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| == Short introduction to the question of open sourcing the social graph==
| | #REDIRECT [[Media:Dusan.essay.trimester-2.Privatising-the-Privacy.pdf]] |
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| (so far just general structure and notes with an open end)
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| <pre style="line-height: 20px; font-size: 120%; font-family: Arial;">
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| *** import/export fb/google conflict ***
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| In November 2010 Google introduced a technical change that blocks its e-mail users from importing their address book
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| in one click to their Facebook account.
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| Google's refusal of giving Facebook access to these data was prompted by Facebook's refusal to reciprocate.
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| [Users have to transfer their contact list from one platform to another manually via their local hard drive.]
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| It comes as no surprise that two leading internet companies are protecting their users' contact/friend lists.
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| *** rivals ***
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| 2010 was a landmark for Facebook: the movie, the man of the year, the most visited site on the internet.
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| Their 'Like' button has spread rapidly across the internet, and lately discussion engines followed.
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| With 600+ billion users in stock, Zuckerberg aims for the clear target: dominate the web.
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| As well as Google, his enterprise largely depends on the revenue from behavioral advertising, fed by the user-generated data,
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| which is their biggest asset. Their competitive advantage.
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| [In 2009, advertisement amounted to 97 percent of Google’s revenue;
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| while Facebook drawn 1/2 of total revenues from direct marketing and contextual advertising, and another 1/3 from global brands ads.
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| http://investor.google.com/financial/2009/tables.html
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| http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/03/02/facebook-made-up-to-700-million-in-2009-on-track-towards-1-1-billion-in-2010/]
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|
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| The revenue is generated by the wide range of developers and web-based industry plugged in and depending on these centralised resources.
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| Facebook and Google compete for being the dominant supplier of civilisation's data sets to industries, which are being developed around them.
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| It was necessary for them to develop the methods for delivering these data.
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| *** social graph ***
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| In May 2007, Zuckerberg introduced "Facebook Platform [with which] any developer worldwide can build full social applications
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| on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook."
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| [http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=3102]
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| In August 2007, internet entrepreneur Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal creator) published a proposal to make "the social graph a community asset,
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| utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as 'the' central graph owner."
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| His plan worked out, although two fundamental conditions were not met:
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| "a. Establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges,
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| and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph.
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| This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users)
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| and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users)
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| b. While the non-profit's servers and databases will initially be centralized, ensure that the design is such
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| that others can run their own instances, sharing data with each other. Think 'git', not 'svn'.
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| Then whose APIs/servers you use is up to you, as a site owner. Or run your own instance."
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| [http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/]
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| Fitzpatrick was hired by Google, which proudly launched its Social Graph API in January 2008, giving public the access to its graph,
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| although collected and hosted on Google's servers.
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| In a response, Facebook introduced their Graph API in April 2010.
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| While both APIs employ the open source standards for data structure and authorisation (XFN, FOAF, OAuth)
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| the access to data sets is limited.
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| Facebook allows third parties to access user's data only upon the temporary approval by the user unless the user defaulted them to public;
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| Google provides only "publicly declared connections".
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| [http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/#auth]
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| [http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/]
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| [API data example: https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends]
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| [API data example: https://socialgraph.googleapis.com/lookup?q=http://twitter.com/dusanson&edo=1&edi=1&fme=1&pretty=1]
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| ***social commerce***
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| Google was not very successful with its social applications: development of Google Wave was suspended,
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| and OpenSocial protocol did not receive the expected attention.
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| Facebook owns much richer and larger social graph, and it was a question of time when will it start to monetise it.
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| [nov 2010: gmail 176m users, fb 550m]
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| After widgets embedded at product webpages mentioning friends who liked the product,
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| recently it launched 'Sponsored Stories Ad Unit' program, which basically uses the users to advertise the products.
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| First, personalisation of online services in last decade allowed the direct marketing to bloom -
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| users ('YOU') produced and consumed their own identities,
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| now with the social networks (and social graph) there comes a new dish: 'friends'.
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| [http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/social-networks-drive-commerce?page=all]
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| ***privacy***
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| Privacy's flip side: being used by companies as an argument to keep the social graph gated.
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| ***open sourcing the graph?***
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| Companies use the privacy argument to protect their competitive advantage - to set the rules over access to graph.
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| Question: What implications would have making the social graph the public domain?
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| </pre>
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