Owning the Product Graph

February 4, 2008 in ThisNext, product graph

If you agree with O’Reilly (I do) that the web right now is about controlling data, then smart companies are trying to understand their business in terms of what kinds of data they are building. Big winners are those who own/control/provide access to classes of valuable data. Some examples: eBay owns that data on the secondary market, Google owns the data on the data, and Facebook owns the data about who knows who.

At TN, we think we are onto a real and valuable class of data that nobody has really identified and defined yet. We call it the “Product Graph”. I’m pretty sure we coined the term (first mention I can find is this interview with Gordon), and here is my current working definition:

The Product Graph:

The network of connections that exist through which people communicate and share information about products and brands and the resulting preference patterns visible in such information flows.

I’m sure we’ll come up with more elegant ways to express this idea, but the basics are there. The Product Graph is a real and valuable class of data that nobody has tried to index, characterize, and provide access to- yet. This is a big part of what we are working hard to do at ThisNext.