Smart groups for DiSo

[Chris Messina]

Had a chat with some friends today and they offered an interesting
benefit of the FB Social Graph: the ability to group your contacts by
attributes -- like birthday or location.

I think this could be huge for DiSo if we make it possible to target
content to "smart groups" ... Like "share this event/post only with
people in San Francisco" etc.

By distributing maintenance of profiles attributes to the edges, and
then being able to poll on criteria in real time, we could basically
kill Evite and make for easier on-the-fly, implicit group creation
that doesn't require any overt action on the part of the recipients
besides openly publishing the attributes or criteria they want to be
discovered by... Hmm.

Chris

Sent from my iPhone

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Basically, treat almost all attributes in hCards as tags and
birthdates (read: ages) in ranges as tags. At least for some
applications. I think this could be immensely useful -- the question
is, what situations should this occur in? Should we crawl the hCards
of your friends list and allow you to set permissions based on this
sort of thing?

--
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[Stephen Paul Weber]

On second though, permissions is the one place you would for sure NOT
want it -- since anyone could just edit their site to SAY they are in
that group and then get around your privacy...

So, more for discovery groups etc.

[anders conbere]

Well it's not hard to group by xfn attribute though that's not ad hoc.
you could certainly use that to limit a query across those.

~ Anders

[anders conbere]

right, you would want to group users by groups you assign them, which
would be stated in the edge of the graph that you define. Aka, the xfn
link you make to their profile.

~ anders

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Hmm.. what would you use that for? "People someone considers a friend"?

--

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Sure, that's how we handle permissions (that and I'm allowing custom
categories too), but I really am liking Chris' suggestion of
profile-attributes-as-tags for other purposes, like searching for
people/through friends. (If I'm understanding correctly...)

[anders conbere]

Ah right, so I mean he's really saying is look through the list of
people linked to from xfn find profile data on them, and group them.

~ Anders

[anders conbere]

Heh, this is what I get for not reading :-D

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Just visually? That makes sense, although you'd need some way of
choosing which to group by since each person will have multiple
attributes -- unless by all of them, but then you're back to a
searching/browsing metaphor.

[Chris Messina]

Basically yes. Think about the criteria FB collects when you add
friends (how did you meet, when, did you go to school together,
where... Etc). These are all attributes that you could use for your
own personal smart groups; if you merge this data with, for example,
someone's Dopplr presence, interesting things emerge in the space
between what you know and assert about others and what they publish
about themselves.

So, if I know you live in SF but dopplr says you're in Boston, how can
we improve our service?

Chris

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 7, 2008, at 2:49 PM, "Stephen Paul Weber"

[anders conbere]

Right, so the problem that I'm seeing your bring up in your first post
is that if we think of these as "permissive" that is you're granting
users of your graph who meet certain criteria access to a resource,
then that's not really a permission system at all since a user can
arbitrarily update their data to become part of a group.

The idea makes /much more/ sense if we think of if in terms of a push
system. Let me "push" this message to all the users who meet a
criteria. Then it's not a permissive system it's a filter. Push not
pull.

~ Anders

[Dan Brickley]

This makes a lot of sense. I've been using RDF queries in the SPARQL
language, to define ad-hoc groups through query patterns.

I have some lengthy notes here:

http://danbri.org/words/2008/01/26/263 "Waving not Drowning? groups as
buddylist filters"
http://danbri.org/words/2008/01/22/260 "Embedding queries in RDF -
FOAF Group example" (a bit more general and detailed, re idea of
publishing queries into the Web)

The queries I was demo'ing at SGFoo mixed FOAF and XFN quite freely,
imported into ARC/SparqlPress. I have some UI ideas around venn
diagrams to play with too, for filter authoring...

cheers

danbri

--
http://danbri.org/

[anders conbere]

On Feb 7, 2008 3:01 PM, Dan Brickley <danbr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This makes a lot of sense. I've been using RDF queries in the SPARQL
> language, to define ad-hoc groups through query patterns.
>
> I have some lengthy notes here:
>
> http://danbri.org/words/2008/01/26/263 "Waving not Drowning? groups as
> buddylist filters"
> http://danbri.org/words/2008/01/22/260 "Embedding queries in RDF -
> FOAF Group example" (a bit more general and detailed, re idea of
> publishing queries into the Web)

Right.

This isn't a tool to filter who has access to data, but a tool for you
to filter your friends on what data they are exposing. If I want to
message all my friends who live in seattle that I'm going to be going
to happy hour today at 5, I don't need to send that same message to my
friends in San Francisco, and in fact I want to avoid sending that
kind of message because it reduces my signal to noise ratio.

~ Anders

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Could be great for filtering activity stream data too (only show
events friends in the area are attending...)

--

[Matthew Terenzio]

Makes perfect sense. Adhocracies is what I call that.