Rich Karpinski makes an interesting point,

Do telecom service providers own anything equivalent to a social network’s social graph? At first thought, we’d say no, though as hinted at above call detail records are information-rich and enable telcos to track (and bill) for small actions at an individual level.

How service providers deal with the power of the Web social graph is a key competitive question moving forward.

I think the difference between service providers, and places like MySpace, is you voluntarily put your information on MySpace for the world to see. That’s not to say that the telcos won’t use their social graph information for internal use and analytics.

Interesting article at The Economist about social graphing being a ‘fad’ sweeping across silicon valley. Google CEO Eric Schmidt steps in as well,

Silicon Valley’s craze for the “social graph”, however, is overdone. The term has been around in computer science for decades, says Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, so it is puzzling that Mr Zuckerberg should get any special credit for using it.

The idea and application of graph theory has been around for a while. Zuckerberg just reintroduced the topic in an interesting time. As Hugo said, ‘there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come’.

The article goes on to compare all the networks, and once again we hear all the speculation on valuations. We will continue to hear these worthless speculations for a while-  I think until the dust settles after this impending storm we will have a clearer idea of where the true value lies.  Who knows what kind of power lies in true leverage of all that data? In an information age, it’s hard to see people overlooking its importance.

Tech Crunch reports on PopFly, Microsoft’s new tool for creating applications. It’s in Beta, and I decide to check it out. Ok, I need to sign in… I am greeted with a Microsoft Passport requirement (ugh). Furthermore, take a look at their signup page. Click to enlarge.

Seriously, it looks like a 12 year old made this in Frontpage back in ‘98. The entire site from logo to structure looks novice. It’s utterly ridiculous to think that with their resources and human capital this is what they come up with. I am not usually one to rant or rip on products, but this is just lacking and it’s a theme becoming consistent with Microsoft’s strategic thrusts. Miscalculated and poorly executed.

Please digg and help me find this interview…

If someone could help me out, I am looking for an interview I recall Zuckerberg did where he claimed they had a joke inside Facebook that ‘we can guess who will get into a relationship based on variables’. I won’t venture to guess the success rate they had, but it was impressive.

This interview was done a while ago, and leads me to wonder just what algorithms Facebook uses internally to track their users. Then we hear things like this:

Again, from the Web 2.0 Sumitt:

Battelle pounced, asking Zuckerberg to define the “social graph,” a term that Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others with interests in social networking have bandied about in recent months.

Noting that there is quite a bit of misperception about how Facebook thinks about the social graph, Zuckerberg said it is the set of connections—including business connections, friendships and acquaintances—that everyone has in the world.

“All that we’re trying to do at Facebook is take the social graph that exists in the world and map it out,” Zuckerberg said.

“Once we have an accurate model of the social graph, then what we can do is expose those connections in a way that our users are comfortable with,” he said. Then Facebook will let users link “to a set of applications, and those applications can use the connections to help people use information more effectively,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg claims they do not have an accurate model of the social graph, and they will do what they can to ‘expose those connections in a way [users] are comfortable with’… to the public. Again, I am more interested in how users’ data is being exposed and exploited inside the company.

Back to that joke: If they have an algorithm to guess relationships based on variables such as profile views, picture views, pokes, wall-to-wall posts, and number of messages back and forth as an internal joke, what kind of applications are they writing for real?

There’s not much we can do except take our own information out of their social graph, we put it there.

On the social graph:

Zuckerberg: “What we’re trying to do at Facebook is take that social graph which already exists and map it out. Then we can take that map we’ve constructed and connect everything through applications… That concept is deep in the company’s philosophy. In fact, we thought of building a platform for social applications before there was ever a Facebook. And it might take 30 years or tens of years before it’s a mature application. But it’s really amazing how quickly it’s taken off so far.”

On opening up Facebooks social graph:

It’s the user’s data. We want to get there, that’s the goal. If you look at where we’ve gone in four years, from just one college letting people share a very limited amount of information… we want to get there. It’s a flaw in the system now and we want to get it out as soon as we can. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.

Are we truly in bubble land?

Steve Rubel:

The whole social graph thing is a unicorn-like myth. We have a social graph already - it’s called real life. True sign we are in bubbleland about 7 hours ago from web.

A bubble exists when there is an invalid perception of value. Are people perceiving more value than is really being created? I think we are only on the brink of what we will be seeing in terms of real value creation with social networks.

People will be shifting where they get their information from. As people turn more towards the Internet for information, and less from traditional channels and real life, the social graph online is going to grow in influential power.

We can all get news from the newspaper. When the web came we got news from online news sites, such as CNN.com. Then Google took all of those news sites, and fed them into a personalized news page for you. You could decide what topics to view, but it was still news filtered only by you.

Another avenue of getting news was from chats, or forums. A person would make a topic, and people would discuss that topic in a linear fashion. The more people discussed it, the higher on the forum it stayed. Digg took that model, stripped the original topic theme to strictly news, and went one step further by allowing voting as well as discussion. The news you are seeing are what other people on Digg deem important.

Next come a slew of new programs to get the news, or a scoop on someone (your social news). Twitter keeps track of friends activities. Facebook keeps tabs on friends activities, as well as videos posted by the friends, news links, blog posts posted by those friends.

So what we have is this evolving social filter through which we can find information relevant to us. What’s the next step for this social filter? How do you target certain groups to get through their social filter and get a media message across?

Another concern: if I you have really lame friends,will the information you ’stumble into’, or ‘feed on’ through this certain filter be just as lame? Perhaps you can choose a different filter to view the world through, just to find new information? For example, if you wanted to find topics to chat up women. You could look up what are 23 year old women in Philadelphia are finding interesting in the media today. Information makes anything easier.

Facebook App Design: Elements of Style -

The viral spread of Facebook apps is 7 times greater than other platforms because of the API.

Think mathematically, who you are targeting and how people will see it.

Jia Shen, RockYou.

Dave Morin, senior platform manager, Facebook:

Facebook is largest photo sharing site. Not because of more features but because it leverages the power of the social graph.

More rumblings about social graphing.

While the information in the social graph can be useful for facilitating my ability to find people I know in new social media applications or social networks I join, its value is significantly higher to prospective service providers when considered with the source of the graph data. The source metadata in effect provides a degree of context beyond simply the relationships of the participants (ie. friends, co-workers, family, etc.).

As I look ahead, something inside tells me that the Facebook revolution that has been taking place over this past year is only the beginning of the next explosion of the Web. Where all of the walls of information are taken down and the social networks begin to play the role of contextual settings (places I go to do ‘X’) and persona management.

At lunch with my friend Ryan last week, we discussed that the grounds are rumbling. Things are definitely getting interesting, and people are really taking notice.