comment
| - There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application
which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing
information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody
and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately,
there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive
and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality
and many of them walled gardens.
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Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature
(e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your
main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends,
add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out
address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement
succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also:
Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
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