Social graph

This article is about relationships in social networks. For the term that encompasses all relationships between individuals in the world or the World Wide Web, see Social network.

A drawing of a graph in which each person is represented by a dot called node and the friendship relationship is represented by a line called edge

The animation shows the different types of relations between social objects. User Eva is a friend of Adam and Kate, while Adam and Kate are not friends, but Eva is the mutual friend. Peter's photo was estimated by many users, including Eva. Also Eva listen the Last.fm radio and watch video from Youtube.

The social graph in the Internet context is a sociogram, a graph that depicts personal relations of internet users. It has been referred to as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". The term was popularized at the Facebook f8 conference on May 24, 2007, when it was used to explain that the Facebook Platform, which was introduced at the same time, would benefit from the social graph by taking advantage of the relationships between individuals, that Facebook provides, to offer a richer online experience. The definition has been expanded to refer to a social graph of all Internet users.

Since explaining the concept of the social graph, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has often touted Facebook's goal of offering the website's social graph to other websites so that a user's relationships can be made aware and put to use on websites outside of Facebook's control. This can be accomplished through the Facebook Open Graph API.

One of the earliest known forms of the social graph was created in 2002 by Harvard student Philippe Bouzaglou in a paper published on the Harvard Department of Economics website. The paper replicated the Kevin Bacon Game using Harvard students and for the first time, gave an overview of an entire social graph, allowing the analysis of the characteristics of the network using graph theory. This paper was written for a seminar also attended by Dustin Moskovitz, later a Facebook co-founder.

Issues

Several issues have come forward regarding the existing implementation of the social graph owned by Facebook. For example, currently, a social networking service is unaware of the relationships forged between individuals on a different service. This creates an online experience that is not seamless, and instead provides for a fragmented experience due to the lack of an openly available graph between services. In addition, existing services define relationships differently.

As of 2010, Facebook's social graph is the largest social network dataset in the world, and it contains the largest number of defined relationships between the largest number of people among all websites due to the fact that it is the most widely used social networking service in the world. Concern has focused on the fact that Facebook's social graph is owned by the company and is not shared with other services, giving it a major advantage over other services and preventing its users from taking their graph with them to other services when they wish to do so, such as when a user is dissatisfied with Facebook. Google has attempted to offer a solution to this problem by creating the Social Graph API, released in January 2008, which allows websites to draw publicly available information about a person to form a portable identity of the individual, in order to represent a user's online identity. This did not, however, experience Google's desired uptake and was thus retired in 2012. Facebook introduced its own Graph API at the 2010 f8 conference. Both companies monetise collected data sets through direct marketing and social commerce.

Open Graph

Further information: Facebook Platform#Open Graph protocol

Facebook's Graph API allows websites to draw information about more objects than simply people, including photos, events, and pages, and their relationships between each other. This expands the social graph concept to more than just relationships between individuals and instead applies it to virtual non-human objects between individuals, as well.

See also

• Social web
• Interest Graph (the network of people who share interests, but who don’t necessarily know each other personally)

External links

• Graph API at Facebook
• Top 20 Social Networks