Day: February 3, 2008

So, after we looked at how {moscontentlink:my primer|I saw Social Networking (SNW) develop}, here is my look at how I see things develop. As I mentioned in the article above, working for Bluepulse made me think about SNW a lot, and I decided the starting point for any conversation on the future of SNW had to be the current standpoint of Facebook.

Now, you see, Mark Zuckerberg has been talking a lot about the social graph. That's the topological graph of people on a social network and the way they are connected. The concept is fairly old, dating back to the original Friendster: you could interact with people depending on their social distance from you, see their profiles if they were your friends' friends, and needed an introduction if they were once removed. 

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You know, having worked for a social networking startup (Bluepulse) made me spend a ton of time thinking about the purpose of social networking (SNW) itself. I had spent a lot of time on a bunch of different SNW sites, pretty much enjoying just the fun of looking at them, at how they tried to solve a problem, trying to get to the bigger picture.

Of course, it all started with Friendster, the grandmother of SNW. We all joined back in the day, and we had find exploring the possibilities of interacting with friends of friends, getting introduced to them. Friendster showed us that we were connected with people in ways we didn't understand, and that those who we may have thought strangers were actually just a party away from us.

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