Utilizing the Social Graph as a Relevancy Source for Data Ranking | Hacker News Reader

Utilizing the Social Graph as a Relevancy Source for Data Ranking

wireblur.com

9 pointsfotoblur5 comments

The problem I see with most attempts at using the social graph for problems like this is that most social graphs have no notion of expertise. Tom may be a good friend of mine who shares my interest in cooking and scuba diving, but he works in a Windows shop coding in Java for enterprise apps while I am a Mac user who does large-scale consumer service development using Python and Erlang. He also likes the Patriots, which calls into question any opinion he may have about sports :) Capturing the different facets of "relevancy" is hard, and it does not sound like this comes close to being able to distinguish signal from noise when coming from a source that otherwise might appear to be trustworthy.

Great points, but what system does have a notion of expertise? Wikipedia maybe? Google has many issues with SEO hackers and they've had a hard time filtering out the gamers. Hacker news requires up and down votes. I agree there is noise in any system and solving that is also a challenge to consider. Thanks for the comment.

Agreed, but there are a ton of different social graphs out there. If you are looking for data about a person who is only on one or two social sites, the data won't likely be very valuable, but if you are looking at a group of people that all have a many social graphs like on linkedin, twitter, hackernews, quora, that all vary from each other appropriately with the aim of the particular sites, I can see being able to pull out some valuable data. One of the keys is that the users you are interested in actually participate in the different sites differently and have different followers and friends on those sites. If they automatically friend everyone, and crosspost everywhere it makes the social graph useless.

Interesting you should mention this: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/newsie/

Glancing at the front page, it seems that the social graph is made up of technophiles and business junkies.

But then, we knew that, I guess. It's just funny, this is basically SF/NYC tech/business talk, while a trace over the RL social graph would probably bring up something more like Us Weekly or ESPN. Even at a sample size of 1, I talk more tech/biz online and more ESPN offline.

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