Deriving real value from the social graph

As the physical presences formerly known as "human beings" undergo transmutation into electronic avatars on the realtime social network, the ability to automatically track and analyze their "movements" and "relationships" becomes an increasingly attractive value-mining opportunity. This opportunity exists today, but what's required to exploit it is the connection of the rich data collected on avatars' online activities with data collected on various salient economic variables. Such a connection of datasets would allow much more precise estimates of the economic value of, for instance, "friends" and "followers" in the context of both consumer markets and labor markets and, in turn,... http://ping.fm/jNLhM