Future of the *Social Internet*?
Social media seems to be a hot topic but with a lot of tension from two aspects:

(1) There is a lot of talk about developing and delivering more in social media. The more might be from things new in each of data sources, data manipulation techniques, Web sites, or companies. There might be more in just the content or in social search to find such content.

(2) There is not much clarity about just how to have more in social media or just why to have it. For the "why", what users want it, and what would they do with it?

Here are two examples of some of the recent talk about social media:

First, here on HN is the thread:

"Sergey Brin: We’ve Touched 1 Percent Of What Social Search Can Be (techcrunch.com)"

at

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/sergey-brin-weve-touched-1-percent-of-what-social-search-can-be/

Second, is the thread "Building Better Social Graphs" at Fred Wilsons blog A VC* at:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/01/building-better-social-graphs.html#disqus_thread

with a lot of relatively good relevant comments.

In Fred Wilson's thread "Building Better Social Graphs", there were two strikingly different themes:

First, Wilson started the thread with a post where he wanted to be able to download each of his social graphs and then curate them himself.

Second, in the comments, the theme was strong that given the data on the social graphs, we should have computer-based means to process the data for curation, etc. Curiously, the goal of this processing was Wilson's "Building Better Social Graphs" by stronger means than just Wilson's manual curation! That is, Wilson's title was stronger than Wilson's post, and the comments were closer to the title than the post was!

So, from 40,000 feet up, it appears that many people have some vague, ill-defined, intuitive, poorly identified and articulated visions of making progress with social graphs. Each of (A) the broad subject of social, (B) Facebook, (C) Twitter, and (D) the Internet is so big that we should take the visions, as crude as they are, seriously.

Three issues:

(1) Meaning.

An arc in a graph from the definition in applied math has essentially no meaning in any sense social or even practical. So, if we are to make use of data from social graphs, etc., then we should make some progress, if only rough, on what the arcs, or other data, mean.

(2) Purpose.

We should identify the purpose of the software. That is, what will be the output of the software, and why will users like that output? Or, what do users want, or at least would like if they saw it, that such software might provide? What the heck is the darned purpose?

(3) Techniques.

Given the data, what data manipulation techniques will we have the software use to get the results good for the purposes?

I raise one more point:

The US has something over 300 million people. In some important respects, this number is not very large. E.g., it is easy enough for current computing and data base techniques to have, say, 1 million bytes on each person and still be able to store and process that data.

So, it can appear that there is a chance that we could have a single, grand solution in the space of social graphs and social search. If so, then we will guess that the present efforts in social media are only tangential or indirect solutions for a central problem not yet identified, articulated, or solved and that a single, grand solution might be possible.

Net, we have potentially a grand answer to the issue what data.

Then we can move on to what purposes? What will people what to do with this data?

What more is there to be said?

Where can we be more clear on the data, purposes, processing, and future of social whatever via the Internet?