This article is so good. So good that I have read it about five times and howled with laughter and nodded my head in agreement.
What happens to dead people in the social graph? Facebook keeps profiles around for a while in memoriam, so we probably shouldn’t just purge dead contacts from the social graph immediately. But we certainly don’t want them haunting us on LinkedIn – maybe there should be a second, Elysian social graph where we can put those nodes to await us?
You can call this nitpicking, but this stuff matters! This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they’re completely inadequate.
via The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog).