Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)
Posted by Nathaniel Whittemore on Nov 19, 2010 in Social Web | http://blog.assetmap.com/?p=101">View Comments
With the massive supremacy of Facebook in the social networking space, it’s easy to assume that the door is closed for social network innovation. The reality, however, is that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of how we interact with and derive value and pleasure from our networks. There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests.
Thesis 1: The Interest Graph is Different than the Social Graph – In a great post on TechCrunch in October, Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin articulated the difference between the “social graph” (the network of people you know personally) and the “interest graph” (the network of people who share interests with you, but who you don’t necessarily know personally). If Facebook is the service with the internet’s most complete (visible) social graph, Twitter is the service with the internet’s most complete (visible) interest graph. “Following” a person — even one you don’t know — is an affirmation of your interest in their insights and recommendations. “Friending” someone is simply an act of acknowledging an existing relationship, that in many cases, has more to do with a previous shared experience (think: your freshman dorm) than with a really active shared interest.
Thesis 2: The Interest Graph and Social Graph are good for different things – After spending a day or two in Silicon Valley, one could be forgiven for thinking that the future is everything you’re doing now, but done with your friends and that the best filters and recommendations are not algorithms but friend recommendations. But for as valuable as friend recommendations and sharing can be for some things, they aren’t a panacea. One look at the landscape of social music services validates that fact.
I’m pretty music crazy. I’m listening 100% of the time I’m working (which is a lot), and because of that constantly searching for new things. I was extremely excited when the founders of Kazaa, Skype, and Joost launched a new social music company called Rdio.
Rdio does a great job of making music sharing social. From an interface perspective, you get a real time feed of what your friends on Rdio are listening to, and it’s dead simple to share out a song or album across Facebook or Twitter.
But guess what? My friends have absolutely terrible music taste. That awesome stream of my friend’s music patterns? Worthless, because they’re listening to crap. Of course that’s entirely subjective, but that’s the point.
Music, movies, books, articles — these are all things where people have tastes that aren’t always influenced by friends – or at least not a big group of your friends. It’s no surprise to me that the most successful music services so far are things like Last.fm and Pandora that are far more organized around your musical interest graph than your musical social graph.
Of course, the social graph is still great for lots of things: recommending which parties you want to go to, which events are valuable to attend, etc. The point is just that there is not a 1:1 relationship between the things you like and the things your friends like, and what’s more, the friends you shared interests with 5 years ago may have become interested in fundamentally different things since then, even if they’re still your friends. Entrepreneurs are going to have to get smart about knowing which things fall into what category.
Thesis 3: The portion of both your Interest Graph and Social Graph that you care about is much smaller than the whole – One thing that is true of both our interest graphs and our social graphs is that the subsection of the graph that we actually care about is much smaller than the whole. On Twitter, for example, there are a small handful of influencers who anchor different interest categories, and whose perspectives carry far more weight than your average member of the interest graph. Within your social graph, there are people you are simply more close to – your family, your best friends..the people you would invite to your wedding. It seems like it would be smart for entrepreneurs interested in leveraging these graphs to concentrate on understanding the difference in value between an influencer or wedding attendee and their more removed counterparts. New life-sharing application Path is an example of a company doing exactly that.
Thesis 4: The Interest Graph is going to reshape your Social Graph – In real life, there is a constant interplay between the interest graph and the social graph. In high school, you gravitate towards people with common interests, and they become your social connections. In your professional career, you attend interest-specific events and connect with people who share that interest, but then become friends and start to share experiences.
There is a mirror process beginning to happen online. People are forming communities and connections through Twitter and social media like blogging around shared interests, which then spill over into the real world through meetups, conferences, and other offline happenings.
This process is going to reshape your social graph. It will be easier to find collaborators of all stripes, from band mates to business contractors. It will be easier to share your knowledge and experience with people who need it. It will be easier to do more of the stuff you want to do with people who can actually help you do it. And entrepreneurs who make this process easier and more fun stand to win big.
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The point of all of this is not to argue about the value of the interest graph compared to the social graph. It’s simply to recognize that they’re different things, obey different social rules, have different opportunities and challenges and different types of value, and ultimately are influencing each other in increasingly interesting and complex ways.
Like always, the most successful entrepreneurs and investors will be the people who not only take advantage of the increasing clarity between these two graphs, but through their products and services amplify how we use them to make business and life more fun, easy, and successful.
Going back to the old communities of Interest idea, heck we might even revive USENET if this is the future.
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