18TH CENTURY SOCIAL NETWORKS DATA VISUALIZATION

I'm fascinated by mapping, and the role data visualization plays in bringing to life patterns that are essentially 'invisible' to the naked eye.

This smart project from Stanford takes 18th century correspondence between intellectuals in what they term the "Republic of Letters" and visualizes who is sending and receiving letters. Worth watching

FACEBOOK F8 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION

Watch live streaming video from f8conference at livestream.com

Mark Zuckerberg knows that even Facebook's mighty ecosystem is not enough by itself, it needs partners. If developers combine their ecosystems with Facebook's ecosystem then Zuckerberg gets the complete map. Google wants that map, Microsoft wants that map. Who will get their first?

This video is long, but well worth watching if you want deep insights into Facebook's priorities within the developer community.

The first part of this video is just policy statements, and Facebook cheerleading, but at around time marker 06:55, Zuckerberg moves to the big stuff, as he says - which is the social graph.

It's interesting how Facebook is now starting to overlay semantics onto the social graph. This is powerful stuff. This semantic layer on top of the social graph comes in the form of the Open Graph Protocol

The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user.

Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in the same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.

Just as interesting, was the launch of the Graph API:

At Facebook's core is the social graph; people and the connections they have to everything they care about. The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g. people,photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

Participating in the Graph API will help Facebook get one step closer to the map of connections of people and things. Remember this is not just a technical exercise, this map is a map of our culture. Being able to add and take from the map will be a very appealing prospect for brands and developers alike.