Six people
That’s how far you are from anyone in the world right now. Be it your favorite actor or the president of a world power. This concept is called the six degrees of separation and in today’s age, it is probably even less than that. Social media has made almost everyone in the world one click away. Most would-be business men invest quite a bit of time in networking. Quite frankly, I have absolutely nothing against typical networking. That is, going to networking events and consciously going to places to network.
This concept of the/a NetGraph, whose explanation will come in very shortly, has been gnawing my brain recently. Here’s the thing, in most cases, if you want to meet anyone in the world, you wouldn’t even know where to start. That’s why networking is a skill. Since you always know someone who may know someone who may know someone that knows the person you want to access, it would be ideal if you knew who exactly you need to talk to to get you in front of whoever you want to access. That’s where the NetGraph comes in. NetGraph is a shortened form of a network graph, which is a graph that represents your networks, casual and professional. NetGraph is a piece of software that asks you to provide your social media details, then it taps into your friends and their friends. It finds out who talks to who and who knows the person that knows the person who talks to the one you’d like to meet. Those sentences were a bit of mind wranglers but please do read them again if you have to.
How it would work
For the NetGraph to work effectively, there would be three levels:
Level one: Shallow
This is the base level “stalking” so to speak. It checks basic social media follows and finds a paper-trail you need to follow to meet anyone you want. It saves you countless hours or months in some cases of hit and miss. It does this by checking who the people you follow and engage with on social media know, then it finds out who they follow and associate with. It does this multiple times while assigning a score based on how much they interact with each other until it finds the person you would like to meet. If it does not find the person who is directly going to introduce you to your person of interest, it suggests the closest person it could find and tries to “guess” based on interactions with people closer to your person of interest. This essentially means it will find you the best possible connection you can have by checking social media interactions dating back on every social media platform. This would ideally take a few minutes to a few hours.
Level two: Moderate
We start collecting and scraping news and gossip related sites. If you have a high profile or relatively known person of interest then they may have appeared magazines, shows or news sites. We scrape and use AI (Artificial intelligence) to extract the involved individuals in making that article come to life. We start tracing their connections and our connections and finding the connection chain of least resistance that we can use to access this person of interest. Level two also uses the entire system of Level one coupled with news and article aggregation to find people of interest. This would, in theory, take a few days at most.
Level three: Deep
We (The AI) watch videos that are publicly available and listen for any names that are mention then try to analyze what context they are used in to establish if that is a person that may know your person of interest. Again, if your person of interest is famous, this is easier. It also uses Level one and two to check socials while scanning through news sites to see if there is any correlation between the people who may get you to your person of interest. We also check for possibly connections with people that have been determined to be potential direct connections to your person of interest. This would take the longest. Probably a couple of days to weeks.
Ethics
Obviously, with great power comes great responsibility. So before building something like this, we need to ask ourselves, what could possibly go wrong? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what issues you think may come up as a result of such a technology existing. Let me know in the comments and thanks for stopping by.
