What if Twitter were open and anyone could use it for anything?

What if Facebook were open and anyone could use it for anything?

It's an interesting thought-exercise.

Interesting biz opp. Who's in? ;0)

I'm in! How do we get started?

Facebook and Twitter have such network effects that it will be hard to get anyone to use something else.

we seriously need to figure out a way to talk in person or something. i have this crazy idea and i am going to launch a beta site soon to see if there's a market for it..

check this out (projected demise of FB, Amazon, Google). it's the first argument that seems legit to me: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/04/30/heres-why-google-and-facebook-might-completely-disappear-in-the-next-5-years/...so fits in with how i want to roll ;O)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/04/30/heres-why-google-and-facebook-might-completely-disappear-in-the-next-5-years/

Christine and Matt, check out Naval's comment below.

Totally agree. Social graph should be an open resource. How would you envision it being open? What kind of access would you want? We have a 115K user social graph on AngelList right now. We even have a more sophisticated graph in some ways, in that we use companies you work at / advised as intermediate connections (see the "Paths" feature on the right hand side of any user / startup profile). How would you like to see that (a) more open and (b) how could you use it?

my background in intel makes me want to vomit out a lot of stuff at you that makes peter bergen sound like he doesn't know what he's talking about ;O) ...so putting twitter to use here: i want to influence relevance. most social graphs are just a function of nodal proximity relevant to the semantic value and the distance of the edges and the number of traversals i have to execute. but one major beef i have is that I CAN'T DEFINE which edges have more value to ME or which nodes for that matter. Facebook's social graph -- like ALL THE REST OUT THERE -- are not relevant to the end user. Here's a simple example - in the Family type, I can't list step parents, children, etc. I can't list half-brother. I can't say I like my mom more than I like my step mom or my step cousin or perry farrel is my BFF or i like to call my aunt in london 15 times a week to get the latest updates on her hot italian younger boyfriend. This reason contributes to their limitations to western (or really anglo) cultures too... my $.02

Christine, the tough questions are what Naval said:

A) How would an open social graph be specified? We'd have to define protocols or at least APIs.

B) How could we use it? Is it just being able to use these identities in applications without giving away everything, or is there more to it than that?

Adam/Naval -

a) the how isn't the hard part. the hard part is what kind of social graph do you want to build? a patent-skirting version of the FB graph? not me...at the end of the day, the root of your design is tied to vocabulary and rules...just like any other language. there are open APIs and specs that can be used now to implement a graph like that. for a good example, take a look at what the biotech world is doing with the human genome project...the mother of all graphs ;O)

b) in october (maybe sooner if i can get my funding!) i will show you how you can use it. and no, it's not about creating an abstracted identity.. that's the easy part! :O)

biotech examplse:

http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/c/c5/HCLSIG$$Presentation_Archive$VectorC_Demo_Presentation.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1532046406000311

Christine, if I understand you correctly, you'd like all the nodes of Facebook to be linked to this bigger, open social graph.

Is that right?

If the use is not about creating an abstracted identity, I'm wondering what the main use of it would be.

The links you posted -- Semantic Web stuff -- I never really understood the utility of.

Kind of, Adam. I see the FB graph as one type of conversation you can have. I think your goal for PandaWhale is a perfect example of how it could be used.

Since you mentioned it, I'm trying to understand how an open social graph would be more beneficial to PandaWhale.

I mean, besides letting people login (and comment) using their AngelList identities, to bring up what Naval offered.

We already have OAuth:

http://angel.co/api

So not sure what else would be useful...

You could crowd source information in real time across multiple platforms

Christine, I'm intrigued. What kind of information would be best to crowd source? Startup news?

Here's an example i lifted from twitter from a guy who follows me who invests in startups: "after talking to its pretty obvious that @PayPal is completely out of touch with the market, they need to get better". The type of information I would want to crowdsource if I were an investor would be feedback from people in the market space who have an opinion about an existing competitor to a startup i was considering funding. In the example above, this guy is basing his opinion on one conversation with a startup. That startup maybe completely right. But how cool would it be to run a quick market test of that opinion across twitter, FB, linkedin, financial sites - or just the connected world etc. that i am hooked into to get some near-real time validation - or not. Another thing I would use crowdsourcing for in the AngeList community would be due diligence feedback on recent investments (say 3-6 months in for startups by type) across the investors in both AngelList and other angel groups i was connected to. This would help me determine what in military parlance we call I&W (indications and warnings) about my investment choices and potentially help identify where the problem is (my choices, startups of a certain type, startups in a certain geographic location). I would also be interested in what other "follows", "likes", "pins" or whatever social platform is coming next that both any entity or communities of interest (COI) I was connected to were executing or tracking. I would also want to suck in reams of my own research and provide it to select communities of interest - e.g. if i'm a portfolio manager then the COI is my pool of investors - and then constantly source that data's relevance in the real world. Think of it this way: crowdsourcing information or requests for information could be to investors what agile development is to lean startups.. does that make sense? thoughts?

at some level it could all be analogous to 6 degrees of kevin bacon ;O)

We have a bit of this on AngelList- we show you your six degrees of separation along AngelList, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Crunchbase graphs if you're logged in and look at any startup or person profile.

Hi Naval - right. saw that. now, let someone shoot out a question, start conversations, or get and give answers. to me crowdsourcing info along the social graph edges does two things: gives you an almost big data response with the power of dynamic basic inferencing along edges and eliminates the need for big data analytics. sometimes, i just want a quick but informed answer that is relevant to me without having to run it through a configured app. sometimes, i just want people's opinion - and i want to have a sense of whether or not that opinion is trustworthy or informed without having to build rules sets and quantifiers or sift through them asynchronously.