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Writer's pictureJohn Rae-Grant

CLOSING THE GAPS IN THE SOCIAL GRAPH

Updated: Apr 14, 2020


Twitter just announced a way to easily and automagically follow all of your facebook friends. Who owns the social graph? For a while we thought it was Facebook exclusively. Then we woke up to the realization that for many of us who grew up with email - it's in our gmail or outlook contacts and usage patterns. Recently twitter has become the easiest social graph to leverage, especially with annotations. As more and more sites get the import features originally pioneered by Plaxo, my social graph is becoming more widespread, and available to any service I want to give it to (and plenty that I don't). Who is going to step forward and give me real time control over my connections? Every time I do an import, I lose control (since having to go to 57 different control panels is much more confusing, less likely, and time consuming than managing one), and the company owning the import service gets a piece of me forever. The identity folks are right, but woefully outgunned. It's just too tempting to get that easy broadcast and receive, so we'll all end up doing it. For the sake of ease of use, we're perpetuating a future filled with privacy headaches.

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