Where Is Your Social Graph?
I know that I wrote not too long ago that I didn't like the term "social graph" but the comments I got to that post educated me to the reasons why it's a good term. So I am using it now. — But where is your social graph? In Facebook or myspace or LinkedIn?
Context & Ripple Effects
Fred Wilson's question lands one month after Brad Fitzpatrick framed the term in Thoughts on the Social Graph and one day after Six Apt announced it was opening the social graph — the same piece syndicated alongside this post. Wilson admits his earlier dislike of "social graph" was talked out of him by his own commenters, and now turns the term against the platforms: your friendships live inside Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, none of which you control.
That framing matters because Wilson has been tracking small-scale social services for a while — MyBlogLog's growth on his own blog showed how fast contact networks form outside the big three. The question "where is your graph?" is really a VC sizing up whether graph ownership is defensible at all.
First-order effects
- Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are put on notice by an influential investor that their friend lists are being reframed from proprietary asset to something users expect to own and carry.
- Six Apart's opening move gets immediate amplification through the venture/blogger circuit, giving the interoperability camp a visible platform the day after launch.
Second-order effects
- If users start expecting to export their connections, the large platforms face pressure to decide between locking down (protecting the network effect) and exposing APIs (feeding third-party apps) — a fork every social competitor will have to take a position on.
- Startups like MyBlogLog-sized services gain leverage: access to borrowed graphs could let small apps bootstrap audiences without years of cold-start network building.
Third-order effects
- If portability becomes the norm, competition shifts from who owns the network to who builds the best experience on top of shared graphs — eroding the moat that made social platforms winner-take-most.
- The pattern points toward industry-wide data-portability standards, likely dragging regulators and consortia into defining who controls identity and relationship data online.
The trend: Social networking is moving from platform-owned friend lists toward portable, user-held social graphs, with the 2007 openness debate forcing incumbents to choose between walled gardens and interoperability.