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I'm not buying the idea that a social graph has long term value. Relationships come and go. People die. People delete their Facebook accounts.

A social graph is just a digital incarnation of a yearbook. I don't recall yearbooks being valuable or useful...perhaps on a personal sentimental level.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical.

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You're right that yearbooks are not terribly useful on a day-to-day basis since it's static. However, I think Facebook's value comes from the organic nature of the site. You can update and craft your social graph to how you see yourself interacting with different groups of people at a given point in time. Of course your social graph will morph over time -- Facebook will hopefully make that as frictionless as possible. Facebook is a history of yearbooks.

On the other hand, a Facebook user's list of groups that they've been active in within a month (or look at regularly) is probably very useful data.

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