The Power of the Social Graph

At this point, we are all familiar with the viral spread of information throughout the web. We blog, we tweet, we post links to Facebook or LinkedIn. The simple fact remains that Social Media has changed the way we interact with the web and this has never been more apparent to me personally than the spread of an Israeli producer's video called ThruYou.

The producer's name is Kutiman and he created a mashup of YouTube videos to make some pretty cool music. But first things first, if you haven't seen the video (http://thru-you.com/), then check it out. Okay, you impressed? Well so was I.

The interesting thing here is that I saw this link while purusing Mashable, then saw it on TechCrunch. The next thing you know, it was all over Facebook, Twitter, and just about every other network that I'm a part of. I even forwarded the link over to a lot of my friends for them to check it out.

Hundreds of thousands or even millions of views later, I'm now starting to realize the true power of the Social Graph. All of us that work in this industry know that you can only do so much to sway people to try your product/service, but it's the content itself that takes on a life of its own. Kutiman didn't know that this was going to be a world-wide phenomenon, but neither did each person that posted, forwarded, tweeted, or linked to the video that he created.

More and more with examples like this everyday, I start to feel like we are all a small part of the larger part we call Social. Pretty cool stuff huh?

Does anyone else have another example of a viral video or article that made them feel the same way?

Requests in Real Time

Imagine this situation: You're at work and you're eating lunch. You chip your tooth and you realize that you need to see a dentist immediately. What can you do if you don't have a dentist nearby that you can call?

Peerviders is an application that allows friends to review and recommend service providers to others that they know and trust. With that said, you can log into Facebook, open your Peerviders application and scan through your list of friends to see if anyone you know has a dentist that they would recommend. If they have one, great! Search, over.

What I'm more interested in is the situation when none of your friends has a dentist to recommend. Right now, the application allows for you to ask a friend that might be able to help, but there is a time-lag with regard to the amount of time it will take for your friend to respond.

Good news - Facebook just announced that applications can now include invites via the Facebook Chat feature. Check this article out - http://mashable.com/2009/03/05/facebook-chat-invites

We're starting to look into how this will work for Peerviders.

Now imagine you chip that tooth, log into Facebook, nobody has a dentist to recommend, but you look at your friends who are currently online. You will be able to send a Peerviders invite via chat and get that recommendation in real time. Pretty cool huh?

Keep your eye out for this new feature in the future, I know I'll use it. Will you?