With the massive supremacy of Facebook in the social networking space, it’s easy to assume that the door is closed for social network innovation. The reality, however, is that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of how we interact with and derive value and pleasure from our networks. There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests.

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.

Continue reading Thesis 3 and 4 here!

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Sunday being Valentines and the Chinese New Year, I tried to find a theme somehow connecting the two – ultimately settling on our love affair with the internet. Google’s first TV advertisement in the US captures the sentiment quite well.  The internet enables and initiates almost everything, from information sharing to  something potentially much more.

Ironically, as the ad tells the story of the internet being woven into our personal lives, Google threatens to withdraw services from China while Iran bans email and nearly shuts down its own internet.  Similarly, in more progressive countries, workplaces and schools seek to limit private communication, ranging from blocking social media to enforcing penalties for texting. The collision of interests is cultural as much as it is political.  Stefana Broadbent, an ethnographer studying the way social habits and relationships function in the digital age, concludes the internet facilitates modern intimacy.  Efforts to regulate this intimacy will be strenuous and short lived at best.

This exposes a deeper cultural dynamic. As the millennial generation merges the physical and virtual worlds and as ubiquitous, borderless, and instant communication become the norm, authorities with outdated worldviews will fall.  Fearing limits on their ability to maintain control, institutions corner communication technologies as a scapegoat, sometimes even blaming external powers for stirring domestic affairs.  China, for example, believes that the west is “wielding communications innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily and to stir dissent internally.” 

It’s true, online communication amplifies the collective (sometimes critical) voice.  Instead of silencing this voice, figures of authority must engage in conversation and establish a dialogue that demonstrates genuine concern. If the government or workplace can’t trust its own people to communicate freely, the problem is rooted much deeper.  Last week’s Economist Special Report on Social Networking briefly discusses this topic in relation to the workplace.

Image thanks to ivoryocean on Flickr.

Limiting access to communication won’t work for a generation of ‘digital natives’.  Online communication, in many ways, is an extension of and facilitator for physical interactions.  Connectivity is the new cultural norm and it’s woven into daily routines.  As younger people enter public service, the number of supporters understanding and championing this cultural norm will grow (Alec Ross and Jared Cohen being great examples in the US) — hopefully the trend is similar in other parts of the world.

As we celebrate the Chinese New Year and Valentines day, let’s hope China and all other countries with questionable internet policies realize that just as physical walls failed in the 20^th century, virtual walls will fail in the 21^st.  The internet must remain uncensored, information must move freely, and countries need to embrace the cultural norm valuing connectivity.  It’s time for internet lovin’.

Paul Gleger previously worked for the International Office of Communication and Information Policy at the US Department of State.  Among other things, the office was tasked with promoting internet freedom.  It was successfully lead by Sandbox Advisory Board member David Gross.

A living legend for geeks from all continents, Vint Cerf is a 65-year-old computer scientist who co-invented the TCP/IP protocol and who is most frequently considered to be the father of the Internet as we know it today.

His three-piece suit and his beard make him look like Matrix’ Architect, though with a sense of humor. He is now a Google vice-president, and their Chief Internet Evangelist.

In this talk in Geneva during LIFT09, Vint Cerf mentioned the biggest challenges now faced by the information and communication technology, two of which have particularly raised our attention:

We must increase the number of IP addresses
An IP address is an identification assigned to a computer, allowing him to communicate with other devices over the Internet. As the research program started in the seventies, which led to the current form of Internet, no one could tell how many possible addresses should be created for the purpose of the experiment.  The plan was to do a low scale test, before launching a “production version” of the Internet. The immediate success had the consequence that there has never been a production version.

The IP addresses had been defined as a 32 bit number, which gives a total of 4’294’967’296 possible addresses. With 542 million computers connected to the Internet, and 3.5 billion devices, we are already reaching capacity limits, although we still have 80% of the world to connect. A new kind of Internet Protocol (IPv6) will use a 128 bits technology and will allow for 3.4×10ˆ38 possible addresses, which should cover our needs for the next couple of decades.

InterPlaNet: Interplanetary Internet
One of humanity’s biggest hopes – at least for some scientists – is to once be able to colonize other planets and therefore free us from being too dependable on the future of the Earth.

But we will have to “space-enable” Internet before that: what would be life on Mars if you wouldn’t be able to add your earthan friends on Facebook? Before sending humans to other planets, we will have to figure out how to send data. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal as we already send and receive data to and from satellites, but Internet is a much richer communication system, and the current protocols were not thought for interplanetary stuff.

The problem? “The distance between the planets is literally astronomical, and at the speed of light, it takes 3.5 minutes for a signal to propagate to Mars.” So if your computer makes a request, it will have to wait at least 7 minutes until receiving the answer, and the current internet protocols have been designed to handle delays of some milliseconds, not minutes. Another problem is celestial motion: “planets have the nasty habit of rotating and we haven’t figured out how to stop that yet”. There are people working on this and the InterPlaNet should be ready in November 09.

As Nico and I attended Picnic in Amsterdam, we had the chance to meet Rafi Haladjian, a serial entrepreneur who has founded Violet, a french company pioneering the Internet of things.

Violet’s mission is to make our life easier by connecting the objects around us with each other and to the Internet. What if tomorrow, by choosing a book in your library, you could choose between reading it on paper, on your Kindle, or listening to it as a Podcast? What if your Nespresso machine would order coffee itself before you run out of caps? And if your scale would send the daily progress of your diet directly to Weight Watchers Online?

But instead of starting to connect useful things like books or coffee machines, Violet has chosen to connect plastic rabbits. Why rabbits? Simply because Rafi happened to have a toy rabbit on his desk when he decided on the project. The rabbit was named Nabaztag, just because it is a complicated name to pronounce (the second version which is being sold today is called Nabaztag tag).

And what can a plastic rabbit do if you connect it to the Internet? Pretty much, actually: Every Nabaztag has a mouth (a loudspeaker and a synthetic voice), ears (a microphone and two rotable ears), blinking lights and a nose (an RFID reader). With this, it can do pretty much anything: read your emails, wake you up in the morning with your favorite webradio, move its ears when your shares go up or down or blink blue if you have to take an umbrella before leaving home. You can even connect two Nabaztags to make their ears move together, which is a cute way to say that you are thinking of someone.

The strategy that Rafi presented in his keynote at Picnic was very simple :

1. Connnect the rabits
2 Connect everything else.

The rabbits now being connected, Violet is working on connecting the rest. To quote their homepage: «We spend the greater part of our life in a physical world that is tough, unfair, inflexible and devoid of magic. The objects that surround us have reduced, rigid, limited functions; they are unaware of our presence and are unable to adapt to us or to other objects. We can seldom define “preferences” or “options” in the real world, unlike what we are used to in most software. You can visit Amazon.com twice and it will recognize you and provide relevant and personalized advice. You can live in the same house for all your life and you will always be a foreigner. »

To me, this statement is very true. The Internet of things opens a whole lot of new possibilities and I find Wifi rabbits fascinating. And you? Which objects would you want to connect to the Internet?

* french proverb