Skip to content

Eric Friedman

  • Home
  • Fractional COO & Coaching
  • About

Social Discovery and the Implicit Graph (explicit too!)

June 9, 2011 by Eric Friedman

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.

 

Related

Post navigation

Previous Post:

What to ask yourself before launching a startup

Next Post:

Google+ Weaving the common thread

Search

Subscribe via email

Recent Posts

  • Tapestry.so – No code project breakdown of time, costs, and a guide for others
  • What does this make possible?
  • Tapestry – Weaving Stronger Co-Founder Partnerships
  • SOS Shiny Object Syndrome
  • 2021 Predictions

Top Posts

  • Quiet Giants
    Quiet Giants
  • Combat Ineffective
    Combat Ineffective
  • Must Go Faster
    Must Go Faster
  • Predictions for 2020 and the decade ahead
    Predictions for 2020 and the decade ahead
  • Tapestry.so - No code project breakdown of time, costs, and a guide for others
    Tapestry.so - No code project breakdown of time, costs, and a guide for others
  • Interview: Anders Hjorth - SES 2008: San Jose
    Interview: Anders Hjorth - SES 2008: San Jose
  • An Advisor Equity and Advisor Pool Breakdown
    An Advisor Equity and Advisor Pool Breakdown
  • Expa Labs - Some Lessons Learned
    Expa Labs - Some Lessons Learned

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Projects

  • Building The Machine
  • DoBlu.com
  • Eat.ly
  • Multiplayergames.com
Thoughts from Eric Friedman