Josh Elman discusses the social web and how the Facebook Platform supports social applications. This presentation is from the inaugural Glue Conference in Denver, 2009.
Most of the presentation explores the nature of social networks and the characteristics that define subsets of such networks. The typical network begins with an individual who establishes links to other individuals in at least four categorical ways: friends, family, co-workers, and public profiles. Public profiles can include celebrities and other kinds of resources, like media outlets, or organizations.
The final parts of the presentation deal with the "virtuous cycle of sharing,"involved as members of the network share content. Content can range from tweets to videos, to documents - almost any kind of content. Facebook offers an Open Stream API as part of its platform specifically to enhance and simplify the creation of these kind of sharing services in any social network application. Other parts of the Facebook Platform address issues of identity (and sharing of trusted identity across applications) and social graphing.
View Gluing together the Web via the Facebook Platformfor more information about social networking and how Facebook supports it.