Data-Object-Relations-SQL. Then it kind of stopped. URL-RDF-OWL-SPARQL. Hope it does not stop.

You have a very interesting take on the subject. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately since I am actually working on a site that would help users collect and map their larger social graph in one place, and access and reuse it however they like.

Most of the geeks that are interested in and talking about this stuff really are the sort that have a lot of different connections on a ton of different sites. But I agree that’s not really the case for the majority of internet users. I think you hit the nail on the head with what you said above, that, “most people socialize online with relatively few people in very complex ways, ways that are not necessarily well served by the wished-for unified social graph, ways that can’t be fully represented by computers.”

Personally, as a geek, I’m thrilled with the idea of a unified graph just for simplicity of management. But not everyone deals with that problem. I’d love to hear any ideas you have on hypothetical use-cases.

In some ways I think the important distinction with making something human-relevant more than just machine-intelligible is to find easy and interesting ways to present information to humans. We humans are inherently good at pattern recognition, so how do we present these complex interactions in ways that are interesting and useful for the ‘normal’ user you posit?

(By the way, the app I’m working on is starting with this unified graph approach with an early emphasis on tie-ins to OpenSocial app writers, but we’re going to be looking for some early alpha testers in December if anyone here is interested. Just drop me a line: nick@beyondthepath.com.)

TBL’s GGG could be understood in varied ways. In contrast to distinguishing social graphs from semantic graphs, I think of another, probably more interesting point in the GGG presentation: we are converting the current Web from the publisher-oriented point of view to the viewer-oriented point of view. And this is a key to the next generation web. Radar Networks’ Twine is an attempt (or maybe the first significant attempt) in this path, though it is currently less than complete satisfaction of fulfilling the goal.

Maybe you would like to watch my analysis of TBL’s GGG at: http://yihongs-research.blogspot.com/2007/11/multip-layer-abstractions-world-wide.html

– Yihong

I suspect that any kind of unified social graph would represent a lossy transformation of our relationship data online. The fact that I am friends with someone on two out of five different sites and friends with someone else on four out of those five sites means something.

I suppose I am arguing more against the idea of a unified social graph, however it is implemented, than against semantic web technologies to represent such a thing. But it seems to me semantic web approaches may be overreaching if they try to get into the question of what’s best for recording and processing the social graph — and they lead to problems, because social data needs humans involved in processing, that’s the social intelligence part.

On your last sentence, “the graph becomes… more easily navigated, imported by, searched, integrated with …” that’s a potential problem for any unification of the social graph because the social graph needs human processing not machine. We saw that when some service (can’t remember which right now) spammed all of people’s email contacts without permission.