ONE OF THE MOST interesting things about Jaiku Friday is how it connects people, their ideas, and real-time collaboration through text or concise on-screen comments. When you map Jaiku to other social networks (think Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us, mash, or music), you get nodes you would never have imagined. It's something Euan Semple and I chatted about after Reboot 9 and it's something several researchers are now pushing out of their labs. It will become a mainstream conversation in early November, when the newest iGoogle gadget leaves alpha. I told Mitch Joel about my reading of these items in a Greenfields Report filed with Six Pixels of Separation. I record short comments for Mitch's podcast because I learn what I meant to say when Mitch offers his follow-on commentary. I'm very interested in his take on mapping social networks because one result of Google barging into the game will be a frontal assault on the social networking available only inside Facebook. Dan Farber reports on Reactor, "the back end for managing RSS and Atom feeds", and speculates that it could be "used to power activity streams for a project code-named Makamaka to see what feeds your friends are reading or YouTube videos they are watching."
"Interactive Friend Thing" (source of the info in the graphic above) uses the TouchGraph GraphLayout applet which clusters people together automatically. Yahoo! helps me do that with Mash, keeping opt-in central to every step.
Greenfields Report #11 on mapping social networks [3.8 MB 96 kbps MP3 file]. There are 22,500 results for iGoogle in social networking before the launch of new iGoogle gadgets in November 2007.
Dan Farber -- "Google forays into the heart of social networking"
