SmoothSpan Blog

There’s a great scene from Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt says to government man Kitridge, “You’ve never seen me very upset.”  In the same vein, I don’t believe we have yet seen the Real Social Graph, although we certainly think we understand it.  The world is sniffing around the potential, but the full featured version has yet to be created let alone experienced.  Why do I say that?  Because to reach its full potential your Social Graph has to be connected to every aspect of your web experience.  It won’t do for it to be confined inside Facebook.  It won’t even do for it to be portable, so you can move it around between services.  We can’t get there simply by recreating the Social Graph inside every different service we use because the Social Graph is bigger than that and it changes too rapidly.  The copies would never stay in sync or be up to date. 

Think of the Social Graph as tracking your relationship status.  It changes constantly.  Perhaps not for your oldest, dearest friends, but for most relationships, there is change.  We’re moving closer to some people because our interests line up.  We’re moving further away from others because common interests are on the wane.  The interests themselves are constantly changing, and are cataloged in the context of the Social Graph.  See why I say you can’t manage this by copying data around?  Besides which, the essence of the web is leaving data in place and refering back to it.  Copying things around is so Old School.  The Real Social Graph can add value to virtually every web interaction we have, and it can increase it’s own power and reach by being aware of every interaction we have.  The Real Social Graph is not just data, its a living breathing thing that changes constantly based on inputs from it’s owner and the other people it represents relationships with.

Recently, there was another round of the “E-mail is dead” meme.  A silly business that, because at nearly the same time there was also a big round of posts about how much value can be derived from E-mail.  People say the e-mail networks are the biggest Social Graphs out there, that they’re not set up as networks per se, and that there is a limited window for them to get moving before other Social Networks take them over.  I say there’s a limited window for all these services:  Facebook, Twitter, E-Mail, and every other Social Thing out there on the web.  It all has to connect.  None of it is as “Social” as it could be.  And very very little of it is truly open.

We’ve seen a similar meme about blogging, and yet that is far from dead too.  Just ask WordPress which is growing like a forest fire out there.  The reality is that all of these services have differences, some subtle, some profound.  They all have value.  There is no one single universal form of web interaction that is appropriate for every kind of communication and collaboration with every kind of relationship you have with the vast plethora of individuals you interact with on the web and in your personal life.  Come to that, this isn’t even limited to the web.  Why shouldn’t it take in your telephone activities as well? 

Fred Wilson writes about how valuable it was for him to fire up Xobni to figure out who his 100 closest friends where based on who he sent the most e-mails to.  I’ve got news for Fred, that would be a start for me, but I’d be missing out if I didn’t look at the folks I call on my cell phone the most often.  I seldom send e-mail to my local relatives and closest friends, for example.  I call instead.  I’d be missing out even more if I thought my Social Network in Facebook would do it, or my network in LinkedIn added to that as well.  This is why I think Stowe Boyd will lose his bet that in 6 months everyone’s business contacts will move from LinkedIn to Facebook.  These things are siloed for a reason: we use them differently.  We want to keep them separate for many activities, but we need to be able to treat them all as one thing when it’s convenient.  If we could look across all of these media, perhaps with some sort of weighting, we could get a lot closer to the perfect invite list.

Let me say it again:

To reach its full potential your Social Graph has to be connected to every aspect of your web experience.

It has to collect data from everything you do on the Internet, and every application you use on the Internet.  Because it will be so intrusive, there is a good chance you may not want to delegate control of it to someone else’s cloud.  There are deep privacy issues at work here.  This is the penultimate Little Black Book in everyone’s life.  Dealing with those privacy issues will be very hard.  There needs to be a mechanism for you to delegate just a little bit, but not too much.  And there need to be real controls in place.  ZDNet writes about Facebook apps that ask for your userid and password so they can provide you access to some other service from within Facebook.  People do it, because they like the centralization.  But some of these apps use that information to do a lot more, like root around the other service in ways that are not illegal, but that you never authorized or considered.  In the article, Phil Windley wonders what happens when people give up passwords for things like their 401K account so they can monitor it while they’re in Facebook.  Danger!  Danger Will Robinson!

Your Social Graph may have to be centralized in some way on your own computer.  The web software world hates that idea, the Microsofties would love it, but it may not be a partisan issue so much as a personal asset that must be protected.  Failing that, it may have to be sharded.  Imagine a system like public key cryptography where you can freely distribute parts, but unless they have your key, the parts are useless.  Having a way of controlling the smarts of how these shards get combined and the keys plugged in will be difficult.  This will all be very new and will require much gnashing and moaning to work out fully.  We’re not even close to being able to declare a winner.  It could all get torn down and rebuilt very easily as new models come along that are closer to the ideal.  The ideal system needs to be capable of presenting a single identity to you the user while making it look to the outside world like as many individuals as you choose so that nobody can put together all the pieces of the treasure map.

If we think of the Social Graph as being fragmented into shards, the question arises of how we manipulate it.  There will be a desire to bring it all together, to create a single point of control for users.  Care must be exercised that this doesn’t result in a single point of control for monopolists.  Some sort of central dashboard will be desireable, but the current crop are not quite right either.  Facebook et al are much closer than email, because they are multimedia.  I can recieve messages and other notifications as well as see the news feed.  It seems to me that whatever the final evolution of all this turns out to be, one wants to have some sort of highly personalizable dashboard that has widgets that let you mashup from all the services you belong to whatever it is you want to get out of them.  Don’t take the dashboard as the one and only thing, it’s only a piece.  Stowe Boyd is right and Steve Rubel is wrong:  portals are not the final answer even if they are fine dashboards.

This has to be open.  I have to be able to get my email from my family web account, my email from my business account, my messages from Facebook, my Twitter messages, and all the rest.  While I’m at it, why can’t we finally get a unified inbox that includes my voicemail from all sources too?  This open central dashboard needs to be a jumping off point.  Richer interaction will be possible if I link through to more specialized services.  The dashboard can’t be the be-all end-all either, because it can never do everything.

There are tons of cultural issues at work here too.  The best mechanism to communicate with a particular person is going to be context, content, and recipient dependant.  The recipient will have their own preferences about how they want to be communicated with.  BTW, they need to be able to express that and you need to be able to respect it.  I may tell you to use Twitter for random drivel (“I had a Big Mac for lunch today and I actually liked it”), Facebook for Social Small Talk (“I just got an iPhone and I love it!”), LinkedIn for random business networking (“Does anyone know a good Ruby programmer?”), E-mail for Business Non-Urgent (“We need to meet about your new project, I have some ideas”), or Telephone for Urgent Personal and Business (you get the idea).  The system should be able to review your content and at least narrow the field.  Context is what else is going on both for you and the recipient.  For example, you two work together on a project your boss is urgently looking for an update on and that you’ve just written a message about.  Let’s also don’t forget the idea that different Learning Styles can color your Web preferences.

Summarizing where we are on this in terms of capabilities for the Future Social Graph and attendant software, I come up with:

• Access to all Internet Interaction.
• Privacy issues may mean Social Graph is only assembled completely locally.  Meanwhile, out in the Internet, services see only pieces of the puzzle doled out under the control of the owner based on what the owner thinks will be valuable and at the same time safe.
• Users need to be able to personalize a dashboard using widgets of some kind.  This dashboard needs to let them drill down into the individual services for a much deeper experience.  The dashboard is only there to help them decide when drilldown is needed.
• The mechanism used to communicate with your Social Graph is content, context, and recipient dependant.

This is a tall order.  See why I don’t think we’re even close to the Real Social Graph yet?  Most of what I’ve touched on here is scarcely even being talked about, let alone available to use.  These are not small issues.  They’re makers and breakers in the world of Silicon Valley Accidental Empires.  The irony is that to make it work, everyone has to quit making their view of it the center of the universe and reach out to all the others.