The Real Social Network: Your Mobile Contacts
The term “social network” is of course synonymous with online networks like Facebook. But think about what you're actual social life is like for a second. Are you really closest to the people whose items you “like” the most on Facebook?
Context & Ripple Effects
The claim in this piece is a revival, not a novelty: Publishing 2.0 argued back in December 2007 that email and cellphone contacts are the real social graph, the same season A VC was asking where your social graph actually lives and TechCrunch called a mobile-native social network the holy grail. By mid-2008 that grail looked lost, when analysis showed MySpace and Facebook squeezing out mobile-only social networks rather than the reverse.
What changes the calculus in September 2010 is scale on both sides: Facebook is extending search results across the wider web and ranking news by Likes, while simultaneously blocking suspicious stranger-to-stranger friend requests and aggressively recruiting Google engineers amid rumored IPO-track growth. The argument here is that all of that activity sits on a declared graph that maps poorly onto actual closeness — the address book everyone carries but no web service owns.
First-order effects
- Mobile social app developers face a fork: rebuild a friend graph from scratch inside each app — the cold-start burden that stalled the 2007-era standalone mobile networks — or build directly on the handset's contact list and inherit trust ties for free.
- Facebook's own week of moves cuts both ways: blocking stranger friend requests tightens the graph around real relationships, implicitly conceding that Like-driven breadth is not the same thing as closeness.
Second-order effects
- If the address book is the canonical graph, whoever controls it — the handset platform, not the app — becomes the chokepoint every social product must negotiate with, converting contact data from free infrastructure into contested, licensable territory.
- Facebook's web-wide search expansion looks different under this framing: it extends the declared graph outward to capture intent before the behavioral graph on the phone does, a race against whatever builds natively on contacts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking stratifies into two layers — the declared graph owned by networks like Facebook and the behavioral graph embedded in the device — with control of the device layer deciding who can monetize identity and introductions.
- Contact-list access becomes the next walled-garden fight: apps treating the address book as open plumbing invite exactly the kind of platform enclosure that buried the mobile-only social networks after 2008.
The trend: Social applications are converging on the phone's contact list as the canonical social graph, setting up a contest between device platforms that own the data and networks like Facebook that own the declared ties.