Who Controls the Social Graph?
As I had suggested in a post earlier this week on Google’s Friend Connect, there is a fight brewing over control of the social graph. Much of the discussion of FaceBook’s reaction has focused on the explicit social graph as declared by people via a ‘friend’ type mechanism. But there is also the implicit graph based on interactions such as email or commenting. That graph is a lot more distributed or at least has been. In some ways Friend Connect is an attempt to get at and potentially control both at the same time. If sites use FriendConnect to provide social features, then the data for the implicit graph is already at Google. Furthermore the iframe and JavaScript implementation makes it difficult for others to extract the releavant information using standard web crawling (difficult, not impossible). It will be interesting to see how much the fight between the big guys will be to the detriment of users and smaller sites. Both should be given better access to and control over their respective portions of the graph.
