Raising the social tide

Brad Fitzpatrick has a long pedigree for a young guy. Besides creating Live Journal -- one of the earliest and most popular blogging services (and an open source one at that) -- he is the creator of OpenID, Perlbal, MogileFS, memcached, djabberd and many other fine hacks. Astute readers may recall Distributed Caching with Memcached, which Brad wrote for Linux Journal in 2004. Today memcached is one of the world's most widely used distributed caching methods, while OpenID is a breakaway leader in the user-centric identity field.

In August Brad published Thoughts on the Social Graph, which presents this problem statement:

There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes. 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.

At the time, Wikipedia's "social network" entry (same as its "social graph" entry) said "Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors." Elsewhere in Wikipedia "Graph" is explained as a mathematical concept: "a set of objects called points, nodes, or vertices connected by links called lines or edges".

So the first idea is to move the center of social networking gravity outside the silo'd sites, each of which impose inconveniences on themselves as well as their members. As Brad says, 'People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.' The process is also silly. Not long after Google's Orkut social network site went up, Rael Dornfest made fun of the friendship-declaring protocol by walking up to people he knew and saying "You are my friend! Yes or no!"

The second idea is to make society itself a platform. Or, in Brad's terms, to "make the social graph a community asset", and "to build the guts that allow a thousand new social applications to bloom".

Significantly, most social network sites (all but MySpace, I believe) run on Linux. Wikipedia too. If Brad's right, we can equip the rising social network tide that lifts all boats. There should even be plenty of work converting today's silos into tomorrow's arks.

For more, visit http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/. Or just look up "social graph" on the vast Linux hack called Google. The lucky top result will probably be Brad's.

- Doc Searls