Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_ results. (For an

Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_ results. (For an example close at hand, I believe that I did an awful lot of growing up by confronting fears of rejection and learning to act on an attraction.) Me responding to your points: Of course there was a social graph, it just wasn't reified in a database. Here's how it worked: You got an email saying someone had a crush on you. Curious to see who it was, you then entered all your friends & classmates email addresses in to see if there was a match. Not a whit of difference in what's actually happening; you've just made it shinier and removed some of the manual data entry. The "Step 3: ??? that comes before Step 4: profit" was, of course, that all your friends now received "someone has a crush on you!" emails too, and the marketer running the site had a nice fat verified mailing list to sell to unsolicited bulk email operations. Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product.