Why facebook apps are important even though they annoy the crap out of me

Facebook applications are here to stay, and are, I suspect the key data point that will provide Facebook with an edge in the social advertising space. The reason being is that the applications give Facebook a unique way to look into how closely user are located on the social grapb and in what manner they are close on the graph. (Well, technically, it actually create a set of graphs, one per communication channel that can be projected down onto a single graph using from matrix transform, but whatevs.) By combining this new data, with the permission graph that all the social networking systems have (this is what you are used to, so-and-so can see this data but not that data, etc) you start to get a pretty persuasive package of socially intelligence agents with permission settings that allow access to and from the data with user confidence.

The genius here is that by forcing all of this networoked behavior over their permission graph, Facebook makes sure that the implicit graph and the explicit graph overlap, an furthermore, the implicit graph is a subset of the explicit graph, guaranteeing that for any implicit edge, there's a explicit trust or permission edge dictating what inferences can be used from that edge. Genius. Contrast that with OpenSocial, which gies google a myriad of implicit edges, but no explicit edges, and even those edges that it can find will exist in a federated system of graphs that are, most likely, highly degenerate. What a mess. It will take Google a long time to sort this out and come up with a way to unlock the implicit behavior for their clients. Meanwhile Facebooks new and rather impressive R&D team will be churning out one novel application of implicit networks after another.

Now if only someone could give them an applications that generated an implicit network based on something other than zombies, vampires or ninjas.