Graphing social patterns with Linkedin's Reid Hoffman
Speaking the Graphing Social Patterns conference (covering the business and technology of Facebook) in San Jose today, Linkedin founder and chairman Reid Hoffman poured cold water on the notion that a single social graph would prevail.
Context & Ripple Effects
Reid Hoffman taking the stage at a Facebook-focused conference is itself the story: his own company spent 2007 repositioning, with the departure of LinkedIn's chief executive in February followed by the June decision to open LinkedIn to outside developers. Speaking in San Jose, Hoffman pushed back against the conference's organizing premise — that Facebook's platform momentum points toward one dominant social graph.
The backdrop is Facebook's aggressive year: it opened its network beyond college students this spring, launched self-serve Flyers ads, and Mark Zuckerberg used TechCrunch40 to announce the fbFund grant program for application developers — though the fund has already required all applications to be resubmitted. Panelists at the event were snarky enough about the platform hype that multiple outlets covered the snark itself.
First-order effects
- Hoffman is drawing a line under LinkedIn's strategy: the professional graph competes with, rather than dissolves into, Facebook's consumer graph — a distinction that matters right now for the developers LinkedIn just opened its platform to in June.
- Application developers watching Facebook's fbFund and platform push now have an explicit counter-argument from LinkedIn's founder that building for a single graph is not the endgame.
Second-order effects
- Developers weighing where to invest face a two-graph market — consumer versus professional — pushing toolmakers toward abstraction layers that span both rather than betting on one platform's API.
- Facebook's pitch of becoming potentially the biggest database in the world gets a credibility check from the most credible professional-network voice available, giving advertisers and partners cover to treat the graphs as complementary ad and recruiting inventory instead of a winner-take-all race.
Third-order effects
- If Hoffman's framing holds, social networking settles into durable vertical graphs — professional, personal, interest-based — each with its own platform economics, rather than consolidating around a single identity layer.
- That fragmentation makes data portability and cross-network identity a structural question regulators and standards bodies eventually have to address, since no single company controls the graph users actually live across.
The trend: Social networking in late 2007 is splitting into purpose-specific graphs — consumer, professional, interest — rather than converging on one winner-take-all social graph.