What does “The Social Graph” really look like?

The O’Reilly people have been putting on a series of conferences and newsletters that go by the name “Graphing Social Patterns” (GSP). When I first heard that there was going to be a “Graphic Social Patterns” conference, I was excited to learn more. I love data visualization, and the idea of seeing some of the patterns emerging from the social media explosion sounded really interesting. Turns out that the conferences have exactly nothing to do with actually graphing social patterns. The series should really be called “Building Facebook Applications”, as you can see from the schedule of the last show. I think that O’Reilly is probably making more money on facebook applications than any single application developer.

The people who are REALLY exploring social patterns are over here at Orgnet. Valdis Krebs is the founder and lead researcher. They have a series of interesting case studies posted on the site, which are definitely worth a look. My favorite is this one, which shows an average online community in a picture and also explains why the different kinds of users look different when it comes to connectedness.

Orgnet suggests that the contributions break down like this:

1. Blue dots on the outside are lurkers. Not contributing any meaningful content and not connected. They are 60% of the average community
2. Green dots are transitional guys not yet truly engaged – 20%
3. The red core are the guys making the whole community happen -20%.

My experience as the general manager of epinons.com and as a board member at thisnext.com tells me that the average online social community is even more concentrated than the 20% number than Orgnet identifies. I think the bulk of the community content and engagement comes from less than 5% of the users, and lurkers are more like 75%.