Social Discovery and the Implicit Graph (explicit too!)

8 Comments
by on June 9, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Marketing.fm

Recently I co-hosted an event with Ro Gupta from Disqus, Marc Leibowitz from StumbleUpon, Shaival Shah from Hunch, and Mark Coatney from Tumblr called Social Discovery and the Implicit Graph.

We hosted the event at the new Union Square Ventures office as part of an ad-hoc Internet Week event in NYC.  All the proceeds went to HackNY.

We invited folks to the event with a simple description and had a great conversation.

The term “social graph” was coined originally to describe the network of connections we already knew we had such as friends on Facebook or professional contacts on LinkedIn.

More recently, graphs that are inferred as a result of other primary activities – e.g. taking a photo in a bar (Color), commenting on a website (Disqus), expressing a taste preference (Hunch), sharing a new website (StumbleUpon), etc. – have emerged in a big way, particularly in advancing discovery and recommendations. Even platforms for which explicit connections are core – e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and others – are realizing the value in the implicit relationships that form over time.

From this intro we assembled about 40 people for about 2 hours of solid discussion.  There were many more questions than answers and we were able to dig into many of the issues surrounding both implicit and explicit social graphs.

I got a ton of great feedback on site and even online.  Theres probably too much to go into in one post but its a topic I definitely want to dive into more.  Hearing the opinions of the group and from the companies mentioned above, we were able to tackle some of the larger questions that arise.  There are a ton of nuances when dealing with implicit actions in a web service, and even more when it comes to deciding what to do with the data.  We think about this a lot at foursquare and it was good to step back for a awhile and talk some of these issues through with a large group.

One of the big takeaways was the need to continue the conversation – we setup a google group to do just that: http://groups.google.com/group/implicit-and-explicit-graphs

If you are interested in talking about implicit or explicit social graphs or other actions, come join us.

 

Posted by Eric Friedman on June 9, 2011

http://www.ericgfriedman.com/2011/06/09/social-discovery-and-the-implicit-graph-explicit-too/

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  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    Hi Eric

    Both panels (@ USV and RRW) were interesting.

    Mostly as the topic obviously struck a chord with the audiences. Overflow crowds with lots of ideas and feedback.  When you are talking about how to use an individual’s data to guide their future choices, it’s personal and people care. Less about security and more about better recommendations it seems.

    I’ve been looking at filters and the curation space as both an explicit and implicit discovery process for individiuals, but mostly companies discovering markets  (http://t.co/QV8K2gp ).

    It seems obvious that the more contextual the filter to gather the data, the more targeted and relevant the implicit recommendations become. Facebook likes, generally less so. Disqus comments, more so.

    I’m a believer that filters expand our horizons by creating more specific context and there is what I call a ‘interest footprint’, that is carried implicitly along with the explicit data. For example, when I started blogging about tech and wine to drive my biz, it turned out that 95% of all clients started the meeting with something about wine.

    Interested in your opinion on this. At foursquare and generally.

  • http://www.marketing.fm Anonymous

    Its a great point and one we think about. I love the idea of an “interest
    footprint” or “taste graph” as hunch calls it.

  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    ‘Taste graph” is a new one and resonates.

    We will get ‘graphed out’ though….the friendship graph as the base with the Interest or Passion graph (or passion points) as a mesh above, as a filter to discover context and connections.

    Within the curation space, I’m advising a company on how to uncover serendipity, find correlations between facets of a personality to deepen the contextual connection. To me the “interest footprint’ to Hunch a graph.

    Still poking around to build correlations to the curation space as they are key components of making the social web actionable from a number of different points of view.

    I’ll propose some ideas on how to continue this discussion in some format ala what happened at USV. On the company discovery side this becomes marketing, on the platform side, this becomes social product design. On the marketing front, I’m interested in help make this happen.

    I’m going to invite some folks to join this conversation on your blog.

  • Melissa DiVietri

    Hey Eric,

    You have great sophisticated posts on your website, I’m impressed! Nice work!

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