We find the “Apps your friends like” section to be especially intriguing: is Google going to use Gmail, Buzz or something else to determine who your friends are?

It’s a very good question and it’ll be interesting to see what Google comes up with. However at the same time I have a small sense of dread for having yet another social graph. Is that a sign that I’m getting dated or that the social graph is? Depending on which it is, one of us is due for an update.

The social graph is so last year, or is it?

Working in the consumer Internet space I joined many of the social networks long before people heard of them, from Friendster to Cyworld America. The whole thing was novel years ago but now just seems so common. In a way it reminds me of how everyone cared about interoperability between messenger clients years ago. Today there still is nothing in the way of interoperability and yet people couldn’t care less. People’s Internet habits seem to change as quick as the weather. Messenger clients haven’t gone away, they’ve just evolved and handed the limelight over to newer trends.

I don’t prune my social graph, I just make new ones

It’s widely perceived that Facebook users can’t be bothered to recreate their social graphs and that these “switching costs” make user-acquisition too difficult for competing services. A win by Foursquare – heck, even survival – while in direct competition with Facebook will call that assumption into question.

- Places Is Facebook’s Biggest Bet To Date

For me it’s the exact opposite, I want to switch. I wanted to get far away from MySpace and was happy Facebook was there. I’m happy when I’m on GChat and my friends on Yahoo! Messenger can’t see me. Frankly I’ve forgotten who some of my Yahoo! friends are. Messenger is old, it has my old friends on there and like many of them I’ve moved on.

I guess I could always prune my social graph on Facebook or Messenger but I just don’t care too expend the effort. Plus I feel bad in a way about deleting someone I once knew but have since forgot. The only list I care to prune is the contact list on my phone and it would be a stretch to call that a social graph.

So in the end I counter the perceived notion that there are “switching costs”. I’d rather jump and create a new social graph that better represents my current life than prune an old one. Like leaving bread crumbs to mark my path, I’ll leave the Internet sprinkled with my old social graphs.

All too often my feed is just noise

Email was great when I first got an account. I eagerly awaited every message. Now I can never get my inbox to zero. I feel the same way with my feed on Facebook. I know I can filter it, but I’m not going to for the same reason I don’t prune my social graph.

Location just adds to my social graph fatigue

I have a lot of friends so when I come to town I can’t possibly see all of them, so I’ve taken to only alerting those that I can see on that trip. It’s easier if the others don’t know I’m in town, helps to avoid uncomfortable conversations. Also helps avoid the, “I don’t want to hang out with you outside of work” conversation. Why do I have these work friends in my social graph? Because they asked to be added. All of this just ads to the anxiety I feel about my social graphs – just who’s exactly in it and will get this message? We’ve already seen people be fired for what they send out. Why do I need more anxiety in my life? Should I be fearful of who might show up next time I give out my location?

All this anxiety makes me want to just step away

Speaking of anxiety, every time Facebook releases a new feature the more I’m worried about my privacy. Can I really trust them with my social graph? Can I trust anyone with my social graph?

I already established that I’m not going to prune my social graph so that leaves me with little choice other than pack up and move on.

The death of the one size fits all social graph

In the end I find myself taking the easy route and using Facebook less and less to share. I share less personal stuff and tend more toward broadcasting links – which I find is better a task for Twitter. But I still like some aspects of social graphs like Facebook. What I really would like is multiple social graphs – a social graph for my family, close friends, and local friends. Maybe I’ll keep Facebook as my clearinghouse of every friend I’ve ever known and LinkedIn for my business connections.

Multiple social graphs could work, however that strategy doesn’t really leverage the true power of the social graph. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg has dreams for more unique ways to use our social graph, however based on my personal use I think I’m heading in the opposite direction. What I really want is more akin to Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that surfaces contextually relevant information about the email sender combed from the web. Open an email from a recruiter and see their avatar image, job title from LinkedIn,Twitter feed, etc. This is what I need – a loose social graph.

Maybe Rapportive can build in some levels to its social graph. If I email the person back we’re at level two of the graph. Maybe this unlocks other information that can be displayed. Maybe Rapportive can pull up information like what game I’m currently playing, book I’m reading, song I’ve starred.

Of course I don’t need this all to become noise either, I don’t want all of the info on this person. Maybe they could randomize it – surprise me. That’s what my daily routine needs more of anyway – fun surprises. And I’m being serious about the surprises.

Surprise me what social game my insurance agent is playing. Now that would be truly viral.

There is hope

After Facebook introduced Places all the talk last week was about what Foursquare would do now? From what it sounds like they’re moving toward splintering the all encompassing Facebook social graph. Just what I needed.

The goal is to make Foursquare a product that does a better job than Facebook Places of keeping users in touch with their real friends  – as supposed to the 700 people they know on Facebook.

Drawing up the next few posts I found a common theme – screenwriting. What can I say, I have a lot of story knowledge having failed to become a screenwriter.

Fail faster to succeed sooner.- David Kelly, CEO of IDEO

So with that in mind I’m going to refocus my blog around screenwriting. Not the art of screenwriting but how the principles of crafting a story can be applied to tech. In the past I’ve blogged about social media, virtual worlds, cloud computing, etc. but that doesn’t make me any different than the next guy. The unique voice I have is my screenwriting knowledge.

A decade ago I listened to Richard Newton, the former dean of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifelong champion of innovation, at a small private function in Silicon Valley. One of the things he said has stayed with me: Innovation opportunities going forward will be at the cusps of different disciplines–biology and computer science, information technology and health care, semiconductors and medicine.

- Barriers To Innovation

• Great technology built on an open format - X3D
• Plans to open up the platform
• A great distribution model
• Has developers in mind - Vivaty Creative and Vivaty Studio
• A great team with the right perspective
• Great backers - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures

That looks like a lot of opportunity rather than risk.

It’s exciting to be getting into the virtual worlds industry on the ground floor. The whole industry is still looking for the killer app that will attract a mainstream audience. I of course think that the killer app is immersive story. But even if I’m wrong, I have confidence in myself and the Vivaty team to discover whatever the killer app is.

Since I’m starting afresh with my blog after it unceremoniously exploded, I thought I’d give a quick intro to my blog and some recent history. Some of this is a rehash of a post I made a week ago after being inspired to return to more of a rant style.

First, this blog isn’t the easiest to get into as the concept of immersive story itself isn’t easy to grasp for many.  Sometimes I wish I was blogging about a topic that was well known, but then again what’s the fun in that. To try and help visitors I tried to keep the blog focused and explanatory. However I think I sacrificed some of my personal stake in doing this. After seeing Dusan’s rant on small worlds and oddly enough Scoble’s post about how the blogging community has failed, I feel the need to move to a more rant style. To be less concerned about my audience every day and just post – I know, what a novel idea, maybe I can call it a blog.

So to be clear, this blog will revolve around:

• Immersive story
  • Concept and requirements
  • Requirements for an immersive story engine (TapBot)
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) to make it work
  • Other technology that might be useful
  • Moving intelligent virtual agents to intelligent virtual characters
• Interactive story in general
• The metaverse
  • The industry
  • Platforms
  • Concepts
• Marketing
  • Methods in immersive story
  • Metaverse in general
• Social media marketing

I included social media marketing as I think it’s relevant, especially after the explosion of small worlds that revolve around social networking features. It’s also my day job as a Social Media Strategist at Experian.

One thing I’ll try and stay away from is re-reporting stories that most people discover through other means – FriendFeed, Google Reader, etc.

All in all I hope this will allow me to knock out posts at a quicker pace and ultimatley spend more time writing my screenplay. I know I’ve failed so far in the screenplay department, but I just can’t seem to give up the dream.

One – To avoid having to manually update Drupal to the latest version. My host, Bluehost provides SimpleScripts which makes instillation and updates a one button process. This will greatly cut back time spent doing maintenance and give me more time to work on my screenplay.

Two – Drupal is built to be more of a powerful and flexible CMS rather than simple blogging tool and consequently has a broader feature set. When I started the this blog over a year ago I thought I would use some of those additional features but as it turns out I use less of them. And if Failed Screenwriter is just going to be a blog, WordPress is the better suited tool. For one, the plugins that I’m most concerned about are updated quicker and many nice to have features are defaults in WordPress.

Three – I want to get more intertwined with the community while at the same time not get buried in spam. Features like Trackback and Pingback are great for this and are supported natively on WordPress.

So I bit the bullet and switched last night. I even moved most of my older blog posts even though I didn’t worry too much about keeping their original URLs. Then today I noticed my RSS feeds weren’t being updated in Google Reader. In trying to trouble shoot the problem I completely forked my WordPress instillation. My whole blog basically exploded. Boy was I not a happy camper. Not being a developer I wasn’t about to waste more time trying troubleshoot everything, so I decided to start again fresh.

This time instead of importing my old posts I decided to make this a clean start. I also believe that my old posts were the reason for the original RSS update problem. My original concerns were not being able to keep my original URL structures and my RSS subscribers. I wasn’t so worried about the URLs yesterday as anything older than a week is pretty dead in the land of blogs, for a lot of people on FriendFeed anything over 12 hours is old.

RSS subscribers I am very concerned with. I hate the thought that people might have to resubscribe but if I’m ever going to make the move, today is a better than in a month.

I’m trying to keep a positive attitude about all this. One thing it will enable, is for me to have a fresh start on my message. I’ll get to review what I’ve written and only carry over the most pertinent pieces. An essential step whenever trying to focus a message.

If my site is causing you to get broken links or you have to resubscribe to my RSS feed, I apologize but the thing kind of exploded on me – what was I to do.