The Social Graph
I know this is an expression that has been around for quite some time now (2007), but I feel it is interesting to get back to it today. The expression was first used by Facebook to refer to their social network. Jeremiah Owyang described it as “the representation of our relationships. In present day context, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social networking websites”. So basically it encompasses all the persons you potentially know and the persons closed to your contacts.
So why is the difference with a network? Robert Scoble made it even clearer: “The Social Graph is NOT my social network. My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that”. In fact, as this is an online social graph you can see all the intertwined things that were previously hidden: the persons that know each other; how far away you are from a person (remember the six degrees of separation rule), a company or an organization, etc.
However there is not a pure social graph tool as all our networks are not always linked: our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn are not automatically exchanging contacts between each other and as their nature is quite different we may voluntarily prevent that. So at some point we duplicate the same data again and again and again (or partially as we have some contacts on the three platforms and others just on one of them).
The only thing that was close to giving user a visibility on what their social graph was doing was Friendfeed. I use the past tense as Friendfeed is now part of Facebook and I do not see the company lasting more than a few months. So the question is: will Facebook be the tool that will truly give shape to our social graph? Quite unlikely.
Firstly, because it still remains a quite closed space in terms of public information and does not let people export all the information they put on the platform.
Secondly, even if more people start using Facebook as a professional tool, the vast majority of us still do not feel comfortable having their personal and professional life there.
Thirdly, it might be too soon to really apprehend the concept of social graph: not everyone has fully embraced social media. It seems that we will need a generation time to really apprehend the concept of it (which means when all the grandparents will be on the Facebook equivalent of that time).
Nevertheless, why spending some time on debating the notion of social graph? Well, because it is going to impact the way we share information and we do business. If you have a complete visibility of your social graph, you can reach people and spread information faster than ever. And as a portfolio of clients might be a selling point when looking for a job, the size of your social graph will be something taken into account during your job interview: as Brian Solis put in a recent blog post, the size of your social graph matters.
The only sad thing about the notion of social graph is that it might give people more visibility on who they know but it does not prevent them for feeling lonely. As this article from Newsweek pointed it out, we are more connected than ever but we also feel lonelier than ever. As I feel sometimes that Facebook has destroyed the word friends (I would have preferred something like “people you know”), I hope than a more visible social graph is not going to destroy the meaning of friendship.
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