[...] Predictions on the Social Graph for 2008: Charlene Li and Jeremiah (tags: social media trends interview) [...]

I do feel, however, that using the number “6 billion” is unfortunate — because that would almost make it seem like there might be a 1-to-1 relationship between the number of people and the number of personal relationships and/or roles any single person can take on. Indeed: Every person probably plays a role in many social graphs — perhaps up to the “extreme” perspective that every person plays a role in every social graph (i.e., it could be an “infinitesimally small” role — but still some role [e.g. it could be so small as to be simply "imperceptible"]).

In this vein, I might venture that about 6 billion people play an imperceptible role in almost any social graph (be that the facebook.com graph or the youtube.com graph or the web-strategist.com graph), and only a comparatively small number play a “significant” role. Each of these graphs will be related to other graphs in the network known as the “world-wide web” (www) of social graphs — and it was Google’s “bright idea” to harness this information to add significantly to the information retrieval process.

What the engineers at Google overlooked, however, is that not all social graphs are alike. A “movies.com” social graph is essentially different than a “hotels.com” social graph — but still, Google’s algorithms do not differentiate among them. If I were to search on movies.com for “paris hilton”, then I would expect different results than if I searched for “paris hilton” on hotels.com (and precisely because these “online properties” are something like two different “graphical maps” of two different aspects of the real world. One-size-fits-all search engines, however, have not yet caught on that information retrieval is not simply a matter of applying the same to all phenomena. Perhaps I could echo E.F. Schumacher’s notion of “appropriate technology” and suggest that successful search / information retrieval technology may very well crucially depend on applying “appropriate measuring sticks”.

In stark contrast, we now observe that Google and other search engines have instead chosen to disable their previous “technological breakthrough” (since they have introduced “nofollow” links) and instead offer whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay.

In sum, my guess is that sites like digg.com and/or facebook.com are successful primarily due to the ludicrous nonsense that has come out of Google over the past couple years. As time goes on, social graphs will continue to become more focused and/or specialized — and one-size-fits-all engines would do well to observe that cars.com has something to do with graphing the topic “cars”, just as baby.com has something to do with graphing the topic “baby” (and I guess more and more strategists will also recognize that it maybe be useful to play more than merely an insignificant role in such graphs).

Yes most predictions are wrong, yet we do them because we have to plan for the future. As a result, we have to at least take some stabs at what the future will hold.

nwm-

To be clear, everyone will have their specific social graph(s). so yes, there could be more than 6 billion of them.

nmw

Yup, and it’s more than just making it easier for the users, the real benefit of socialization coming to static websites is one of the biggest features we could see.