Key Elements In Digital Social Graphs
The excerpt below is a bit technical, but considers the relationship between entities when graphing social networks.
excerpt from:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_graph_concepts_and_issues.php
More about social graphs:
http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
Key Elements In Digital Social Graphs
With the recent rise and proliferation of social networks, the social graph comes into the spotlight. Unlike the one that scientists have been studying, this one is digital and defined explicitly by connections in all social networks. Let’s revisit the main issues that Brad and others have been talking about:
1. People Identity Each one of us participates in multiple networks, but we want to be identified as the same person in all of them. Brad describes this as a multiple login nightmare. He calls for having a way to map IDs onto each other, via Node Equivalence:
“Given a single node, say “brad on LiveJournal”, return all equivalent nodes: “brad” on LiveJournal, “bradfitz” on Vox, and 4caa1d6f6203d21705a00a7aca86203e82a9cf7a (my FOAF mbox_sha1sum).”
2. Type of Relationships The links between people in social networks are of different types. Crudely, different types of relationships are a friend, a co-worker, a family member. There are more fine grained relationships defined in Facebook (see picture above) and Spock, which uses tags to identify how people are related.
3. Relationships Identity Similar to having node equivalence, there is an issue of edge equivalence. Although, this issue is more complicated. If two people are connected in one social network, should they automatically be connected in all of them? Consider an example of a LinkedIn and Shelfari. Just because two people work together does not mean that they share the same book interests. However, the crux of the issue is not that - it is actually discoverability. As Brad pointed out, there needs to be a way for a new user who joins a network to be able to find friends who are already using that network.
