Back in November, shortly after the announcement of OpenSocial, I wrote a post about how making Pulse an open social network (rather than a “walled garden”) was good for our business. I included a chart that became the talk of the industry (coverage included TechCrunch, CNET, Valleywag, and even the New York Times). At SXSW, I became aware of just how many people had taken notice of the chart, when conversation after conversation down there eventually turned to: “Hey, about that open social growth chart…what’s the real story? What’s been happening since?”
So, I thought it was time for an update. The original chart showed a dramatic change in the rate at which the Pulse social graph was wiring itself up -– a "Great Inflection" point exactly coincident with the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial initiative on October 30, 2007. The biggest question raised by many at the time was, “Is that a sustainable change of slope or just a temporary PR-driven surge?” That question is even more relevant today, as we now know the OpenSocial story has taken a few months of development to solidify, and that we are just now starting to see full rollout on sites like MySpace. (We’re planning our own rollout in Q2.)
Well, I am pleased to announce that the trend that got kick-started with a PR surge did, indeed, end up sustaining. People liked what they saw when they came to Pulse, and the pace of establishing family, friend, and business connections has held remarkably steady. Here’s the latest Pulse social graph “hockeystick” chart, showing a continued meteoric rise from just 1 million connections in early November to over 7 million connections as of last week!
And, to be clear, these 7 million-plus connections are a new breed, an alternative to the model that forces all relationships to be described as “friends”. Every single connection in Pulse has a category, such as family, friend, or business. It’s what we think of as a “true social graph,” built up from the real who-you-know foundation of users’ unified address books. So, here’s a first peek at what happens when you give users a permission model for selectively sharing content, based on category of relationship:
When you give users choice in this area, the social graph that emerges begins to look like the real world. That is the real world of our demographic, which is the post-college crowd, centered on the 25 to 55 year olds. For that crowd, the largest slice of the pie derives from interactions out in the world: the set of people they currently work with, or worked with in the past, accounting for 75% of all connections. It is also interesting to note that when people have choices other than "friend," the word friend gets back its meaning; here we see just 20% of connections being labeled as real friends. And the group that for many is the most important, is by definition, the smallest – your family, representing here just 3% of the total connections.
We really believe that we are on the cusp of the next major phase of the Internet, a phase we call the “Social Web.” We are thrilled to see the major players actively working together on issues of data portability, implementing support for OpenID (Yahoo!) and microformats, coming together on application portability via OpenSocial, and creating innovative building blocks, like Google’s Social Graph API. We have been encouraged by the groundswell of support for the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web and for the concepts of data portability, in general.
For example, ReadWriteWeb, an influential blog, recently wrote:
“Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'."
And here's a relevant video clip, featuring Joseph Smarr on the Portable Social Networks panel at SXSW, addressing the notion that open grows the pie; that this is not a zero-sum game:
Also, if you haven’t see Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s presentation at the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference, I highly recommend taking at look. The slides she used are here. Her thesis is that “social” will become such a natural part of the open Web, that social networking will become “like air.”
In other words, “open” is not just good for business – it is the natural way of the Web. And it's proving to be the case that the "air" Charlene talks about is wind in our sails.
John McCrea
vp of marketing