Misreading the Social Graph

Sez CNN

A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That’s flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks.

Time for a bit of Shark Jumping practice then

Anyway, the article goes on....

The really weird part of this story is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Facebook. It works as well as it ever has, and many of the people who use it (my kids for instance) are unaware of the worsening situation about its privacy-invading Beacon social ads scheme that tracks people’s web-surfing habits even when they’re not on the site.

I'm not sure about that - anyone who knows tipping point theory knows that new memes are started by a small group and then spread....

Anyway, a thought occurred to me while reading Nic Brisbourne's article on Facebook's suddenly faceless PR this morning:

They are playing with people’s private data and they must have known this would be a sensitive area ... I replied that I hoped and thought they would be clever enough to get it right.

One of these days I will learn to stop being so optimistic.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how they were getting some of the details badly wrong, and around that time was when they needed to go into damage limitation mode. That is something they have totally failed to do

My reply to Nic in the comments section was this:

I think anyone who studies social nets “gets” that friendship groups run on trust, not utility. I think Facebook confused what they had - friendnets - with the sort of contact nets business people have, and assumed because the “Social Graph” looked the same, it worked the same - which has to make you wonder how well they “grok” the underlying dynamics of social nets (hmmm…I feel a post coming on).

Anyway, this is the post. I blame it all on the term "Social Graph". it sounds so cold, so clinical. You know where you are with a Social Network, the term brings with it connotations of people, of human relationships, of trust systems, because it has been the term used to describe human relationships for decades.

You relate to people in Social Networks, you flog and spam people in Social Graphs.

They look the same when drawn on paper or rendered on a screen, but it isn't the same thing at all. With a social network you know all the value is in the lines you draw between people, its a line showing trust, showing a series of mutually co-operative interactions over time.

A Social Graph shows you nodes, you calculate the NPV of each node, and you count the edges (links) and calculate the % of NPV each link can cough up to each of the marketeers you are going to connect on that piece of paper. You draw the line from Marketeer to person on the Graph, it looks connected.

On the ground it looks different...on the ground it looks like a group of friends chatting about, say, music are suddenly joined by a man in a Coca Cola suit shouting "I wanna be your friend" and then - cringe - yelling to everyone - "HEY FAN-SUMERS - did you know Joe over here bought a Celine Dion CD from me on my Promo day yesterday".

Oh the embarrassment. I mean, Celine Dion !!!

And then you find out he's telling everyone about everything else you bought, even though you asked to keep it a secret.

Some friend.

Anyway, thats what I think went wrong here.

To make it right, you have to re-think the business model in the light of people being on a Social Network, and its the lines, not the nodes, that describe where the value is. Yes, the nodes are the $300 NPV, but you don't get squit of that unless the line is the correct sort of connection. The nodes manage the lines, not the Social Graphologists

Sorry, its Social Networking 101...but sometimes its good to go back to basics.