Social Graph and Related Thoughts

I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs lately. Xobni works with MS Outlook; we use its APIs to get to mail data. Xobni’s current value comes from organizing this data in novel ways for our users.

There’s still a ton of great things Xobni can do to (a) tap into other sources of data, including but by no means limited to mail data, and (b) make all of this useful data more accessible to other developers.

Xobni isn’t the only group of developers thinking about this problem. It’s clear to everyone that rich personal and inter-personal information is locked away in data silos.

 

Social Graph

People are trying to free social graph data, e.g. OpenSocial and the Social Graph Foo camp this coming weekend.

At the end of the day I think it’ll get done. The data is spread through email, social network, IM, and phone platforms, but that won’t stop progress if there is real value to be unlocked. That second piece is what I’m worried about; we are at a lack for compelling use cases of the social graph data. Here are the ones I know of: dopplr, evite invitations, setting permissions based on friendship, and search. What am I missing?

 

Other Personal Data

People are important but there’s more to life. Facebook, for example, has all kinds of data entities, and all of them are interconnected. It’s a powerful approach. Here’s my illustration.

 

 

Comments

[ed]

From my perspective, the social data is always used for group planning--and I really don't think that's a problem.

I'm much more impressed by improvements software gives me, as an individual. E.g., an augmented email reality (stats, references), "suggestions" by my software agent (it's been 7 months since you contacted Jane), identifying the other person as an agent (e.g., a stream from my bank), and the potential to enrich communications for tasking (i.e., outsourcing).

Maybe I'm just uninitiated, but it still seems like facebook, et al is a mash up between a chat channel and a popularity contest. IMO, Xobni exposes the gimmick of these networks by removing membership buy-in and performing like a software agent. (Xobni is also well suited for that, and lacks access to certain data obtained across users).

Anyway, regarding social data, or pretty much anything, the first and best use case is always, "how will this get somebody laid?"

[David]

Hey,

What software did you use to create that mind map?

[Adam]

Powerpoint. Turns out I learned something in my stint as a PM at Expedia. :)