Research conducted by Duncan Watts and now CNET Networks would lead you to believe so.

Here’s the catch. Duncan Watts is an academic, a sociologist. Neither he nor I should ever come into contact with each other according to his theories. Yet I am now connected to him, albeit in an ancillary way, yet connected enough to have read his Fast Company article and his book Six Degree’s.

How is this possible? It turns out that Duncan Watts, in order to reach a greater audience, got published in an online magazine that is trusted and highly connected to the technology world. This in turn got him noticed by Guy Kawasaki. It turns out that Guy is also a trusted source of original content and he is highly connected to people via his blog. He is the very definition of an Influencer or to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology he is a connector.

Sure these connections are not strong ties as in a familial tie, but weak ties (the topic for another blog post). Enough of a connection exists that someone living in north eastern Wisconsin (virtually the middle of no where, serious it just down the road) is connected via a connector in California, to a Academic at a college in New York.

This very connection seems to imply that something may not be entirely correct about the interpretation of Duncan Watts’ work.

I have finally found my dream application - Tabber. It’s rough around the edges. It lacks the usability that Spokeo has for reading your friends posts. You add your feeds/sites and it will auto-discover your friends. It builds a list creating your lifestream and attaches you to a list of your friends lifestreams.

This seems to all be accomplished by using a combination of the hCard microformat and RSS feeds. I admit it isn’t perfect. For instance I have someone I am linked to on Twitter and also linked to in del.icio.us, but since they have different screen names they show as two contacts. Perhaps they have a way of telling them apart if the hCard contained more information.

The big thing that I see lacking, besides the desperate need of a graphic designer, is the inclusion and utilization of FOAF information. Once I put in my FOAF info it could grab my friends info and possibly de-dupe.

Despite the minor roughness, this is the ideal social application and a fantastic use of microformats. I can’t believe Google hasn’t snatched this up to integrate into Blogger or Yahoo! to integrate into Y360 (did they abandon this?)

I have been following the Social Network Portability(SNP) group setup at Google. The conversation there has been lively and dynamic at times. But the conversation always seems to boil down to the need for a centralized approach to managing friends. I just don’t see where that is much different than using Facebook. And why is it everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel? Create their own “unique” protocol or data format.

Henry Story from Sun Microsystems chimed in yesterday with a fantastically detailed dialog on the whole social graph or SNP problem. What I found really interesting about the whole post is that he never attempts to develop a new standard, format, or protocol.

Henry dives right into the elephant in the room, security. Stating the obvious: “Not everyone lives in the open the same way” He is the first one to make me understand the beauty of the mbox_sha1sum. Then he goes on to give an example of providing different foaf’s based on the amount of trust you assign to each person.

This was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it.

Trying to find that one ring to rule them all seems to run counter to the whole reason this conversation is happening. It’s time to turn the conversation to a truly open system, much in the way DNS or even OpenID is.

If you have been awake sometime in the last 48 hours or so I am certain you have heard about the Social Graph. Even the name is a source of debate. This seems to me similar to the ajax “web 2.0″ explosion. It was nothing new, XMLHttpRequest had been there a long time. It just took the browser to get to the tipping point then some programmer to decide to stick his neck out and use it.It seems that is where this social graph discussion is heading. Formats like RDF and FOAF have been hanging around in one fashion or another for some time. Suddenly everyone has taken notice as though it’s a new revelation.This is a good debate.I have to say that I am beginning to shy away from the central repository idea (non-profit or not) that has been being bantered around. I see this as moving the stove pipe from one side of the house to the other. Never solves the problem that its still a stove pipe, that its to small and constraining.I prefer the idea of people owning their data. I have seen some simple ideas come up to resolve friend relationships by necessitating any friend that you point to would need also point back at you. Astro is my friend because I have indicated it in my FOAF. Astro confirms this by indicating I am his friend in his FOAF.The FOAF documents need some work. The FOAF project website is in shambles. So there is some work to be done. To consider moving my data from his site to your site doesn’t fix the problem. I want my data on my site. Then provide a solid way to share that data so it can then be used effectively.Now that is the real problem that needs a clever solution.