This evening I've come across a wonderful term that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook refers to as the "social graph".  This is the web of social connections that show up as links between users on the Internet.  This is clearly at the foundation of social networks and is coming to the forefront in the discussion about data portability.  If you can create a picture of your social graph it might look something like a spider web.  I like the term so let's use it for a moment.

The social graph could also be seen in other terms like, viral maps and entity relationship diagrams (ERDs).  An application that I scantily used a few years ago that used this same idea was The Brain, a very cool and fun contact management system.

I'm sure many of you have the same challenge that I do in terms of creating a truly viable social network and of course doing it only one time.  Plaxo Pulse, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and so many more.  I'm currently leaning toward Plaxo Pulse and Facebook precisely because these two networks are easier to connect to other social networks.  Their not quite as walled in as MySpace and LinkedIn, but I suppose that is changing even as I write this.

Setting aside the data portability questions, privacy concerns and the proprietary nature of each social network, I want to venture some principles on why open and inter-connected networks will be the right solution and that each user will eventually get to decide on what they will do with their social graph.

1)  Marketing in the future will be personal.  The practice of tracking the minutia of marketing events continues to lose relevance in a continuously connected world and evolving relationships.

2)  Marketing in the future will be transactional.  We may think of this in terms of order flow or event-triggered email today,  but I suspect it really refers to an idea that is much bigger than this.

3)  Marketing in the future is integrated.  The Internet and social networks are taking us closer to the realities that all space, including human thought and relationships, is governed by light and that there is no space in which law, structure and order are absent.

4)  Marketing in the future is measurable.  Yes, this may be true, but our analytical tools are woefully inadequate to manage the flow of information that is becoming available to use.  Business intelligence has a long, long way to go but it is a critical foundation of conducting business in the future.

Returning to your social graph, what are you going to do with it?  Well, that really depends on whether you think those relationships are yours in the first place.  As for Mark Zuckerberg, according to the Financial Times, he thinks the knowledge of how you use them are his for "competitive advantage."