own server according to the open standard APIs, and hence will not be centralised.

Although he's right that people are tired of readding friends on each network, one flaw is that "friend" has different meanings. On some, it's simply "This person is my friend". On some like Facebook, it also means they can see information about you that others might not. On LiveJournal however (which was created by the author of this article), it goes far beyond simply "friend"; it indicates which journals you want to read, and who can see your "friends only" entries. So conceivably, who I want as a friend on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as who I want as a "friend" on LJ.

Now theoretically this can be handled in that "people whose journals I want to read" could be a subset of anyone I list as my friend (i.e., you have an option for each friend whether you read their entries, whether they can read yours, or whatever is specific for that site). But that's more hassle for individual users.

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.

So you want to change the Internet...

[Tucan]

How about an RFC instead of a web page?

And we want this *why*?

[pla]

What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related

Just that? Why, sure, I'll gladly make enough info public on myself and my friends to make identity theft nearly trivial. And hey, as a perk, if I ever find myself on the run from the police (for example, after someone steals my identity and gets me flagged as a major contributor to Al Qaida), they'll have a convenient list of everyone I might contact. Golly, what not to love about that?



People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site

Why, exactly, does "every site" need to know my friends? For that matter, why should any sites know my friends? And I don't mean in the Slashdot Friends/Foe sense - I have plenty of both, solely for the purpose of moderation. Of over 100 people on my lists here, I only actually know three of them, and one of those I've never even met.

If a site actually needs to know my friends/family/coworkers, you can safely bet on my not wanting to use that site.

For the record, I get sick of registering at websites not because it takes too long to come up with fake info, but because for the majority of them, I shouldn't need to create a personalized account in the first place! If I find something through Google, I don't want a lasting relationship with a site, I just want my damned content. If I buy something as a one-off purchase, I don't want an account, I just want the transaction completed and all my info expunged from the site. Unless I specifically ask a website to give me a persistant profile, don't force one on me - it only wastes time, and I won't rememeber what fake info I put in next time anyway (hell, I must have over fifty logins at the NYT).



This sounds like yet another one of those non-issues that give marketing gurus wet dreams and serve no purpose beyond stripping us of any semblance of privacy and anonymity. Brad can keep his thoughts, I want no part of it.

Re:And we want this *why*?

[mdwh2]

Why, exactly, does "every site" need to know my friends? For that matter, why should any sites know my friends? And I don't mean in the Slashdot Friends/Foe sense - I have plenty of both, solely for the purpose of moderation.

Actually, this is the sense that is meant. Usually sites, just like Slashdot, use "Friend" to imply some specific feature, whether it's who you want to see certain personal data, or whose journals or comments you want to read. It's unfortunate that the word "friend" has been overloaded, but Slashdot is just as guilty of this.

Given that LiveJournal - created by the author of this essay - uses "friend" to mean something specific, I imagine the author is talking about "friend" in this sense, whether or not they really are your friends. Though the flaw I think (as I said in another comment) is that since different sites use "friend" differently, who you want as friends on one site may not be the same as who you want as a friend on another.

For the record, I get sick of registering at websites not because it takes too long to come up with fake info, but because for the majority of them, I shouldn't need to create a personalized account in the first place!

Agreed, and OpenID is one way round this (which was created by Brad, as it happens). This just goes one step further, for those sites (like LiveJournal, Facebook - or Slashdot) where you do want to enter this extra information.

Re:And we want this *why*?

[Colin Smith]

For that matter, why should any sites know my friends? So... The whole concept of social networking has bypassed you entirely?

You truly are Slashdot material. Welcome my brother.

Re:And we want this *why*?

[kebes]

Just that? Why, sure, I'll gladly make enough info public on myself and my friends to make identity theft nearly trivial.

Quite right. And it goes even deeper than that.

I know how to use the web in such a web that I'm "sufficiently anonymous." I know true anonymity is impossible (e.g. with an IP address and a subpoena), but I know how to restrict the information I give out to a level I am comfortable with, and totally out of my control.

One problem with ubiquitously-connected social networking is that I not only have to be careful what I reveal, but I am now very much dependent on what my "friends" decide to reveal about me. If they go mentioning personal information about me, and it's cross-connected through every social networking site I visit, then this represents a release of information beyond what I'm comfortable with.

Obviously this problem already exists (and currently results in, e.g., people wasting time un-tagging themselves from Facebook photos)... but a widely connected and widely available social graph exacerbates the problem. Suddenly I'm dependent upon the net savvy of every single person who is connected to me? (And, given the whole "six degrees" issue, that's a lot of not-so-savvy people.) No thanks.

The end result of more detailed, more available, social information is merely that those of us aware of the privacy implications will stop using social networking sites. Is that really the intent here?

Re:And we want this *why*?

[pla]

So... The whole concept of social networking has bypassed you entirely?

If you mean that I can't call myself one of the 1.4 million "friends" of the latest boy band - Yes, it has. I simply do not see the point of Myspace or Facebook other than as a free-as-in-beer webhost (with the hidden expense of having all your "friends" receive slightly better-targetted advertising).

If, however, you mean a real social network - I limit mine to people I actually know, people that (with very few exceptions) I have physically met. Friends and acquantances whose real names and at least partial contact info I know, whose birthday I might celebrate with them, whose voice I would recognize on the phone or whose face I would recognize in a crowd.



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".

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.'

Not going to happen

[Angst Badger]

"Dear commercial websites, could you please implement a system that will render yourself and your profit models irrelevant?"

It's my understanding that a crack team of programmers has been assigned to this problem. That team includes Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Great Pumpkin. Good luck and godspeed.

Mugshut

[bjourne]

Mugshot 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.