There's a fair amount of excitement recently about Google's Social Graph API. In a nutshell, the API aggregates various social connections from any number of compliant social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc) allowing an application to see the entire picture. I had a strong hunch that social networks were going to break out of their walled gardens and just become another app on the internet. It seems to be happening.
It sounds great, but it might be worth spelling out the driving force behind connecting you all together. It's marketers, coveting the power of endorsement.
When one person, with no personal stake, makes a recommendation of a product or service to another - that's marketing gold. No advertisement, no sponsored search result, no viral message comes close to the power of a personal recommendation. Marketers would love to harness that.
Facebook went down this path with their Beacon disaster initiative. Every move that a Facebook user made that involved one of their partners was broadcast to their friends. All of your friends would suddenly be told about the tennis shoes you had purchased. Of course this was immediately seized upon as a gross invasion of privacy, and Facebook backed down from it.
Still, this shows the real goal of social networking - it's a marketing platform that harnesses the power of recommendation in order to sell things. It's that goal that drives so many new companies towards the social networking space. That's what social networking is really about. Re-connecting with your high school buddies is a side effect.
Labels: marketing, social networking
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