Facebook Graph a Semantic Social Search Engine

Facebook graph search has landed and with it a worlds first, a semantic social search engine. The vast quantity of work we have all put into Facebook, all those likes and status updates, the affirming and rejecting of friends. The location updates, the invites and group events. They all add up to an immense pile of neatly structured data. More than that. Data that is inherently understandable by humans. Compare that to the mountains of data utility companies and banks hold on us.  This stuff is about us, what we do and like and who we do it with. We all ways knew it was a goldmine, but now we can see how Facebook intends to profit.

The data is already ripe for semantic search. We have fed it data in social formats which relate to our lives and the times of our lives. So providing a social search engine is a brilliant thing to do.

Initially I though the data would be fairly crude in terms of how to rank and apply relevance to results. Facebook appears to have a  a very narrow tagging system you can either like something, comment or share. But beyond that there is how you structure your feeds, who you elect to receive updates from. If you read those updates, if you follow links. Once you add these variables into the mix they have a the ability to prove more granular or accurate results. I can't tell if they are doing this yet but it would seem the obvious path to take.

The auto complete in the search box offers terms which fit with the content types and relationships you are searching for. So  "National parks my friends.." could complete to "National parks my friends like" or "...have been to". It knows that national parks are places you visit, it will also know that restaurants are places you eat, Sony makes things you buy, Justin Timberlake is someone who makes music and has concerts you can go to, and that you can like and comment and share all of these.

If they open up to other services such as retailers, location based services -  FourSquare, brand and product recommendation engines, then the value of the Facebook data is released every time a user searches. First pull in related results from the external sources. Then charge to allow other sites to pull in social graph results into their results. Of course this will bring privacy issues to the fore again. But int he past Facebook has managed to ride the waves of discontent and come out winning.

Google Now the starter pistol for the semantic web?

Google Now is one of many new features of Jelly bean the latest incarnation of the Android OS. In some ways it initially seems similar to Apple's Siri, but it goes further. Rather than just answer questions or enter into a knowledgable conversation it remembers things about you and offers information even when not prompted. 

On the launch page Google show various examples of how Google Now will help users. All but one example are simple search, location based searches, local weather, places to eat etc. But one feature stands out. 

What is most interesting about Now is that it can use different data sources in intelligent ways. As Hugo Barra said it is designed :

"to figure out what information you might need, and when"

For me they only showed one truly new example of this. Google Now knows what is in your diary and if the diary entry includes a location it will compare this with your current location and prompt you about when you need to leave to arrive in time for your appointment. It does this by selecting a route and knowing current traffic congestion. 

While this is not rocket science in terms of a useful function, and it has been the staple of visions of future tech for some time, this is the first real world incarnation of this functionality. This form of merging data to form useful information is one of the goals of the semantic web. I assume the plan is to marry Now to Google's semantic search and use a wider range of more diverse data sources as input. If this is the case then the widespread unconscious use of the semantic web will have arrive sooner than expected.

Revisiting Open Asset Architectures

This is from a posting I did in 2009 on the Amaze Innovation Blog ( now closed). With the rise in popularity of Pininterest and Fancy etc, it seems all the more relevant. 






I was reviewing the potential of Apture for use in a client site. Apture allows site owners to embed rich content links the text of pages, when users roll over the links Apture displays a in page overlay with additional information. This can be video, other urls, images etc. It is very powerful and easy to use, no coding required.


But apture is all about pulling additional content into your site in a way which supports users but tries to keep them in your site. It only applies to text. You cannot apply Apture to images.

Mockup of Open Asset Architecture

It made me think that there may be an opportunity to do an image version. Such a tool would allow a site owner to both do what Apture does - supply additional info but to also do something which may be more powerful. The above image is a mock up.


If you have a site which features great images the visual content may be reused by other sites. Web etiquette is that you should reference where the image came form but this does not always happen. It is also easiest to just grab the image off a site and place it in your own site. If we developed a tool which allows users to make it easy for other site owners to pull the original image form the owner's site then we several three things:

• make the process of image syndication easier
• potentially improve the owner site's SEO rankings as the embedded images will always link back to the original site.
• allow users to trace the origins of a given image - one of the unrealised foundations of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project
• allow site owners to see who is using their assets.

From the viewer's perspective they would recognize an image which has this function by a icon or logo int he corner of the image. Clicking on this would flip the image over. I think using such a primitive and natural interaction as flipping is important as it make this process of discovering more seem easy and intuitive.

This would display the background information, tools for linking to the image and a count of how many time the image has been used. If the image was owned by another site then it would also contain a link to that site. The fliped view would also contain a link and call to action to use the tool - for the mock up I called it PhotoFlip.


I call this approach an Open Asset Architecture. We could also add additional services into the system such as acting as a image broker who would sell high quality prints of images. Although newspapers and magazines already have their own methods for achieving this many other sites do not and we could make the process easy and generate an income stream. 


Such a tool would be of use to many brands. We have spoken to several about the need to take a position where they share their assets rather than hold on to them, they should make them available to all the bloggers and other sites who can act as ambassadors for the brand. This tool would facilitate easy syndication and with the other services, especially SEO optimization and image tracking provide a much more powerful resource.