First, let's clear the social media gibberish: Social Graph? Interest Graph? To quote David Rogers, the Social Graph is a digital map that says "This is who I Know", a place that reflects real-life social ties. On the web, these places are called social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn are the two most common examples. In real life your phone's contact list or your last birthday party's guest list are just the same. The interest graph is the digital map that says "This is what I Like": think Twitter for news, your Imdb reviews for movies, your blog, your Trip Advisor ratings... In real life, having a look at your library, your passport stamps or your bank receipts might tell the same kind of info.
The purpose of this article is to discuss whether Facebook is trying to reconcile your Social and your Interest Graphs and how. In other words, will you ever again have to leave Facebook when looking for things you like? (i.e. Is Facebook going to kill Twitter?)
Because "Who You Know", and "What you Like", are both parts of "Who you Are", Facebook is trying to merge both worlds. It's not really about social discovery of content anymore. Facebook finally understood that your friends don't necessarily have your taste in music, the same favourite football team, the same appetite for knitting-related news...etc. The value of your social graph when discovering content is actually quite low. (hence the outrage following's Google Search's new prominence given to G+ results). The interest graph and the social graph simply don't match each other and that's only common sense: your friends are your friends, not Apple's CEO, not your video store's clerk, not Mario Balotelli (hopefully) or your favourite Pitchfork reviewer.
In order to bring the two worlds together, Facebook has to bring in the Interest Graph mechanisms (discovering and following what/whom you're interested in) into their existing platform/functionality...i.e. your profile, your apps and the news feed/ticker. This "new" Facebook's purpose is to let users receive content from their interest graph rather than counting on their friends to provide them with personally relevant content. Facebook has moved a long way in recent months into that direction. Here's what you can already do to bring your interest graph into Facebook:
- Following Pages you like that will show you regular updates in your news feed (example: I follow the Huffington Post, Dollop Parties, Plan international...)
- Subscribing to people you're interested in (example : Pete Cashmore, Jeremiah Owyang) to receive their updates.
- Add Apps providing you with an enhanced discovery experience (Art Finder, TicketMaster, the Guardian...) which will bring you relevant personalised content (galleries you should like for Art Finder, tickets to gigs from your favourite artists from TicketMaster, trending playlists from Spotify...)
Of course, the Pages algorithm for post visibility in your news feed needs some work, the subscription system is quite new, only a handful of individuals are using it and the results are contrasted (Pete Cashmore on Twitter : 32,000 followers vs. Pete Cashmore on FB : 250,000 subscribers - Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter : 96,000 followers vs. Jeremiah Owyang on FB : 1015 subsribers ) and we haven't seen the full potential of the frictionless apps yet. Not to mention the increasingly complex privacy settings and the disturbingly deep Timeline...
Coming back to the overall picture: if your favourite brands, venues, magazines all had a richly managed FB page, if every single individual whose activity/insights you'd like to follow had a Facebook account to subscribe to, if all areas of content discovery from news to film to travel could be mapped in Apps...you would have pretty much all your interest graph within Facebook, never having to leave the platform.
Are people willing to share their Interest graph with their Social Graph? Do I want my boss to know I'm listening to a Spice Girls best-of on Monday Morning ? Maybe not.
Do people want to fully interact with both their social graph and their interest graph on a single platform whilst letting the two worlds meet each other only when sharing seems relevant? My bet is yes.
Facebook moves fast, let's see if after the failures of Check-ins or Deals, this new strategy will work.