Many are talking about the Social Graph at the technical level, leaving many business folks with many questions. The following, using clear business language (void of tech speak), will explain what is the Social Graph, why it matters, and what you should do.

Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.

Welcome to the second installment of our new People in Tech series. In this post we interview Jason Devitt, CEO/Co-Founder of Skydeck. It's a mobile web startup built on the premise that "you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email." The second big idea of Skydeck is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records.

Charlene Li gave the opening keynote at today's Graphing Social Patterns conference. The keynote was titled "The Future of Social Networks" and Charlene clarified that specifically she was focused on five to ten years out in her presentation. Her basic thesis is that in the future, 'social networks will be like air.' In other words, it will be ubiquitous as you navigate across the web and sites will feel inadequate (like you can't breathe) if a user's social network isn't part of the experience.

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

The word Web we normally use as short for World Wide Web. The WWW increases the power we have as users again. The realization was "It isn't the computers, but the documents which are interesting". Now you could browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on. Simpler, more powerful. Obvious, really.

Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them. OpenID, which was born at Six Apart less than two years ago, was successful by embracing a similar philosophy: no one company should own everyone’s online identity. An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.