ice crums

Don’t want to sound like a broken record but…since the dawn of the internetz people have being trying to communicate: email, chat, VoIP, etc. People have been claiming that the next step in communication will be video, when in reality it is shaping to become more indirect and in context communications. Om Malik declared “email bankruptcy” in a July article for the now debunk Business 2.0 magazine. He says:

Here’s where e-mail’s socialism turns from strength to weakness: It doesn’t matter if the message comes from a spammer hawking Viagra, your wife asking you to pick up some wine, your boss telling the company that Monday is a holiday, or a client asking for a meeting at his office at 11 a.m. In today’s inboxes, all e-mail messages are equal.

He is absolutely right….socialism doesn’t work in economy, why should it work in email. All commications are not created equal.

By now you must be asking yourself, why would the title be “The social graph and new social economy”? There is a lot of buzz going around the blogshpere about this “social graph”. Here is the wikipedia definition:

A social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes.

The most clear implementation of the social graph would be facebook. Which allows people to interect through pokes, messages, tags, comments, and apps. These are connected through nodes of the social graph.

In facebook all communications are not created equal. The exact opposite of email!

In a blog post Brad Fitzpatrick proposes an open standard to connect the nodes of a personals social graph interactions.

Some of the stuff that he presents are pretty interesting(don’t agree with all) but it all makes sense.
Key points:

-No one company should own a person’s social graph.
-Open standard to interact with different social graphs and help with interactions.

This is the start of the Web 2.5(2.0 revamped). Facebook, Google Docs and Pownce are the start of these types of applications which would eliminate use of email in order to connect socially in context. Why should I send a spreadsheet via email, when I can just share it. This is the start of the true democratic, capitalistic internet. Where communications(i.e. shared spreadsheet) will have to fight over a notification of a tag photo of you in facebook.

I am not saying that the social graph is the new email, but rather the new communications protocol.

Google is apparently preparing for a mayor “social graph” announcement on November 5, according to Michael Arrington:

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

This whole social graph thing is starting to turn some serious heads.