Diametrics?
I was talking to a professor at Stanford today about how the social networks are looking at a cross-section of the social graph. At first, I was quite puzzled by this considering people usually only care about the singametric plane of the graph. An example of what he means is that in linguistics, singametric refers to the study of language in today, rather than diametric which is the study of language over time. His thesis was that people wanted to see more valuable data about their friends and connections and the best way to represent this was to look at their progression of psychological and relational over time. He felt that a diametric social graph would allow people to see how others changed over time which would be more meaningful because it would give perspective on how people became the people they are.
I also realized this might be interesting because people would be able to look at how their diametrics overlapped. It’s true that my friends all liked to listen to U2 a lot in high school but don’t do so very much today. But how valuable is this data to me? I don’t really know, but I do know that is has quite a lot to do with my previous post.
Psychological projections (which will most likely be discussed throughout this blog) do require a bunch of analysis on what people have done in the past. I know for a fact that people do decide to build connections because they have something in common that is substantive from the past. I have a much higher correlation with another person because we both went to the same college or both died our hair green during our emo period in high school. In that respect, diametrics might play a significant role in the makeup of a person’s psychographic projection.