what's the social graph got to do with it?

What's The Social Graph Got To Do With It?

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Hey [Redacted],

In regards to your questions around the deck:

The deck has a lot of voice over that goes with it...but i wanted to strike a balance between clarity and brevity as its going on slideshare and needs to function as a stand alone (a lot of the data portability geeks will know what the cloud and the mircoformats are so i didn't want to be redundant). FOAF and XFN are microformats for expressing relationships between people online (vs. proprietary markup that say FB or MySpace uses). The "Cloud" can be described as distributed, interlinked virtual servers where data can be stored instead of within proprietary, dedicated hardware, thus decentralizing where personal data is stored. this is the vision of the likes of Brad Fitzpatrick (invented the FOAF and XFN microformats) and the Data Portability Workgroup and the likes of Doc Searls in creating a silo-less, open, semantic Web that functions like a VRM (vendor relationship management).

You could almost think of the Cloud as the "meta-web"...if the internet freed documents from device, the Cloud frees data from device and it becomes permanently cached on the internet (rather than any one server). Right now our data on FB is stored on FB servers. For all intense and purposes, they maintain control over our data. So right now, the "data portability" initiatives like FB Connect, while a step, are still lacking. Its still FACEBOOK granting permission to access OUR data to third parties rather than the end user accessing and granting permissions....

Anyway, this is a favorite topic of mine, and one that has been around since the birth of the net (and there have been a few failed attempts at creating this VRM such as the Lumeria Project back in '96)...anyway, if you want to read about it, there are of course super smart peeps (the ones actually making it happen) to turn to: http://www.vrmlabs.net/vrm-in-a-nutshell/

So, the point of the deck was that while a lot of this geeky stuff is still a ways off, marketers are usually 2 years behind developments in the Web and technology. I wanted to float some of what has been a discussion within the tech community for the past few years. That we are seeing open strategies from the major networks is only indicative of the momentum this movement is gaining and that the realization of a silo-less, open and fully semantic Web is not just a pipe dream after all....

Also, this is not a "the future is VRM" deck...its much more basic and simpler than that (and mainly sticks to talking specifically about FB Connect as an example).

hence too this picto-post i did: http://www.thewebissocial.com/2008/10/on-future-of-data-portability.html


cheers,
alisa