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Hello, Facebook!

Traditional as it may be to programmers, "Hello, World" does not seem appropriate to my new experiment. I am saying hello to Facebook and its Social Graph of objects (people, events, photos and pages) and the connections (friends, likes, tags and shared content) between them.

To describe my upcoming application, I'll start with what I don't want it to be like based on my social graph competitors:

• Solely provide a representation of the interrelationships of friends.
• Retain the geographical locations of social networks.
• View my social graph as the sum of key connecting friends.

I believe they all fail to investigate what really matters: the social proximity and how the digital space has altered its configuration.

An interesting perspective to explore proximity is through privacy. On different levels of disclosure, the application will gradually map your proximity to others in the digital space:

1. As an Internet user, you are constantly leaving traces and providing information about yourself - even before logging onto a social network. My Digital Skins project gathered IP-addresses that revealed an approximate geographical location.
2. Parts of your Facebook profile is publicly available, and that listing's content will already give an idea of your proximity to the social graph. For example, the default settings of Facebook will share wall posts, friends, likes and photos with the entire Internet!
3. By permitting the application to access your extended profile information not available publicly, and even mailbox, stream and friend lists, further assumptions can be made.
4. Finally, there is no social graph without human interaction and therefore the final variable will in itself create new proximities through your own input. As an example, you may be asked to identify who you last spoke with in person.

All of the data collected through these steps of the application can hopefully be able to produce some image of your proximity to friends within your social reach.

How do you imagine the landscape of your proximities will look?

Digital Spaces, Studies | 2 comments »