What Is This Term ‘Social Graph’ People Are Babbling about?

You remember the days of having a Rolodex file, right? OK, maybe not, but you have an address book in your phone. That’s your social graph. That’s the connection YOU have with a network of friends, contacts and relatives who have some degree of importance to you.

Let’s explore that a bit, because part of the change we’re going to see in 2009 and in a big way in 2010 is the evolution of social networks to allow you to bring your social graph (meaning your social connections) from place to place without have to start over every time. (It’s optional, of course, so don’t let your mind get carried away with privacy.)

Surely you’ve felt frustrated and even defeated at times with the onerous task of rebuilding your identity and your friendships every time you join a different system: LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Facebook and the list goes on. These days more and more of us have constructed and are participating in social networks, and though that’s rewarding it’s a hassle to access and update everything or share ideas and news info with others in your ‘address book’ … your social graph.

But let’s do some base-setting here on what this social graph term means and how it might apply to you as a user and as a business owner, B2B and B2C. Here are two useful slide presentations to illustrate these points. Many thanks to Robin Grant of “We Are Social” for posting this originally and spurring my thinking. I’ve been wanting to find a way to illustrate these concepts better to my community of readers.

We’ll begin with Alisa Leonard-Hansen’s presentation What’s the Social Graph Got to Do with It?:

And now let’s look at Jesse Pickard and Shiv Singh’s presentation, Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential, using the example of Facebook Connect:

OK, so you got that? Let’s take a look at some already-in-place implementations. Here is a list of ‘10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect“.

Some are better than others. If you know of more, send me a note.

Tom