Comments on: The most important part of the “social graph” is neither social nor a graph

By: Think clusters, not networks, in mining the social graph. | Volvant

Think clusters, not networks, in mining the social graph. | Volvant — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:16:40 +0000

[...] into this kind of data, and use the best available analytics to get at what some pundits call the Profile of Revealed Preferences, among other terms. That involves not just their connections, but their preferences and behaviors, [...]

By: Think clusters, not networks, in mining the social graph.

Think clusters, not networks, in mining the social graph. — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:22:59 +0000

By: What to do about “unstructured data” | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

Mon, 16 May 2011 12:03:05 +0000

[...] In June, 2010 I elucidated the variety of data that could go into an individual’s marketing-oriented profile. [...]

By: Big Data is Watching You! | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

Big Data is Watching You! | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 19:45:46 +0000

[...] that they have enough of a social graph to do so. (This application is a case where the term “social graph” is not a [...]

By: The technology of privacy threats | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:14:47 +0000

[...] graph” it infers from informal communication among friends. To date that assumption has been questionable, but we’re still in the very early days. Meanwhile, cruder methods of analyzing social [...]

By: Data that is derived, augmented, enhanced, adjusted, or cooked | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:57:43 +0000

[...] kinds of predictive analytic models, real-time scoring could be prohibitively slow. Ditto for social graph analysis, and the same goes for the other examples as [...]

By: Social Technology

Social Technology — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:31:28 +0000

Difficult Chapter Delayed Me, Difficult Data, Too…

I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

By: Objectivity Infinite Graph | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Objectivity Infinite Graph | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:27:38 +0000

[...] Darren is in general agreement with my observation that the “social graph” shouldn’t primarily be regarded as a graph. [...]

By: Evan

Evan — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:50:13 +0000

Seriously good points. The visualisation of these networks is great fun (and often fascinating), but apart from direct case management and investigation in fraud or intelligence, I must admit I’ve seen few situations that wouldn’t have benefited as much (if not more) by simply treating personal network characteristics and behavioural patterns as additional inputs into a model of some form. Plus, modelling entire populations is often less interesting than modelling subpopulations of tightly connected individuals – the intuitive response seems often to be to try and understand *everything*, but the reality is that I typically care less of your “Friend of a Friend of a Friend” connectivity than I do about your personal behavioural characteristics (which I may either be trying to influence or be viewing with suspicion, depending on why I’m looking at you in the first place). You may be seven degrees removed from Kevin Bacon, but given the amount of time it’ll take for a message to propagate from you to Kevin, that connectivity is pretty much useless.

We’re visual creatures and the graphs are easy to latch onto as something tangible and attractive, but in practice I’ve found they’re the least interesting part. Essential, but not so interesting compared to what’s possible.

By: Dan Weinreb

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:04:24 +0000

And think of how political operatives can take advantage of this information, sending different candidate pitches (or different misleading phone calls!) based on all of these attributes. (Facebook even asks for your political affiation.)