Circles of influence

This article on the Pinboard blog comes with the most credible of endorsements: At least four people that I know (who aren’t connected to each other as far as I know) have linked to it on Facebook/Google+/Twitter. In an odd way, the way that I found it shows the other side of the question that the article raises.

Firstly, I completely buy the argument that it advances: That the notion of the ‘social graph’ is a very limited one and it is stuck at the limit to which we are all machine-readable as individuals. On the other hand, I felt compelled to read it because a few influential people within my social graph said it was worthwhile.

Yet, for all of the shortcomings of the concept of ‘social graph’ as a means of mapping general relationships, particularly for marketing purposes…

“Google, for example, uses XFN as part of their Social Graph API. This defines a set of about twenty allowed relationships. (Facebook has a much more austere set: close_friends, acquaintances, restricted, and the weaselly user_created).

But these common relationships turn out to be kind of slippery. To use XFN as my example, how do I decide if my cubicle mate is a friend, acquaintance or just a contact? And if I call him my friend, should I interpret that in the northern California sense, or in in some kind of universal sense of friendship?”

… it’s still a useful heuristic for the narrower purposes of understanding personal influence. We need to first understand what it is to understand what social media tools are trying to achieve. They are trying to find ways in which they can make our relationships more machine readable. There is a lot of effort coming from social media platforms at Google+ and Facebook with a view to monetising our social graph.

So the Pinboard blog has identified a large hole in the strategies of Facebook and Google+. But unless you’re a shareholder, why should we bother about this?

I’d say we shouldn’t. What is of interest, though, is how we can use the tools that we’re getting for free (!) to achieve things.

In my line of work, the big question is how we understand (and exercise) influence. I think we can learn something about this from the concept of the social graph. Remember, at the start of this post, I said why I’d read that Pinboard article? Four people who influence me all linked to it. I think it was four. I can only name two now. But I’d noted the link, at that’s the important thing. It may even be the case that one of the people who linked to it is someone for whom I’d generally ignore their material. But that doesn’t matter.

I’m pretty sure that politicians and journalists respond to ideas and concepts in the same way.

So how does the concept of the social graph help here? For example, this is an old-ish app Facebook: The Friend Wheel. I’ve highlighted friend Dominic Campbell at random here, simply to illustrate that he knows a lot of people that I know (52) pm Facebook.

My personal friend-wheel. Click to enlarge.

This shows all of my Facebook friends and who is connected to who. On the top left-ish end, you’ll see people who are densely connected to each other – often with me as the connector. On the bottom right-ish, a lot of people who barely know anyone else from my circle.

Then I pulled up another old Facebook app – this time, Friend Sets. Using this, I picked five friends who I’ve got to know at different times of my life to see how they connect to each other:

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