More Than Who You Know, It's What You Know

There is a nice little article in the Economist this week talking about the glimmering appearance of semantics in web applications. We are seeing a blurring of Web 2.0 and semantic web ideas [old ppt download]. Web 2.0 is a poor man’s semantic web. I think the poor man's view is about to start getting richer.

The real value-added of semantics struck me as I was (finally) playing with Facebook a few months ago.  I’ve been on LinkedIn for years now, but haven’t otherwise been drawn to social networking sites.  Facebook has become such a force of nature, it has been hard to resist invitations to “become friends” by people I already consider friends, for fear of otherwise denying our real world friendship.  As I became engaged with Facebook I soon realized what’s there, and more importantly, what’s missing. 

Facebook as Peopleweb Lite
Facebook is a schema and some communications methods.  It defines certain data types (people, events, messages) and their attributes.  So it provides a simple set of semantics to allow me to declare a person (name, address, etc.) and the form of relationship (worked with, dated, etc.) The user explicitly declares everything. Nothing is inferred.

The brilliance of Facebook lies in its simplicity and its completeness.  There has been a standard around for years now in the semantic web community called FOAF – for Friend of a Friend.  FOAF is an RDF and XML standard for defining a person’s attributes to make a uniform, web-distributed method of inferring contact information. FOAF has never risen past the status of demonstration project, even though the technology is quite simple.

Like FOAF, Facebook has its own standard description of a “person,” but addressed the additional issues of privacy (by controls) and discovery (by directory).  Bingo! A proprietary standard wrapped in a walled garden becomes useful.  Then the garden gets a gate (Facebook API) and now it is called an ecosystem.

The Paradox of Simplicity in Social Network Design
But even with this simple semantic web for people, Facebook lacks real utility beyond entertainment, as do most social network sites.  Why?  Because they are defined around fixed schemas (schemata for you purists) which are the boundaries of the community.  LinkedIn is a fixed schema around resume history.  Myspace is a fixed schema around people and entertainment media. 

Social networks are a subset of the general class of community websites. The essential value-add of a community site is to define the schema of the community – what we have in common as members of the community become the defining features of the site.  The granddaddy of community sites is Ebay.  What is Ebay but a schema (marketplace) and a set of rules for interacting around the schema?  What is Amazon but a schema (product catalog) and a set of rules for interaction?  This simple rigidity of design makes these sites intuitively obvious to the casual user and inherently bounded in their ability to evolve past the founding metaphor.  Again, as the textbook example of a self-limiting metaphor I would point to Ebay.

I find social networks of limited utility, because they only do one thing, albeit well.  They connect rigid entities (usually people) for a limited purpose (discovery or communication).  They are shared contact databases with access control and messaging. While they are file sharing containers, they are not repositories for knowledge.  The knowledge inherent in my community is not directly accessible, only addresses. Social networks as presented today don’t help us actually do anything together.

From Social Networks to Knowledge Networks
A social network resembles the old telephone party line. While it connects us, it adds no value to the conversation.  It is the intermediary, momentarily connecting the knowledge that remains mostly in our heads. All the real action still happens at the edge of the social network, not in the network.  They provide no long-term memory or framework for accumulating and navigating what we collectively know.  I cannot imagine using Facebook to discover, accumulate, and share diligence on a prospective investment beyond figuring out who to call for an indirect reference.  Facebook's peopleweb doesn't contemplate how I might accumulate information about a person, their company,  its competitors, and customers and then tap into the related knowledge that my partners or business acquaintances might have.  Yet, the diligence process is one of connecting dots of knowledge (conversations, emails, documents, relationships) to find a pattern that yields an outcome.  The same is true for many collective activities in our communities and organizations. Hence the varieties of definitions around community - communities of purpose, communities of practice, etc.  Communities arise from common circumstance, but they persist because of a shared utility of being.

This is why I think social networks will evolve into knowledge networks.  All the pieces are place.  Facebook has shown us how a gated community can encourage declaration of knowledge (about people and relationships) and maintain a sense of control and privacy.  What needs to be extended is the method to for defining arbitrary entities and concepts beyond people (companies, locations, events, bands, diseases, hobbies, TV shows, chemicals, etc.) and allowing users to define relationships between them (owner of, owned by, included in, compatible with, etc.)  What I have just described is an explosion of meta-data is far bigger than the web itself. But the path is now clear.  No AI.  No inference engines, No voodoo.  “Just” a very large and extensible graph.

We won’t get there in one big leap.  But we will get there, one extension at a time.  Today’s social networks are a transitional Web 2.0 concept.  As they add more and more semantics about different types of objects and concepts, they will morph from social networks to knowledge networks. And knowledge networks will be more valuable and stickier, because what you know is often more valuable than who you know.

Postscript
Well, it seems the spooks have already come to the same conclusion (NYT article) in designing "A-space." They need a social network for the knowledge they gather in espionage and counter-espionage. All the more reason you'll need one soon, too.