Micro Space of Oliver Ding

Well, it has been a long time since my last post here. I am currently traveling in New York City. I flied from Houston on Jan 15. Two weeks have past. I am living at Brooklyn. I will report my travel later.

Today I add a new category to this blog for new goal daily reading. I wish I could read some English valuable articles everyday. I will post some scraps of articles to this new category Scrapbook.

Today I read four articles about social graph.

Wikipedia: Social graph

URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph

A social graph consists of who an individual is connected to based on the type of connections, such as work, friendship, interests, and location. It differs from a social network, which consists of who an individual is connected to based on the existence/strength of (one type of) connection, such as work.

A social graph is a more complex/higher-level model of a social system than a social network.

Giant Global Graph

Written by Tim Berners-Lee
URI: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

“It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”

The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing — but the system doesn’t know it.

Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting — it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.

Thoughts on the Social Graph

Written by Brad Fitzpatrick who is the founder of LiveJournal
URI: http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

What I mean by “social graph” is a the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later.

“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’.”

The social graph contains a combination of public nodes, private nodes, public edges, and private edges.

Social Graph: Concepts and Issues

Written by Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb blog
URI: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_graph_concepts_and_issues.php

One problem is that currently you need to have different logins for different social networks. Another issue is portability and ownership of an individual’s information, explicitly and implicitly revealed while using social networks.

Three Key Elements In Digital Social Graphs

1. People Identity.
Each one of us participates in multiple networks, but we want to be identified as the same person in all of them.

2. Type of Relationships.
The links between people in social networks are of different types. Crudely, different types of relationships are a friend, a co-worker, a family member. There are more fine grained relationships defined in Facebook (see picture above) and Spock, which uses tags to identify how people are related.

3. Relationships Identity.
If two people are connected in one social network, should they automatically be connected in all of them? Just because two people work together does not mean that they share the same book interests. there needs to be a way for a new user who joins a network to be able to find friends who are already using that network.

Tim’s idea is great, Web2.0 is all about people connecting, but many social network websites still like isolated island.I think the next big thing is create social network for social networks.

I also notice Type of Relationships Alex mentioned above.Many social network websites use different way to identify the relationships between people.I think that is interesting topic deserved to do more research.