Interest Graph
= the network of people who share interests with you, but who you don’t necessarily know personally (= An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like.")
Description
By David Rogers:
"In order for social networks to truly reshape our experience of the rest of the Web, developers must first understand the relationship between our social graphs and our interest graphs.
A Social Graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Social graphs are mostly created on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.
An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball. Interest graphs are generated by the feeds customers follow (e.g. on Twitter), products they buy (e.g. on Amazon), ratings they create (e.g. on Netflix), searches they run (e.g. on Google), or questions they answer about their tastes (e.g. on services like Hunch)." (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_the_social_web_social_graphs_vs_interest_graphs.php)
Discussion
Nathaniel Whittemore:
"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." (http://blog.assetmap.com/2010/11/social-web/why-the-interest-graph-will-reshape-social-networks-and-the-next-generation-of-internet-business/)
The Future of the Social Web: Integrating the Graphs
By David Rogers:
"The fundamental stumbling block of the social Web to date is that it has conflated social graphs with interest graphs. But in reality, who you know does not always translate into what you will like.
For example, I have a particular taste in movies. But I do not share that same taste with most of the people whom I have friended on Facebook - a motley mix of high school classmates, work colleagues, PTA committee members, and fellow jazz buffs. Nor do we, as a large and heterogeneous group, all share the same taste in travel, or fashion, or much of anything else. So when Facebook attempts to improve my movie-viewing experience by revealing the tastes of everyone in my entire social graph, the value to me is quite low.
So far, the job of mapping users' social graphs has been taken up by social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, interest graphs have been best built by e-commerce sites such as Netflix and Amazon that focus on highly customized recommendations.
The future of a truly social Web will rely on getting these two types of graphs to work together. We are just starting to see some interesting attempts at this:
- Social circles: On Google+, users explicitly place each member of their social graph into one or more "circles" based on common interests and the type of content they want to share with them. In response, Facebook has just re-launched its own feature to manage social circles.
- Feed lists: Twitter's lists feature allows users to create sublists of people and brands to follow based on different topics (e.g. news headlines, favorite celebrities, fellow sports fanatics, or authors you admire).
- Single-purpose graphs: Niche services aim to map out just one particular circle of shared interest, such as micro-social-network Path (for mapping your 50 closest friends), or social music site Turntable.fm (for sharing playlists with likeminded music lovers).
In the near future, we should see new and better solutions to integrating social and interest graphs." (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_the_social_web_social_graphs_vs_interest_graphs.php)
More Information
- marketing/business aspects of interest graph, comments at http://influencepeeps.infinigraph.com/d?title=The+Interest+Graph+on+Twitter+is+Alive%3A+Studying+Starbucks+Top+Followers&iframe
- Social Graph
- Network Dynamics, (the Pangaia project)