We’ve always had multiple social graphs, even offline

Maybe there was a time in college where our friends, colleagues, and interests were all melded into one group of people (Maybe it’s still like this for people who work at college type companies like Google and Facebook?). But, as your life gets more complicated, that one social graph tends to sort of branch as our interests in life evolve.

When I take my son to a birthday party, I don’t go there expecting to talk about linked open data with all the other parents. And on the other hand, I didn’t go to Chirp last week expecting to talk about how to manage children’s video game time or what’s going on with school redistricting. And the family reunion isn’t a good place to talk about why Activity Streams don’t just use RDFa.

The same dynamics are happening online. My Twitter graph, for example, is all about my professional interests. I follow people who have interesting things to say about software development, the internet, open government, Gov2.0 and so on. On the follower side, excluding the spammers, it’s the same picture. It’s all people who share those particular interests. So I’m not going to share a camera I want to buy or some clothes I’m looking at or some blocks code I’m writing with those people, because all I would be doing is adding a lot of noise.

And so I participate in online forums that are specific to certain interests, I keep my Twitter world more professional, I use a personal email addr for certain friends and family, I use LinkedIn for other things, and I can’t see myself ever wanting to put all of that together into one big hose. Just looking through my browser history, I can’t find a single page that I would want to “like/share” with everyone I know.

It would be a lot of work to tag every thing I read or write about, so I do what a lot of people do which is just maintain different social graphs on different sites, online and offline, to “tag” things for me.

This is why social aggregators haven’t caught on with regular users

If everyone I follow on Twitter shared every online interaction, every checkin, every personal interest, every dish they liked, every political statement, I would stop using Twitter. The noise would just be ridiculous. And I think that’s the real struggle with tools like Buzz and what Facebook is building now. Right now the interface isn’t there yet for me to be able to quickly say “this is something of interest to these 5 camera geek friends”, “this is something interesting for my iPhone friends who code”, “here’s something for iPhone fans who don’t code”, and so on.

This is why Google Buzz wasn’t immediately interesting to me, especially with the initial cut at sharing settings. This is also why I have 4 different email addresses. It’s also why most people use SMS, multiple phone numbers, email, IM, Facebook messages, gists, and dozens of other modes of communications, all in the same day.

Again, I can think back in my own life in school where my friends were my friends and my colleagues and I didn’t have a lot of interests outside of what we did together as a group. But I think the general consumer or worker is not like that.

Now the problem with that is I may have 10 different actual social branches, each of my friends has 10, and they have varying degrees of overlap. So the real interesting work will be in coalescing conversations from these different graphs, not in real time, but at the right time around a particular subject like health care reform or Grand Central Dispatch.

To me that is a much more interesting problem to solve, and more applicable to real lives, than creating the one big graph or the one big firehose.

Ok, that’s the part I don’t quite understand. I understand that OAuth support is a major advantage in protecting users from rogue applications. More importantly, as a practical matter it allows users to more seamlessly change their Gmail passwords, something we should all do more regularly. But this all does come at some expense to app developers; just look at how many Twitter apps still don’t support OAuth.

But Gizmodo and others seems to be implying that OAuth will enable application capabilities that are not possible today. Can anyone think of any examples of this?

Or are people just thinking that better security will lead to more people adopting more third party apps? I don’t know about that, since most users still don’t know or care about OAuth, and the OAuth experience for native mobile apps still leaves much to be desired.

So what am I missing?

The reality is that if you visit http://www.browserchoice.eu/, it is far from fair if you define “fair” as “every browser has an equal chance of appearing in the first slot, and an equal chance of appearing the second slot, and so on.” In other words, by any reasonable definition of fair, given the context of the case to begin with, what the EU probably wanted is a uniform distribution of the world’s top 5 browsers across the five columns on that page.

What they got was something totally different. And arguably, the IE team may have gotten the worst placement of all.

Now, part of it is that Microsoft’s programmers picked an awful algorithm. First of all, let me say that Microsoft employs some of the most brilliant minds in software that exist. Some (ok, not all) of the research and products that come out of Redmond are brilliant. But, unfortunately, when you’re a really huge company, not all of your programming teams will meet those highest standards. And even the best programmers can be sloppy when on a deadline. (although in this particular case, I don’t think they can claim the “we were in a rush” defense!)

Maybe Microsoft outsourced this particular bit of work. In any case, someone needs to be called into the office on Monday.

But what about the role of the EU’s negotiators and policy-makers in this? Here is the agreement, and the relevant section:

(13) The Choice Screen will prominently display the Final Releases of the five highest ranked web browsers based on usage share in the EEA (i.e. only these browsers will be immediately visible without requiring any user action under typical user settings). These five web browsers will be displayed in random order each time the Choice Screen is presented. The remaining seven browsers will be displayed if the user scrolls sideways and will also be displayed in random order.

There’s that word “random”. What they really meant to say is that the browsers should be uniformly distributed across the five possible positions. Now, again, I think any reasonable person would realize that “random order” in this case implies that the browsers should be uniformly distributed.

But if that is what was meant, then why not just say that? You can’t assume that the programmer sitting down to write this Javascript understands the legal and policy context. Somewhere in there is a good lesson for requirements analysts.