Capturing your social network on Facebook

A friend of mine, Bernie Hogan, has created a Facebook application for capturing your social network of friends on Facebook as a UCINET data file so it can be imported into social network analysis tools. It is called My Online Social Network - Phase 1. Cool! There are also other Facebook applications that show your social networks, one is Nexus, which visualizes the social network as a graph. The Nexus app is cool, it generates the graph in real time and shows clusters or subgroups that represent your close friends together. The graph showed a cluster of my U of T friends, my University of Waterloo classmates from undergrad, my friends from TorCamp and my Nokia colleagues. You can also find a friend from the friend graph, change the layout to be radial instead of a spring graph.

Very cool, so try out these apps on Facebook!

On Technorati: Facebook social network, Facebook friend graph, Nexus

Social graph - is it overhyped?

Here's a story from The Economist regarding about how the term "social graph", even though it is hot, is not really any thing new. Social graph is being mentioned everywhere on the Net because of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and how Facebook is touting and is being given credit to the term "social graph". However, the social graph is something that has been done in Computer Science, according to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

It seems that social graph is the new hot thing in Silicon Valley, and everyone is getting on the bandwagon. It'll be interesting to see if it will still remain hot for a while, or go like the dot com companies.

On Technorati: social graph, Facebook

Difference between social graph, social network web site, and social OS

Here's an article that explains what's the difference between a social graph, social network web site and social OS. An example of a social graph is the people connected to each other. AN example of a social network web site is Flickr or Twitter. An example of a social OS is Facebook, although I don't really kind of agree with that. I think of Facebook as a social network application or social network web site. It's not really an OS, because it doesn't permeate through all my computer's applications and it's not tied with Windows or Linux. All my applications I'm using do not all tie in with Facebook (at least not yet).

What do you all think about this?