Social Graph would lead to Social Portals
’social graph’ is an idea that every individual is connected to many other individuals, there by creating a n:m network of people. facebook.com is a social graph, so are any other well known social networking sites like myspace.com, etc. that makes one wonder:
what’s new, and what’s next?
in the good old days when programmers wore ties, it was about one computer connecting to another, forming a local ethernet. so socks was the platform then. the killer app was probably remote consoles. one user could access another computer that’s somewhere else. it satisfied the need for laziness among programmers, probably.
then, it was about one network connecting to another network. so TCP/IP was the platform then. the killer apps was email and usenet. one user could connect with the user of another computer that’s somewhere else. it fell nicely somewhere between a phone call, fax and envelope licking. mail clients like pine, elm, eudora were the enablers.
then, we layered the utput of a user (a document) on top of that and made it connect with the output of another user (another document). so the hyperlink was the platform, and the browser was the enabler to make this happen.
then we layered collective output of grouped individuals into portals single entry points, and neatly organized the information into consumable and discoverable format. the platform became the portal, and it obviated the need to hop documents endlessly to find good documents.
the internet has always been about connections, and enablers were always the communication tools.
the social connection is very much akin to the hyperlink: just the way the hyperlink aided the discoverability of documents, the social graph is aiding the discoverability of people. the graph of hyperlinks formed the world-wide-web, so the connections between people formed the social networks. just the way the private network of hyperlinks (AOL for example) became obsolete, so will the walled-garden social graphs of facebook, bebo, myspace, google orkut, yahoo mash, et al.
in my opinion, the facebooks of the world will open up and evolve into social portals, just the same way the networked documents evolved into content portals. many startups are moving in that direction, such as ning.
classification (yahoo) and search (google) of the content was the enabler in content portals, and in the case of social portals, communication tools would be the enablers. many companies like meebo, grandcentral, twitter are playing the role of enablers akin to the browsers and email clients. if spam, fraud and format were the pests of content portals, trust, safety and law would become the drag on social portals.
couple of related blog posts : pmaca (i am in awe of marc andreesen and his blog) and susan mernit’s take.
[...] (a) programmers have one single way of working with social graphs, they don’t have learn multiple APIs. similar to the way the primitive get/post commands that form the foundations of the HTTP, this API defines protocol to obtain social graph information. kinda like java JNI (again, to my best understanding), programmers would love it. (b) it has forced all the walled social networks to open up their social networks for programmers. in a way facebook did. this is a prerequisite to what i refer to as the social portal – see my prior post on this topic. with this kind of functionality, each social network can become a social portal. (c) as innovative as facebook has been, it does provide some very credible competition. [...]