On "the social graph"

"The social graph" is one of the many, many buzzwords and expressions that have flitted through my consciousness without taking hold. Fortunately, Maciej Ceglowski put more than a little thought into that expression (or rather, the concept behind it), and concluded that "The Social Graph is Neither".

There's no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I'm the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy.

And the social networks we currently have are ... well, I can't improve on Ceglowski's description:

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

I don't think this has to be so, but it certainly is so today. It's the only reason Facebook and other social networks have value to investors.

I've spent a little time around Facebook and am surprised by the lack of subtlety it allows. In spite of its much-vaunted privacy settings, nobody seems much interested in discriminating between "friends" and "friends of friends" and "everyone". And why would they be? Ceglowski makes the point that modeling the complexity of human interactions is hard, and we've never had a successful mapping of those interactions in software. Facebook's privacy (or, if you like, audience-dissemination) settings are a crude tool with which to control sharing of information, so there's no point in obsessing over who gets to see the news that your aunt is sick. (I would guess that you could choose to share only with selected Facebook "friends", but that virtually eliminates Facebook's advantage over email.)

The other thing about Facebook and other social networks is, they promote oversharing. "Oversharing" typically implies trading in intimate details the rest of us don't want to know, and there's certainly some of that, but I mean something different. What people overshare is trivia. Passing thoughts that in the past would have made up a moment's brief conversation with your companion of the moment now are memorialized on the Internet and shared with just about everyone. In principle there's nothing wrong with that, but in practice, I find these constant, niggling little updates to be like flies buzzing past my ear: I want to swat them away as the annoyances they are.

The sharing fostered by social networks is a lousy analogue to an actual human relationship.