The best blog post I read today was on TechCrunch, written by Naval Ravikant, an early investor in Twitter, and Adam Rifkin, who I once knew, a long time ago, when he was starting a wonderfully-named company called KnowNow.

Anyway, this post had a single idea that's worth repeating, and remembering whenever you think one of the leading platforms has it wrapped up.

The idea is this: There are many possibe social graphs.

The thesis of this piece was that Twitter's graph has different value from Facebook's because its structure of a relationship is more meaningful in some ways.

In Facebook a friendship is symmetric. If I have a connection to you then you must have a connection to me.

In Twitter, you can have a connection to me, but that does not say that I have a connection to you.

Facebook has labels on friendship arcs, I can say you're my lover, wife, or just a friend -- or I can decline to say what our relationship is. But I can't say we have a relationship unless you agree.

Facebook relationships represent reality. Twitter relationships represent aspirations.

Neither of them has a language for defining relationships, in other words I can't extend the idea of a relationship arbitrarily. And it doesn't seem to be in the DNA of either company to allow others to get in there and mess with this core stuff. (When Twitter started they made it seem like it was their philosophy, but they've been pulling back from that, in some dramatic ways.)

No doubt we'll look back at these networks years from now and see them as starting points, because neither now has anything like the full richness of human connection that can be modeled in computers. And of course some relationships will be very difficult to model in a computer's memory. But for now and for the forseeable future, there's lots of growth possible in this form of modeling. Maybe that's why there's so much investment today in tech.

I love blog posts that make me think, or change my thinking.

Good work!!

 10/16/2010; 7:40:42 PM.   .

My first report from the Lower East Side.

1. Big news! They removed the scaffolding from the Starbucks on Astor Place.

2. Earlier today I caught a demonstration of skateboarding on Broadway.

3. The Mud Truck is a good place to get coffee.

4. The East Village is often as loud as the West Village. But the drunks don't seem as angry, and they're quiet (or asleep) by 3AM, unlike their West Village counterparts. And they don't sound like trannies.

5. I drove my car for the first time today in a couple of months. It's very different from driving a bike. At times I found myself forgetting that. Luckily there were no bikers nearby to observe and to chastise me (as I certainly would have if I had been biking nearby Dave-the-driver).

6. My move yesterday was done by Moishe's Movers. They rolled out the red carpet for this Twitter micro-celeb. They not only packed everything, and apparently nothing is missing or broken (haven't unpacked everything yet) but helped with some of the unpacking. The price was an incredible $950 for three men, most of the day. Big thumbs up. Great service, great price.

7. I don't have my FIOS yet, so I'm using my Verizon MiFi card for local Internet access. Works pretty well.

 10/16/2010; 6:10:06 PM.   .