A week ago Microsoft’s Ballmer was warning that social networking may be a just another fad. Google’s Schmidt doesn’t think that is the case. Here’s what he was telling the journalists at the end of the Zeitgeist conference, a two-day gathering of an eclectic mix of Google co-opetitors, social activists and even politicians. “People don’t appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks. Social networks account for an ‘enormous proportion’ of Internet usage. It is very real. It’s a very real phenomenon.” added Schmidt. In a conversation that also included Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Schmidt did not answer the question in the mind of many reporters: What is Google going to do to remedy its lack of success in social networking? Schmidt did say that over the next year or two, Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the “social graph,” to improve searches and other Google services. I was showing this idea toa client about a year back and I called it “social search” and "social links visualization". Schmidt also highlighted Google’s existing social network service, Orkut, and its plan to sell ads on behalf of MySpace (and Facebook?), the largest social networking site. What is social graph? Facebook’s Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". It is kind of when you watch on Without a Trace on TV when the FBI guys draw links between individuals that are linked to an event. This is not an easy problem to solve. Today we need to have different logins for different social networks and often we use different names. What we use for linkedin is definitely not the same as what we use in MySpace or Second Life. This may have some legal issue as many would argue user themselves want to own their personal information - including their explicitly or implicitly links to groups or individuals. Graphs have always been very powerful modeling tools for modeling any kind of systems. Economies and cells can be represented and analyzed as networks. Let me throw out a vision. In three years, Microsoft will have functions in Explorer called "People Explorer" and one click on that you get an instant visualization of a person and how he or she is connected to others, click on filters such as “school”, “neighborhood”, “hobbies” or “work” will get you a view of those social connections within the context of your filter. How’s that? It is essentially a meta-social network search and visualization interface. Anyone interesting in making a prototype of that, ping me. I will write a business plan for you. You can get funded in two weeks.
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