DGTL12002 Week 6

A social graph is a physical representation of how people, groups and organizations among other things are linked on a social level in terms of social media. At its very base core, it’s just a list of who knows who and how they’re related. But on a much larger and broader scale, it is capable of so much more. The term was popularised during the 2007 Facebook F8 convention, and since then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hopes to bring the popular social media platform to a point where its social graph can be shared with other websites outside of Facebook’s control so that user’s relationships can be implemented across the web. However, before Zuckerberg’s dream can become a reality, there are several limitations the graph will have to overcome first. The most noticeable one of these problems is described LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick who states that “Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens... the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

References

Margaret Rouse (2010), What is Social Graph?, 28 July, http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-graph