As the interactions and connections grow they further fill-in the Social Graph. The Social Graph is a term coined by social scientists to refer to used to refer to relationships on the Internet. The colorful image above is a visualization of my LinkedIn.com connections, and is basicly a social graph of my network. As complicated and interwoven as it it, it represents less than 600 people. Can you imagine how detailed the Social graph of Facebook, Google, or the World Wide Web is, and all of the interconnectivity and interactions that take place on it daily?
Yahoo is currently working on a project called the Small World Project, in which they are attempting to prove that the world is indeed connected by six degrees of seperation. Sociologists have tried to prove this claim for decades, but have failed to resolve it. You can participate in the Small World Project by clicking here.
As I think about the interconnectivity of it all I can help but wonder if once examined and mapped, will the Social Graph reveal the type of repititive fractal patterns that Mandelbrot discovered? I wouldn’t be surprised one bit, after all it is all interconnected.