The Social Graph

Anyone ever heard about the social graph? I did not until few weeks ago when I read this article :Google Gives Some Hints About Social Network Plan

The article refers to the words of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, at the end of its Zeitgeist conference. He would have said to some reporters that “Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the 'social graph', to improve searches and other Google services”.

After doing some more online research, I understood that this social graph is a quite abstract concept for a very concrete thing. It's indeed all the information about users of social media and about the way how they connect to each other.

Now, the issue is that this information is not publicly shared. Everyone owns of course the data relating to his own personal network, and maybe a view on those of friends, but no one has access to bigger parts of the social graph. Google in the first place, but also companies offering online social networking services, like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Viadeo, and so many others, have on the other side a great amount of this information in their possession. This means important parts of the social graph are actually possessed by few organizations.

It's very interesting to see how an open source movement is growing with as main objective “the decentralization of the social graph” under the motto “One company doesn't own your data and social network anymore, you own and control it”. Examples are initiatives like NoseRub, calling themselves a protocol, or like knowee.org, calling themselves an "online social graph manager".

For everyone who's interested in some more techy insights, check this Google Group and this interesting post.

Good luck!

David