Grazr has introduced the Twitter Reader in August. Today it is their ‘tool of the day’. It allows you to browse the social graph starting with a Twitter user.

Drill down as many levels as you want. Why stop at just six degrees of separation? You can jump from friend to friend to your heart’s content.
Find new people to follow. As you navigate through various networks of Twittter friends you can easily visit their Twitter page and add them to your own list of people to follow. It’s a great way to build up your own Twitter network.
Search for any Twitter user. The Grazr Twitter Reader has a built-in search function that lets you browse the social graph of any user. Just enter a Twitter username and an entire network appears.

It’s interesting, but I don’t see the value right now. Kudos to Grazr for stepping in this direction. Baby steps towards PeopleRank.

Instead of browsing websites on information, many people have started browsing… other people, even ones they don’t know. I had lunch with a friend yesterday and was discussing social networking with her, and how we will begin assessing the mathematical relevance of a relationship using profile and picture views as a small part of the equation. She retorted “Yeah, but I view a ton of profiles of people I don’t know personally, how does that factor in.” Good point. It could either indicate a future relationship or it could indicate that person is popular or a celebrity in their own right. It’s interesting to use celebrity on such a small scale, but I think it’s important to acknowledge.

The daughter of the president of a local university here has a Facebook account. I talked with some freshmen at the school the other week, who were just brimming with the fact they got to see her profile, and asked me a ton of questions about her (I am good friends with one of her friends). These freshmen were using this avenue to get their mini-celebrity fix.

For a time I experimented with a celebrity account on Facebook. I was receiving thousands of friend requests a day, and had to write a macro that I would start before I went to sleep to auto-accept them all during the night. It was overwhelming the response I got from the rest of the social network. Even if it didn’t mirror the celebrity’s reality, I got a taste of the fan crush.

It is interesting to think of the idea of ‘browsing’ people in different terms than in People Magazine, for instance. How will the upcoming titanic proportion merge of media and internet change the way that fame is created, and celebrity is viewed by the general public?

Nice little post over at The Equity Kicker (I am a sucker for visuals).

Now that the novelty has worn off and we are getting to grips with what we actually want to use Facebook apps for things are changing. Firstly, most people I know are already ignoring most of the application invitations they receive, and secondly they are starting to be careful about not spamming their friends with application invites they might not welcome. This is a natural progression from initial interest to looking for real value. It happened before with viral emails - to start with we thought they were hilarious and sent them to all our friends, but now we are a bit bored with them and only forward on the ones that are really funny.

By this analogy the question with Facebook apps the question is whether there are any really useful ones, i.e. equivalents to the really funny virals that we still send on to our friends. If there are then people will use them and tell their friends about them.

In this instance, we are discussing facebook, but the discussion on applications will soon cover other large social graphs.

Now, I am certain that facebook is becoming an important place for companies to create proprietary in-house social applications for employee management and internal affairs. I am very excited to start seeing the public valuable social apps coming into these platforms- Facebook, Myspace, Google begin to show up as the general public gets tired of zombie bites and superpokes.

You’ve heard the term before, but it is worth a revisit. Google changed search by using an algorithm that determined which sites were the most popular based on how many sites it linked to, and how important those sites were. The same will be applied to the social graph.

Would PeopleRank work the same way that Pagerank does? If I have 20 friends but one of them is Bill Gates, and you have 500 friends but none are of much importance, will I be ranked as a more important individual than you?

Could companies use internal social graphs as the future of ‘anonymous peer feedback’ surveys? Can the relationships and compatibilities between employees be analyzed to measure work efficiency?

It makes sense, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average user to accomplish. Along the same lines, it’s definitely too much of a hassle for anyone to go through to export data (they own?).

Paul Robinson of Vagueware writes:

On adding an application a user is invited to select all the friends the user wishes to export.

These friends are invited to add the application. They may choose who is allowed to export their contact data and personal information. Privacy controls would exist to allow groups to see certain data when exporting.

The original user may then ask for an export in XML format (maybe a collection of vCards) of all the friends in the system. This format could then be used by other applications, and libraries developed to allow integration with other websites.

There are a few programs available to begin the mapping and analysis of the social graph.

Visone: In a long-term research project, the visone project team is developing models and algorithms to integrate and advance the analysis and visualization of social networks.

Part of visone is the design and implementation of a software tool intended for research and teaching in social network analysis. it is specifically designed to allow experts and novices alike to apply innovative and advanced visual methods with ease and accuracy.

NetDraw: NetDraw is a free program written by Steve Borgatti for visualizing both 1-mode and 2-mode social network data. It can handle multiple relations at the same time, and can use node attributes to set colors, shapes, and sizes of nodes.

I have recently become interested in the evolution of social networks, the applications of social graphs, OpenID, and associated topics. You are welcome to get involved in the discussion (that’s what this is here for). Please read the about page for more information.This site is currently using Wordpress for its architecture, simply for convenience sake. I plan on creating a fleshed out site in time as this site is meant to be community discussion and not me talking at you in typical blog fashion.