the social graph: so many nodes, so little time.

14 years ago
The tubes are dumb.

  1. People I actually know in person: you should go sign up on SonicLiving and friend me there. It's a concert-recommending web site that seems to actually work pretty well. (Let it read your iTunes. I recommend the "5 or more tracks" checkbox.)

    If I don't know you, I'll probably ignore you. So make it obvious who you actually are, please. Left to its own devices, all SonicLiving tells me about you is first-name-last-initial, and that's really not enough to go on.

  2. People who work on social network sites: You know what we, your users, are really sick of doing? Re-finding and re-friending all of our friends every time the intertubes spit out another whack-a-mole social network site. Why has your company not yet implemented brad's Social Graph API? Won't you get on that already please? Pretty fucking please?

  3. People who work on social network sites, part 2: It's great that all of you are OpenID providers now. it's completely useless that none of you are OpenID consumers. What the hell, people.

  4. I dug through Keychain Access and my cookies to try and track down all the sites I have a login on that have a notion of "friends", and "claimed ownership" of them on jwz.org. You do that like this:

    But that doesn't really do anything, since no sites pay attention to any of this. If you add that kind of stuff and then run your site through the Google social graph API demo, it doesn't actually find most of them. If you run it through the Plaxo graph searcher, it spiders them all, but you then discover that almost none of them are even providing rel="me" links back to your claimed home page.

  5. If you use any of those sites, feel free to friend me (though as you can tell, I barely use any of them.) Again, if I actually know you in real life, make it clear to me who you are or I'll probably ignore you.

    Possibly the reason that I barely use any of them is that they're kind of useless. But possibly the reason is that it's just too much hassle to re-create the friend tree on each of them. It's hard to tell.

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