Open vs. Closed Social Graphs
The TechCrunch article cited below talks about how many social media companies – like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – are starting to shutdown or restrict their API services. An API is an Application Programming Interface that allows developers to access the datasets, social graph, and other information that a company may store. Many of these APIs are used when you “sign in with Facebook” for a variety of different apps, businesses, and games.
With the recent news of these companies shutting down and restricting these services, many business and apps that rely on these APIs will not work as smoothly anymore. We have gotten so used to logging in with our social media accounts that it is hard to imagine having to create new accounts from scratch.
So, why are companies restricting these APIs? Well, these social media giants have realized that their social graphs are immensely valuable datasets and by restricting their datasets, they can create a barrier to entry for new companies. In addition, users preserve and maintain these social media accounts almost daily (think about when you last posted a status to Facebook or tweeted about anything), meaning the millions and billions of accounts are accurate and precise – increasing the possibilities of the applications built on top of them.
The article claims that although these companies prevent the insertion of their social graphs into other applications (via APIs), that email is still the largest and most useful social graph out there. Think about it. Everyone has an email and everyone checks it daily! An email address is an unique identifier for each person. Each node (person with an email) can communicate freely and openly with anyone else in the email social graph (you can send an email to anyone else with an email). It is far less restricting than many social media sites (have to be friends of friends on Facebook, have to 1st connection on LinkedIn). The bottom line is although you may only communicate within your network of people, you are able to connect easily with anyone else (email is one large giant connected component).
To make matters better, it is extremely cheap to send an email. Assume that each edge on a social network graph has a weight, where the weight equals the price required for the node to send a message to another node. In this case, to send a message to anyone on the email network will be easy because the weight is zero (it is free to send emails). Lets compare this to something like LinkedIn InMails where you have to be a premium user. Each InMail’s standard price is $10 per message. This weight on the edge of the social graph severely limits the number of messages that you can send. To make matters most, you can only send InMails to your 1st, 2nd, or 3rd connections – which severely restricts the graph whom you can communicate with.
All of the examples above have led me to reach the same conclusion as the author – that email is a blessing as it is more viable form of communication for the user and is as the author says “dirt cheap”.