All Annotations of Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph[Preview]

saved by71 people, first byAlex on 2007-08-17, last byInternet Freedom on 2008-08-14

• What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.
• it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
• Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps.
• People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work
• Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as "the" central graph owner.
• A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though!
• Establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph.
• A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like,

  "Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we're recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click 'select-all'."

• on 2007-10-05 Vahidm
  Forward thinking... i like it.