graphing social patterns – Silicon Valley Technology Blog

Dave Morin works on the Facebook platform team to bring out the platform – developers.facebook.com. He is talking about Facebook, the Social Graph, and the Facebook Platform.

Facebook is a technology company and a social utility. Facebook is growing at 225k users per day and doubling every six months. The new users are coming from people over the age of 25. Mostly users outside the US (uk and canada dominate the international distribution). Over 50% of users return each day. 60 billion pages every day.

The official definition: Social Graph is the network of connections that exist through which people communicate and share information. Applications like photos and events are examples that leverage the social graph. Dave highlights that the Events App (written by Mark Zuckerberg in 8 hours one night) on Facebook is dwarfing evite because of the social graph and the network effects.

Facebook will be open for developers and users. I wonder what this means.??? Facebook is a young company and I think that they will do the right thing in making it ‘really open’. As Tim O’Reilly says whoever makes the developer money will win the platform war. Right now Tim says that Facebook is a subsystem of the Internet platform. If they make the right moves on the developer front they can win the platform war.

New features will harness the fact that Facebook is moving toward a metric of engagement. New opportunities? Three things important to Facebook: managing the growth, get to engagement apps and metrics, and monetization on these new social patterns.

Dave says that Facebook has 90,000 developers and growing. Facebook is excited and humbled by the outpouring of support from developers. Another interesting stat – 80% of users have adopted at least one application.

Sitting in the row of press next to Nick (allfacebook.com) and Brian Solis. Dave McClure is putting on a great event with top silicon valley press and developers. The “Don” of blogging – Dan Farber is blogging and leading the charge on techmeme. Tom Foremski has some earlier posts.

What is the social graph? Everyone wants to know. It’s really not fully defined but in general I think that it’s a movement that will have legs. Why? Because we are all connected and fully networked. I expect to see some interesting new approaches to content, collaboration, and advertising – maybe we should call it the social semantic web. Some think that Social Graph is based in hype.

Right now Danny Sullivan, the authority on search, is taking about search engines and how it relates to the social revolution that we know of as social networks and media.

web 1.0 search success: “off the page” metrics – clickthrus, anchor text, actual text, and link relationships. Problem: spamming and manipulation of text and links.

Evolution: vertial search and personalized and social search. Changes will be gradual and won’t be noticed by most users. How does this happen? Data used by Google. Yes Google is monitoring your web history. Tagging. Will this be enough? Search will be going through major transformation in the next few years.

What about Facebook? Social graph and social network data…watching what others are doing… reshape results and actions based upon what friends are doing. To me is facebook about watching what people are doing rather than something of value? Is there a collaboration app waiting to be born … uhmm..

Is facebook for real Danny asks..he points the crowd to this picture…

New trend in facebook ..Friend pollution – “true friends”? are your friends effecting the search engines? He says that facebook doesn’t have a facebook friendly search technology. I agree with Danny. I think that Facebook search is terrible.

Question from crowd: what does he think of Mahalo? Danny doesn’t see Mahalo as social search because it is done by editors not a community. Hmm I think that Jason is doing both not just editors. Jason Calacannis is this true?

Search is an on demand activity based upon what a user knows what they want. Different from discovery..getting something that you would like that you don’t know you want… Digg, aggregated news, content that is aggregated knowledge of what your friends watch.

I tried to ask a question but they ran out of time. So I’ll ask it here…

Danny: web 1.0 search was based upon open data (crawling pages) and multiple companies were created to address search (altavista, excite, yahoo, etc).. Will Facebook be monolithic search or will it open up its data? If so what is the best way for facebook to enable entrepreneurs to create new search applications?

Update: Danny answered via the comments..Thanks Danny

Danny Sullivan’s response: “I suspect Facebook will not open up its social data, so the best way to enable entrepreneurs will probably remain though application development — that you could develop an app to call on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask search results and somehow store activity on them by those sharing through some type of search app.”