No updates in a while… while an interesting subject, I found that tracking the conglomeration of social networks is not something I fancied on a daily basis. This site will be dormant until an urge strikes me to begin writing again.

Breaking, Zuckerberg in NYC:

2:48: “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. ”

2:44 PM: Zuckerberg is explaining the social graph. “Where Facebook really excels is in helping you keep up with all of your connections at the same time. It is making the cost of communication so low that information can be pushed out more efficiently than it ever could from a few big companies.”

2:37 PM EST: Zuckerberg: “Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections.

- TechCrunch 

While moving my live bookmarks over into a reader, finally, I was greated by these statistics from Google after importing my feeds.

Trends

From your 16 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 0 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.

We have 6 variables of data shown to us, each of which can be extended internally by Google. I.E. - What were the subscriptions to? The genre? How often were the read? How many items were read in this time period? Is this a sharing person, who did they share with or email to (this will be very important with researching who in your social filter has the highest influence on what you are reading and learning).

Google and Facebook are both suspected of snooping on data. I am sure companies have been doing this for a while, it’s demographic analysis, taken to another level.

Valleywag is reporting that a Facebook employee allegedly used a universal login to view people’s profiles.

Valleywag: Facebook Employees Know what Profiles You Look At

Facebook’s privacy policy doesn’t explicitly reserve or waive employees’ right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery — it’s one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program.

This is not new information. The last bit about Google is interesting too, more on Google down the page.

ValleyWag has some other articles about employees abusing priviledges, and while important they are negligable relative to the macroview of social graph analytics. I wrote in a post (Facebook’s Inside Joke) about a quote by Zuckerberg that said, in effect, ‘we can predict who will be entering a relationship based on variables such as profile views…’. Facebook has been doing this for quite some time, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at what Facebook is going to be coming out with in terms of social graph analytical ability.

It’s a reality that even though you have search history paused, Google is still warehousing every search you do. The inferences they will be able to make based on variables such as search frequency, topics, times, ads clicked, ads clicked per search type, etc are downright scary. It is certain that part of Google’s strategy involves top notch psychological and behavior science teams developing increasing and improving advertising distribution areas, algos, and conversion ability.

Google knows about every email I send and receive, my social network as dictated by my email address book, the blogs and news sources I read, my calendar, and, of course, the searches I make. Wow, that’s a lot of data. And yet it happens in such a subtle manner, since most of Google’s services aren’t overtly linked beyond the convenience of the company’s single sign-in and some limited data exchange. However, Google anxiety is compounded by the fact that we know the company snoops on this data, or more accurately, Google’s algorithm does, in order to target ads. (Read more on this from Steve O’Hear here.)

A frequent theme on this site is the fact that privacy will be a very big issue over the next 5 years. It always has been, but with our going forward into cloud computing, OpenID, Social Graph manipulation, it is becoming more and more important to recognize privacy issues and create protection.

What can we do now? You are the gatekeeper for your static information going into a social graph like facebook, or myspace. This is your personal information such as relationship status, likes, dislikes, etc. However, what we have less control over is the monitoring by big firms like Google and Facebook of our use of their services. This is not unlike how I use analytics to follow the customers to my online retails operations, to track a conversion funnel, and increase that conversion. It’s just doing analysis on a higher level- so where do we draw the line and maintain fairness? Are you OK with this analysis being done if it’s by a robot and not a human (as Google has promised to do for privacy?).

Quite the interesting development, here comes ‘Maka-Maka’

Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

More on this at TechCrunch.

Facebook and Google can talk about “sharing” social graph data and introducing “social ads.” They get touted as innovators, not slammed for violating customer privacy. It’s a boundary clearly being defined on the fly.

Read more at Telephony 2.0

Verizon recently sent out customer notices offering them the chance to opt out of having their customer proprietary network information given to third parties. Where do we draw the privacy line?

The Register’s take on the whole situation?

Perhaps they’ll realise that web 2.0 is not there to “connect you with the people around you” and not about some pseudo-academic “social graph”. That’s the bait. The switch is the big data centre pumping adverts based on your age, where you live, who you’re friends with, what you like doing for fun, your politics and your grandmother’s shoe size.

I have some Google alerts set to email me whenever someone uses a term related to social graphing, and it’s been growing exponentially over the past week. The trend that I have noticed is that everyone is talking about everyone else talking about social graphing. Yes, we all know it’s there, and we all know it has huge potential. With the recent announcement that Facebook will allow appmakers to target based on interests, among other values, I think we are going to see some more from facebook. Perhaps they will emerge with social graph analytical technology? Just speculation.

I have tried to take it a step further in my postings, speculating on different scenarios and benefits social graphing will bring. One question influencing my current ventures- Will companies valuations that have a social graph be higher in the future based on the demographic power of its graph?

Very interesting post over at Techcrunch. We have seen this coming for years, they have a demographic goldmine so it’s obvious they could better pinpoint ads.

The interesting part was this:

This sort of demographic ad-targeting can be done by Facebook app developers as well. I just got off the phone with RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda and asked him if he could do the same thing on his Facebook ad network. “That is open to us,” he confirmed. “At some point we will be targeting this way when more sophisticated brand advertisers enter the field.”

Facebook is passing quite a bit of value on to the appmakers.

ZDnet covers the semantic web:

Danny Hillis (Metaweb), Barney Pell (Powerset) and Nova Spivack (Radar Networks) shared the stage for a session on the semantic Web at the Web 2.0 Summit.

All three are developing services that bake more intelligence into the Web. And, the companies are all well funded, hyped and loaded with experience and talent.

The semantic web, implicit web, social graphs. These all deal with making the internet smarter. They hold a bevy of information, the key is figuring out how to take that information and make people’s lives easier. Out of the three companies, I personally find what Twine is doing to be the most interesting.

This is a very interesting statement,

Twine is about knowledge networking, rather than social networking, Spivack said. “The semantic graph is a superset of the social graph.” Rather than just relationships, Twine makes connections between everything based on underlying semantic Web technologies.