Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a piece detailing the extensive program of data sweeping and data mining that is presently being conducted by the NSA:

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns

Naturally, this sort of practice runs smack-dab against a variety of privacy concerns, not least among them the 4th Amendment, which serves to protect Americans from unreasonable search and seizure and requires particularization - which is intended to curtail broad information dragnets.

Others have commented on the creeping totalitarianism inherent in this program as well as the nature of the “surveillance society” - two very important issues. And largely these are solid positions and concerns. It’s not chicken-little scare mongering. The programs are here. Now.

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The Nexus Facebook social network visualizer is pretty cool, and the best implemented one that I have seen. It does what you would expect it to: displays the relationships between you and your facebook friends. The output graph is really good looking and useful. Mine is shown below.

There are a few different clusters I notice here: one of high school friends, one of friends from a student group, and one from people I know through blogging. The main cluster is people I see fairly often in every day life.

While looking at these graphs is really interesting and can reveal some connections, I would like to see makers of applications like this take it one step further and add the possibility of analysis.
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I meant to comment earlier on this Fast Company article featuring Duncan Watts(author of “Six Degrees”) disputing the role that Influentials play in driving innovation:

He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Valdis Krebs goes on to point out that it is not necessarily the most highly connected individuals who are the most influential. Rather, in order for influence to spread, a large number of people within a network cluster need to adopt an idea, rather than one powerful one.
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Google just released a “social graph” API(I call them social networks, or sociograms, but OK) which returns XFN and FOAF data as a JSON object(sorry for all the acronyms) so that you can produce social graphs of various relationships on the web. I have yet to try it, but will probably poke around with it this weekend.

I would be curious to learn how much XFN data exists on the Web by default. I know that Wordpress uses it by default when you create links to other sites, but I am not sure how well supported it is otherwise. Same deal for FOAF - I have not really heard much news from that end for quite a while.
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I gave a rough sketch of the field of social network analysis, but Mark Hanneman’s Introduction to Social Network Methods will give you the real deal. He was kind enough to offer it for free online.

I did not know that Stanley Wasserman had a blog at Visible Path’s centralityjournal. He did - and now it seems that he will be moving over to the Networked Governance blog. I will be looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

While talking to a friend recently I realized that when one says “social networks” nowadays people immediately think that you are talking about sites like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc. While these “social networking sites” can be analyzed much as any other social network, they are really just the tip of the iceberg.
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