I’d marked the article for comment but just haven’t had time (and still don’t) to really do a response justice so here are a few preliminary thoughts.

Graphs have been around an awfully long time, like hundreds of years but their use in computer science really was a child of the 80s & 90s.  Their current framing is in the social context, a map of all the relationships one has within a social network for example.

However as Chris points out this is limiting.

The thing is ALL my “social” relationships across all contexts, sites, online and offline are my social graph.  So my Twitter followers/following may indeed represent the portion of my social graph that is interests however that context spreads across any number of other properties.

And this is where I think Chris’ thinking butts heads with my own – but only slightly..

Chris talks about “the rising importance of other types of graphs” and gives examples of graphs for Taste, Financial Trust, Endorsement, Local(e).

To me these are all the same graph.  It’s just they represent differing (social) relationship types.  If each were to be represented on separate graphs then the power of graphs in general would be lost – at least without serious jumps forward in semantic technology that is.

What do I mean?  Well, take me for example;

My relationships to my family take on many types (father, husband, son, brother) but they also occur in other contexts such as “financially who do I trust” or “who am I local to.”

To break these into separate graphs would mask the true picture of me.  It would be an administrative nightmare for me to maintain relationships this complex across all and every property in a way meaningful to others.

Far better in my head is an overarching graph that contains all my relationships (this does not mean centralisation of everything as distributed graphs are fine) marked up appropriately with context.

That’s all I have time to write now but this does need more thought.

Last week I attended a Mashup Event in London on The Value of Your Digital Identity.  There is plenty of write up available online with this piece from Jude Umeh from the BCS being amongst the most rich.

In Jude’s post he restates a question raised during the panel session by Ben Hoyle, a European Patent Attorney;

“What about those lacking an identity? There are many still without bank accounts or fixed addresses”

It’s an interesting question simply because it highlights what I believe to be a common misunderstanding of identity; that identity is something we have, create or obtain.

I don’t want to get into the philosophy behind identity or indeed into the technicalities – those are well discussed by people far more knowledgeable than myself but a simple viewpoint here may be helpful to most.

Identity is generally accepted to be “an aggregate of all those views, opinions, thoughts etc about the self from third parties.”

Confused?  Okay think of this;  One’s name is not one’s identity.  I have many names none of which I have given myself.  My parent’s called me Barnaby, my friends Barney, my kids Dad and any number of other less repeatable names by various people over the years.  The point here is these are identifiers for me.  More importantly they are identifiers for me in particular situations or contexts from other people’s perspectives.

In marketing speak these are persona, they are the various roles I play in life.

My identity is all of these mashed up together.  It’s just that a third party may only ever see me in one role, or persona and so to them that is my apparent identity.

Just to make this a tad more confusing, strictly these identifiers (names) are for the relationship (role) that I play with others.  Whenever I interact with someone (or indeed something else – say a business) a relationship is created and intrinsically so is an identifier.  For example when I first shop with a business I play the role of customer to which I am assigned a customer number as an identifier – the weird thing is I as the customer may never even be aware of that identifier as it may be nothing more than “he was the one hundred and thirtieth customer in store number 6 on that date.”

Okay so identity is everything you do, created about you by others for the purposes of defining a relationship of some sort.

So back to the question of “What about those lacking an identity? There are many still without bank accounts or fixed addresses”

Given the above view on identity I would posture that there are a very very very small number of individuals in the modernised world who have NO identity.  Strictly speaking everyone the second they are born (not going to argue the whole conceived thing here) has identity as they have a direct relationship not only with their mother but also with whomsoever played midwife / OBGYN.

We get given a name, our birth is registered, we enrol in school, start work and get a National Insurance Number in the UK (think SSN in US).  Every time we interact with another person, agency or business yet another identifier is created.

So in a modern society we are never really without identity.  With regards to the question posed by Ben the problem isn’t a lack of identity but more a distinct absence of transferable identity.

Curiously this is a problem well understood by large web properties and in particular social networks.  I may have an account on say Facebook with a huge wealth of Barney invested but when I want a new Twitter account I  am in effect an “identity less” new user with little baggage or ability to transfer my self from one service to another.

The web space has been pondering this for years.  OpenID was and is (post it’s blog spam prevention conception) touted as a solution for porting and identifying one’s self from site to site.  Today OAuth, Google FriendConnect  and FBConnect offer a glimpse of what identity portability may provide in the future.

Back on topic though.  If I wanted a bank account I would be asked for identification to which I could produce any number of pieces of information; from drivers license to passport to a fingerprint of my social graph – a map of all my personal relationships. The fact is any identity identifying details could and should suffice (bank regulation accepting).

So because a person doesn’t have a bank account or a fixed permanent address does not render someone identity less at all.  It’s just that current structures for identifying an individual are tied to far too strict a set of minimal options.

As a byword; in New Zealand the driver’s license is ONLY acceptable in law as proof of entitlement to drive on public roads.  It is NOT a piece of identification that can be legally relied upon for any other purpose.  Yet I have clear recollection of opening a new bank account with KiwiBank – a state owned and run bank, where it was THE ONLY form of identification they would accept.

The is one situation though where people do appear to be identity less – the refugee, and more particularly the stateless individual.  In a series of conversations and arguments with Vinay Gupta during early 2009 he was able to convince me of situations in his experience in Africa where people without papers or any physical form of identification were held in refugee camps after crossing borders.  To the hosting country they were in effect identity less.  No one was willing to even go so far as to assign a case number or start asylum  proceedings.  They were no one in the eyes of others.

I consider myself fairly well connected. I talk to a lot of different people, in a lot of places about a lot of varied things. One thing I have always noticed about my networking though is just how bad I am at maintaining meaningful and useful relationships with large numbers of people.

In the last week I have finally hit 150 odd followers/following on Twitter, not a lot by some standards, but a significant number none the less. You see 150 (or thereabouts) is known as Dunbar’s Number.

In an article 1992 article, anthropologist Robin Dunbar predicted a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationship. He based the theory on a study of non-human primates but argued a “mean group size” of 148 (casually rounded to 150) was near the limit of humans.

So maybe this would explain why despite much pruning I have found that my follow list of around 150 on Twitter (there are a few bots in there granted) hasn’t really grown in the last couple of months.

In fact on Jaiku I topped out at 110-115 over 6 months ago and it hasn’t changed by more than a couple since.

My address book on the phone is always about 160 with regular pruning of obsolete contacts.

BUT does this mean I only know/communicate with about 150 or so people? There is overlap but the the number I would estimate is nearly 250-300 people spread across several services.

So how does this related back to Dunbar?

Well there is context at work here. I use different services for different jobs. Jaiku for me offers a very personal conversational medium, one in which I discuss topics, sometimes at length, with people some of whom I now consider to be “friends” even though I may never have met them in the real world. I suspect the more limited set of contacts is based on the more involved nature of the conversations.

Twitter is less conversational, more of a announce and respond time medium. Whilst there are a number of my Jaiku contact sitting on the blue channel also the majority of my 150 or so followings are people who I know in a more professional context. Twitter is used for asking and answering simple questions, sharing a brief thought or announcing an event. I find it far easier to maintain a larger number of relationships in this format.

Where to next?

I know people who just don’t believe in Dunbar’s number, to be fair though many of them are also follower junkies living in heady clouds of thousands of followers/followings. Do they know each and every one of them, of course not but it’s volume that matters to them.

(As a note my thinking on following addicts is that in volume they consciously/sub-sconsciously are seeking validation of their thinking, afterall they have thousands of people listening to their words and there’s wisdom in them there crowds isn’t there?)

I expect my following/followers will exceed this theoretical limit over the coming weeks, tools such as Tweetdeck will help me manage this rise in volume through partitioning and filtering.

My instinct tells me that whilst Dunbar’s number may well have worked in an offline connected world that the use of technologies (effectively creating artificial contexts I guess) will extend our useful reach way beyond 150.

I predict however that my ability to maintain the current level of personal interaction with each and every one will decrease. I will spread myself thinner and thinner in an effort to please everyone.

We will see.

It’s by no means perfect, a little slow and doesn’t pick up all the meta-data behind profiles correctly. Also I suspect the Flickr API would groan with 2 or 3 levels but what fun that would be.