

Utilizing the Social Graph as a Relevancy Source for Data Ranking - fotoblur
http://www.wireblur.com/discuss/498

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evgen
The problem I see with most attempts at using the social graph for problems
like this is that most social graphs have no notion of expertise. Tom may be a
good friend of mine who shares my interest in cooking and scuba diving, but he
works in a Windows shop coding in Java for enterprise apps while I am a Mac
user who does large-scale consumer service development using Python and
Erlang. He also likes the Patriots, which calls into question any opinion he
may have about sports :) Capturing the different facets of "relevancy" is
hard, and it does not sound like this comes close to being able to distinguish
signal from noise when coming from a source that otherwise might appear to be
trustworthy.

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mickdarling
Agreed, but there are a ton of different social graphs out there. If you are
looking for data about a person who is only on one or two social sites, the
data won't likely be very valuable, but if you are looking at a group of
people that all have a many social graphs like on linkedin, twitter,
hackernews, quora, that all vary from each other appropriately with the aim of
the particular sites, I can see being able to pull out some valuable data. One
of the keys is that the users you are interested in actually participate in
the different sites differently and have different followers and friends on
those sites. If they automatically friend everyone, and crosspost everywhere
it makes the social graph useless.

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fotoblur
Interesting you should mention this:
<http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/newsie/>

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jbooth
Glancing at the front page, it seems that the social graph is made up of
technophiles and business junkies.

But then, we knew that, I guess. It's just funny, this is basically SF/NYC
tech/business talk, while a trace over the RL social graph would probably
bring up something more like Us Weekly or ESPN. Even at a sample size of 1, I
talk more tech/biz online and more ESPN offline.

