I'll be the first to admit that not all of my attention has been on the various discussions raging around the weblogging world in the last few weeks. However, my curiosity was peaked when there was multiple references to 'social gaffes'–enough so that I tore my attention away from working on my upcoming bestselling book on web graphics in order to see who had been involved in the latest online contretemps.
I quickly came to understand that I had misread both the word and the discussion: it was social graph not gaffe. Isn't it amazing how one can misread similar words? Oh, well, since my attention is already caught…
The discussion on social graphs seems to be a convergence between Six Apart's and Google's recent Secret Ops discussion related to the topic.
I don't have the issue with the term, social graph that Nick Carr does, though another buzz word being bandied about isn't necessarily a reason to pop the champagne cork in celebration. From my initial read through, my understanding of the difference between social network and social graph is that the former is something we control, while the latter is the mechanistic view to be consumed or derived using whatever algorithmic means present themselves.
You can manually send me an invite to join you in Facebook poking (which sounds faintly obscene), but I don't have to accept your invitation. If I go to the next big thing after Facebook, and decide that you poke good, I can then send you an invitation to join me at the newest, bestest thing. That's a network.
If I have an OpenID and can use it to connect to my social networks and these networks are 'open', not only can I take my network with me from place to place, my social interactions form a 'social fingerprint', as it were, readable by the right software. I connect with The Poker and when I do, the software can let me know that The Poker is connected with other people who other of my friends are connected to, ala *hint, hint*, *nudge, nudge*, fresh meat!
In other words, you can pack up your network in a big brown bag and tote it along with you, but you can't grab your graph.
According to Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, the problem associated with today's state of social affairs is:
Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, 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.
I'm forced to ask the question: is this a real hardship for folks? How many of these social networks do people really sign up for? Do you normally carry along everyone you connect with from network to network, like a bag lady does her favorite umbrella?
I keep hearing what a hardship these 'closed graph' networks are for folks, but I don't think I've read anyone write, Oh, damn, I had to skip my kid's school play because I had to stay home and invite everyone I know to my newest social network. I imagine there are people for whom having to re-spider their newest activity is a problem, but I have to wonder if they're enough in a majority to threaten to become the next meme?
Six Apart's discussion on social graphs is related more to the technologies used: FOAF, microformats, especially the use of OpenID. In the writing, David Recordon uses the recent fiasco with Quetchup, as an example of why OpenID is important–invites to which I received from people who I know would not willingly invite me to a social network, so I knew it was a scam right from the start. (Handy, that.)
Recordon writes:
Quechup.com launched a few weeks ago as a new social networking service. With little context for the new service, many people happily gave their Gmail username and password to check to see if their friends were already members. What many of those people did not realize is that Quechup could use that information to email invitations to join Quechup to everyone in their Gmail address book. Lots of unwanted email, and embarrassed apologies, followed.
Once you think about it, it's easy to see how an email address and password can be the key to compromising a lot of other personal data. With their shared login system, a Google Account allows access not just to Gmail but also to a PayPal-like Google Checkout account, managing your advertising via AdSense, and viewing traffic to any of the sites you're tracking via Google Analytics. If your Gmail username and password is given out to a rogue service it might mean that your bank account is wiped, you've started displaying distasteful ads, and the confidential traffic statistics to your site are now fully public.
…
While OpenID helps to solve these problems, the problem itself is larger than just reducing the number of accounts you manage online. Getting to the point of it being common practice for a service to request your email password to invite your friends really illustrates just how bad this problem has become
Actually, I don't see how OpenID solves the problem. Being a little more selective about where and when you pass out your usernames and passwords seems to be a better solution. With OpenID, you're still giving access to your information, which can then be used in a manner that you may not be happy about. True, you can keep your username/passwords separate for accounting systems such as Google's Checkout, but how many systems do we connect directly to our credit cards, and bank accounts? If you say more than one, well, you don't have my sympathy if you go to buy that hot dog and the check out lady says you don't have any money in your checking account.
What's odd about all of this is that all the discussion about social graphs seems to be based, directly or not, with Facebook, starting with the fact that Facebook's Zuckerberg seems to havecoined the social graph term . It puzzles me to no end this seemingly endless fascination with Facebook, and it always gives me a chuckle when it gets compared to Microsoft or Google. The philosophy seems to go: 'owning' your own social graph is the next big thing in technology because Facebook's web traffic is really, really high.
?
Some of the RDF folks have mentioned how RDF would be perfect for use in these new social graphs. After all, RDF was designed from the ground up for storing and aggregating this kind of data. Here's me frantically shaking my head, though, not really wanting the RDF community to buy into 'social graphing' because recorded data, or algorithmically derived data, isn't necessarily meaningful data:
Me to Social Graph Aggregator God: Recommend me a dentist.
"You know A, and A knows B, and B knows C, and C knows Dr. D."
"Cool."
–later–
Me to Social Graph Aggregator God: Doctow was awbul, just awbul. Why id u recommend awbul dentiss?
"I beg your pardon, but I only plot the points, and follow the connections. I don't test any of it for value".
Me to Social Graph Aggregator God: I twusted you!
"Then you didn't read the TOS closely enough."
Frankly, if people want to jump from network to network and social graph technology can facility this hopping about and they have more control, more power to 'em. We each march to different drummers; dance to different tunes; lick different flavors of pops. This is all a hoot!
What is less of a giggle is Google's new effort to spread Orkut across all of its services. Google has a lot of information about me, but I don't know exactly how much information it has, how it's using this data in derivatives, who has access to this data, and how long will all the data and all derivatives be maintained. To hear that Google plans on extending tendrils even further into our online lives does not excite me as much as it seems to excite the VCs.
A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Picasa and Google Earth primarily because I wanted to see about covering both services for my book. I like Google Earth, especially that new Easter egg, where you can fly jets and crash them into mountains. Somehow in the process, either I made a mistake and checked the wrong box, or I had a momentary brain aberration and clicked the wrong link because the next thing I know, I have Google Desktop on my computer. Well, at least I did for a few minutes, long enough to have my computer mucked up by Google Desktop, which acts more like a benevolent computer virus than a useful service.
Ew! Ew! Get it off me! Get if OFF me!
Of course, I can bag out on Orkut, I think, but I hadn't any intention of attaching accounts to my GMail account, which Google did without my permission. It is becoming very, very difficult to keep Google from 'helping' me by making connection decisions for me.
Returning to Google's Brad Fitzpatrick's take on social graphs, he goes into more detail on what it would take to make building social application's easier by providing a set of goals, including making social graphs into community assets that are owned by a non-profit which:
collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users)
With this capability in hand, user's will get the ultimate social graph experience:
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'."
Also every so often while you're using the site dopplr lets you know if friends that you're friends with elsewhere start using the site and prompts you to be friends with them. All without either of you re-inviting/re-adding each other on dopplr… just because you two already declared your relationship publicly somewhere else.
The fiasco that happened with Quetchup.com seems small in comparison to the problems that can occur with this type of global data aggregation and the associated algorithms to 'assume' and derive associations. Leaving aside the potential for hundreds of messages a day if there's even the smallest flaw within one of the algorithms using this data, every one of the interactions attached to this global graph will be monitored by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies, all waiting to sell us something; all wanting details about what we're willing to buy. It never fails to amaze me that people will struggle to get Akismet to run with their weblogs, and use any variety of ad blocker, yet trip about joining every new social network, happily providing their email accounts so that people like me can be heartily surprised by who exactly I got a 'friend' request from.
(At least I'm getting some entertainment value from Quetchup.)
With all due respect to the gentlemen mentioned in this post–they're all very savvy, tech proficient, seem to have lots of friends, and make a lot more money than I do–but I have to wonder how clearly one can think when one's head is up one's butt?
Though privacy is mentioned, what isn't mentioned is that the data already being collected about us by companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and others is out of our control, and there's no indication that somehow waving the magic 'social graph' wand over any of it is going to make any difference. Google, if I use OpenID, will you let me delete my search results from your database? If I quit Facebook and join Orkut, will you let me delete my search results from your database? No? Then won't using one ID make all this data collecting about me a whole lot easier?
As Julian would say though, it's already too late to worry overmuch about privacy. Bwhahahaha, boys and girls: whatever you know about your social network, others know, too; when you own your social graph, others will, too. They…are watching you…
But let's make a game of it, shall we? Hide and Go Seek. Tag, you're it.
To think that when I started following all the links, all I was expecting to hear about was who embarrassed who and at what function. Now if you'll excuse me, I've heard that today is One Wet Day. I'm not sure what it's about, but I think it has something to do with storms.
