Some time ago I read this interesting observation about the two most popular social network: "facebook keeps in touch with the people with whom you went to school, twitter with people with whom you'd like to go to school."
This might sound like the tagline of the popular microblogging site, reveals an interesting feature of social networks, or the different nature of the ties that distinguish them.
A social network is a set of nodes (people) connected by bonds of various kinds (personal relationships, family, work, etc.).
Social networks today's most popular have based their success specializing on one type of connection: facebook on interpersonal relationships "direct" (person who has had the opportunity to meet directly) on twitter and "interests" (people who write things interesting).
This specialization is justified by the origins and the factors that ensured the success of these networks: Facebook, as is known, began as a network "closed", reserved for students from Harvard and has been successful precisely because exclusive (at least initially), twitter has been a different story: he was born as a system SMS to send "broadcast" to groups of friends, the nature of "open" (anyone can follow anyone) has quickly established itself as the microblogging site par excellence.
If facebook with its 500 million registered accounts today untenti twitter social graph is the graph of interest .
To these are added then the graph of places "real" is at the core network as foursquare and gowalla where the network nodes are made up of locations as well as by people (people have a role to assign properties to the sites, so as to make it active).
For some time, however, things are changing, the topography of social networking is no longer well defined and all the major players seek to expand into adjacent graphs.
For example gravity is an explicit attempt to create a graph of interest in a more structured than twitter, people participating in the network define their interests (called "orbits") and on the basis of these interact with other elements of the network (without them and then necessarily met in person).
Another very effective example of interest is olate graph, a network that has goals similar to gravity but which is focused on questions and answers on issues. The objective of this network is therefore the construction of a new type of graph that we define graph of competence or interest in the graph where a person is competent.
This graph obviously has great value because it represents the professional value of a person captured on the field (a feedback system gives value giving correct answers to questions asked by other people) It is no coincidence that the site has been highly successful and has attracted a significant number of high profile participants (it is not uncommon to read full answers written by main characters in their respective professional fields).
If the first value of the net economy was associated with the number of visitors to a website , or by a logic borrowed from traditional media-type "broadcast" (print and TV) in the economy of Web 2.0 the value is from information about its participants.
The value is proportional to the cardinality of members and the depth of information same, though with facebook (at least in the early stages of this site) and twitter the approach was unstructured and "quantity" will emerge in future-oriented sites to deepen this knowledge, to establish a more detailed profile of each individual.
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