What's the social graph: it's a map of the people you know (your email address book, your mobile contacts, your friends on facebook-myspace-linkedin). It's also a list of information about those people (who your intimates are, who your acquaintances are) and what they're doing RIGHT NOW.
A lot of companies believe that this is the building block of some cool applications and some cool ways to make a lot of money targeting advertising.
---
Facebook is really popular among young people in the US. They communicate with their friends, update them on what they're up to, and are spending more and more time on the site. The company is worth a lot, a presents a legitimate threat to old-line web companies like Yahoo!, etc. Facebook opened up an API for developers to build applications on top of the facebook social graph. But it's not open.
Google announced today that they're going all decentralized on facebook, and will work with a number of other large "social" web applications to build a competing and open social graph and development platform. This will be open. Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly of SixApart and new to google, wrote a open social graph manifesto a few months back, and it's worth a read.
---
Microsoft just invested in Facebook, so they're partners.
Google is opening things up (as noted above), and is building an application to tie all this information together to compete with facebook.
Where is Yahoo!? Are they *really* having another executive retreat to discuss what to do.. because they're really late to the party already. Maybe they should join the Google initiative-- that would be interesting.
What other big players and small players have a different angle on this.
No comments:
Post a Comment