Is The Social Graph Just Identity?

Posted on September 7, 2007
Filed Under Enterprise Software, web 2.0 |

Brad Fitzpatrick posted something about social graphs that I bookmarked and kept thinking about, unable to put my finger on why I kept revisiting it.

The social graph contains a combination of public nodes, private nodes, public edges, and private edges. The focus is only on public data for now, as that’s all you can spray around the net freely to other parties. While focusing on public data doesn’t solve 100% of the problem, it does solve, say, 90% of the problem at 10% of the complexity. Private data can be added later, perhaps at a higher layer. For now, only public data.

The problem with the term "social graph" is that very few people understand what it is and why they should care about it. Social network providers, e.g. Facebook, declare the graph to be their secret sauce and expand on why their graph is better than anyone else’s, but that misses the bigger point.

The social graph is identity, federated identity to be more specific. Something we all know and hate, identity management, with a distributed capability that removes much of the hassle while providing a raft of benefits, federation.

As companies who are developing new applications for Facebook are discovering, just being on FB does not make you a social graph climber. In fact, since changing the rules about how many friends any user can invite to a new app, the rate of adoption for new FB apps has slowed considerably.

What does this mean? Certainly it does not mean social graph theory is flawed but it does mean the unique capabilities that FB provides and the mass of their user base contributes as much to the success of any given app. For Facebook it is more likely that the Law of Accelerating Returns matters more than the theory of social graphs. Indeed the front page feed that is updates you on what your friends are doing is a direct consequence of accelerating returns, the more users you have the more features you will likely benefit from (new apps, groups, etc.).

Ping Identity has some really good whitepapers on how we can achieve federation of identity systems today using existing standards. Enterprise customers (although sad to say, few ISVs) are embracing federation as a means of increasing security and user convenience, it’s time that consumer internet sites do the same.

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