My Social Graph Is Now Self Aware

This week Facebook announced their plans for interweb domination.  It sounds like a joke doesn’t it, the scary part, it’s not.

Their tentacles are spreading to every corner of the internet via share buttons, everything is becoming social.  Just a few examples, I can now see what everyone I know listens to on Pandora, what my friends are buying on Blippy, what they are thinking about on Twitter, where they eat dinner and party on Foursquare, what web sites they love on Delicious, even what investments and trades they are making on StockTwits.  These are all different “social graphs”.

The buzz word this week is “one graph”, basically your complete social profile encompassing everything you share on the internet, and Facebook believes that they can create it.  To understand more about what Facebook is going after, go read this article.

There are some who believe that Facebook can’t put together the one graph, primarily because people are willing to share certain information with everyone, and other information with only a sub set of those people.  Consider this, most people are willing to share what they are listening to on Pandora with everyone on the internet, but not willing to share their checkins on Foursquare with anyone but their closest friends.  To understand this argument, go read this insightful piece by Fred Wilson.

I agree with Fred to a great extent, you will continue to have different social graphs for different things you do on the internet.  But in the end, Facebook finds a way to jump this hurdle through innovative engineering, they have no choice but to do so.  I’m not sure how they’ll do it, but I have do doubt it’ll happen.

We’ve now entered the third inning for the internet and social is going to make a lot of people a lot of money.  Facebook is now valued at about 17 billion dollars on Second Market.  The Russians from DST have already tripled their investment, amazing.  Social is so profitable because there is no better advertisement for a product than one from your friend.  Facebook will be a 5o billion dollar company soon and they will print money like Ben Bernanke.

The coolest thing though is that my social graph is now going to be self aware.  We are at the very beginning of these applications being able to tell you what you’re going to like based on your previous choices and your friend’s choices.  Netflix pioneered this technology, they actually held a bunch of competitions over the course of the past few years to see who could write the best algorithm to decide what movies people would like based on their previous choices.  It’s gotten better with Pandora which now recommends music for me, it’s amazing.  I can’t wait for Foursquare to tell me what restaurants I’ll like.

There is so much to talk about here that I won’t even begin to go into it.  I’m not really a technology blogger, but I do love talking about this stuff because it effect my life everyday, and I do work in the industry as well building StockTwits.  I’m going to make a point of writing more about the products and services I use, many are changing the way I live in amazing ways and that’s important.

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