Facebook Connect’s portable social graphs

by Robin Grant in News on 16 January 2009 at 10:12 Google+

You’re going to be bombarded with lots of buzzwords in this post – don’t be put off. By the end, you’ll have a vision of the future of the web you never thought possible. Let’s start with Alisa Leonard-Hansen‘s presentation explaining portable social graphs:

Now, let’s move on to Jesse Pickard and Shiv Singh‘s presentation imagining their potential, using the example of Facebook Connect:

They gives us a glimpse of what the next few years will bring in terms of the whole web becoming social. To quote Charlene Li:

in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be

We’ve already implemented Facebook Connect, allowing you to use your Facebook identity to log-on and post comments and for your Facebook friends to get told about those comments in their news feeds (when Gawker Media did this, user registrations were up by 45% and comments up by 16% compared to the previous week).

To really begin to see the potential for yourself, have a look at how The Insider is using it, JC Penney’s recent Beware of the Doghouse campaign or the early efforts from Vimeo, Brightkite and Eventbrite.

Update: see 10 Impressive New Implementations of Facebook Connect.

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  • http://www.cementum.co.uk Richard

    “My digg identity is my online identity. My facebook identity is my real life identity. I think I'd rather keep the two seperate….”

    although i love the idea and as a early adopter / geek, even people like me are going to want to keep online identities separate, let alone the average user who might use 2 services. And saying someone is an 'influencer' because they have a lot of friends on facebook is just silly.

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  • barneyc

    From my viewpoint it is ALL and EVERY interaction I have that make up a person's identity, be they online or offline, real or virtual. We may maintain multiple persona using different or identical identifiers but it is still the aggregate of the lot that defines one.

    Wanting to keep parts segmented or partitioned off is wholly understandable and mirrors real life but really the critical thing about portable social graphs (and I really wish people would get over this whole social graph thing and look at graphs as a whole) is the portability, the acknowledgement, the tools, the processes by which the user can claim, manage, control, share in fact do whatever they want with the information as it is theirs not the networks.

  • http://wearesocial.net Robin Grant

    Richard – I think Shiv and Jesse's vision is pretty compelling in an ecommerce scenario – if a site encourages a person with a large number of Facebook friends to buy a product, perhaps by offering them a discount, their friends will then be told about that purchase in their Facebook newsfeeds – which will have an influence on them. The only question is how much this is worth and therefore how much of a discount to give (aside from concerns about people’s reactions to price discrimination).

    Perhaps this is the first step towards Doctorow’s vision of a Whuffie economy?

  • http://www.cementum.co.uk Richard

    i just typed a reply comment and realised i effectively went against everything i actually believe in when it comes to social media just for the sake of playing devils advocate. I think the point i was getting at, without detracting from this very awesome industry which we're all involved with is the, 'which will have an influence on them' sort of statements, although we are just on a comments stream on a blog. Enjoying the content though Robin.

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  • http://www.cementum.co.uk Richard

    “My digg identity is my online identity. My facebook identity is my real life identity. I think I'd rather keep the two seperate….”

    although i love the idea and as a early adopter / geek, even people like me are going to want to keep online identities separate, let alone the average user who might use 2 services. And saying someone is an 'influencer' because they have a lot of friends on facebook is just silly.

  • http://www.exponere.com barneyc

    From my viewpoint it is ALL and EVERY interaction I have that make up a person's identity, be they online or offline, real or virtual. We may maintain multiple persona using different or identical identifiers but it is still the aggregate of the lot that defines one.

    Wanting to keep parts segmented or partitioned off is wholly understandable and mirrors real life but really the critical thing about portable social graphs (and I really wish people would get over this whole social graph thing and look at graphs as a whole) is the portability, the acknowledgement, the tools, the processes by which the user can claim, manage, control, share in fact do whatever they want with the information as it is theirs not the networks.

  • http://wearesocial.net Robin Grant

    Richard – I think Shiv and Jesse's vision is pretty compelling in an ecommerce scenario – if a site encourages a person with a large number of Facebook friends to buy a product, perhaps by offering them a discount, their friends will then be told about that purchase in their Facebook newsfeeds – which will have an influence on them. The only question is how much this is worth and therefore how much of a discount to give (aside from concerns about people’s reactions to price discrimination).

    Perhaps this is the first step towards Doctorow’s vision of a Whuffie economy?

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  • http://www.cementum.co.uk Richard

    i just typed a reply comment and realised i effectively went against everything i actually believe in when it comes to social media just for the sake of playing devils advocate. I think the point i was getting at, without detracting from this very awesome industry which we're all involved with is the, 'which will have an influence on them' sort of statements, although we are just on a comments stream on a blog. Enjoying the content though Robin.

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