Facebook’s notion of a friend has a 1-bit depth. True or false. A social graph of line-art, if you will. This is in stark contrast with much higher resolution social graph that exists in our everyday lives. There are varying strengths and hues to to the sorts of social connections that describe our interaction with the world.
Smartphones capture the nuances of our really existing social graph.
We’ve begun carrying devices around that capture a wealth of information about where, who and what we’re seeing. If you’re in close proximity with a group of a dozen folks at a business address from the hours of 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, they’re almost certainly your co-workers. If you go from there to a bar with several of them a few times a week, they’re your work buddies. And those bars are probably your work-buddy bars. And at your home, a residential address where you’re in close proximity with another 1 to 5 souls who most likely share your last name; those are your family. The people you meet with on weekends, the restaurants you eat at, the parks you visit or clubs where you go dancing are the places that you go with your friends. When you travel across the country at Christmas, every year to the same place, to visit the same people, those are your extended family.
Your location, and those in your vicinity, produces a high-resolution social network. One that actually captures the intricacies of the way we really interact with people. There’s power in that idea. A lot of it. And if Facebook’s social graph is line art, the real world one is color.
A billion dollar idea?
When Color announced raising $41 million pre-launch, it triggered much second guessing of Sequoia and talk of bubbles. Are we in a bubble? Honestly, I don’t care. But if there’s anyone that I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to on spotting big ideas, it’s Sequoia, who have been at the top of that game for decades.
The internet peanut gallery immediately zoomed in on photo sharing not being a billion dollar idea. It’s probably not. But I’m pretty sure there’s more than meets the eye unfolding here.
What’s the data team for?
Color is putting together a top-notch data team, having recruited LinkedIn’s chief scientist. Taking the next step in the evolution of the social web is the sort of thing that top-notch data teams salivate over. More than photo sharing anyway. Heck, making sense of the way that information is connected was a big part of the spark that led to founding my own company, Directed Edge. If I were to put my chips on the table, I’d bet this isn’t about photos, but about transitioning into a high resolution social web, one that analogously, is in color.
Yes, of course it is, there is obviously more than meets the eye to this.
The question is, is photo sharing the “killer app” that will populate their underlying social-web database.
It’s that social-connections database that is the real choke-point of the social-mobile web, as Facebook have found out.
Honestly, what kind of app is facebook, just a crappy blog with some games and photos?
The database of friends (and the fact it was easy to find people because they used real names and so on), that’s the real draw and where almost of all the value of facebook lies.
Aesthetically, the right way to do this is to have a “social database” service built into the internet like email is, and then a million companies providing the apps on top of that.
But we are going down the AIM vs MSN vs Yahoomessenger vs Skype vs etc, etc, etc, route rather than everyone embracing Jabber.
March 25th, 2011 at 6:09 am
Indeed, there is no Jabber to embrace. Perhaps Diaspora.
March 25th, 2011 at 6:13 am
I love the binary/color analogy. Facebook has also been doing things to make relationship descriptions richer, for example by figuring out which of your friends you’ve taken pictures with, and checkins to Facebook Places, but there’s a long way to go, both in terms of the richness of the descriptions, but also in terms of making decisions (curation, recommendation, etc) based on multifaceted relationships.
April 1st, 2011 at 3:08 am
I would argue that it goes even further than just the social graph. Like you say, it also gives Color (and their advertisers) insight into where you spend your time, if you are social or a workaholic, what you are interested in, how typical your behavior is compared to your demographic, etc.
April 28th, 2011 at 10:19 am