Interest Graph( From Interest Graph( Picture by ShinyShiny.tv)

Om Malik (senior writer for Forbes.com, Red Herring and Business 2.0), in his recent blog post, explains his views on the next generation of social networks.
He predicts that, in the future,  there will be lots of specific social graphs, instead of one big social graph.  He explains that  our friends are not necessarily the best source of recommendations in all aspects. We might have a friend that we really like his/her taste in music, but we don’t like his/her sense in movies.

Therefore he suggests that the next generation of social applications are those that build their interest-oriented networks on top of large social networks. Furthermore, he thinks that these kind of networks have more potential for making purchases happen (something which social networks advertising is not currently very good at, in compare with other online industries such as search engine advertising).

For entrepreneurs, I believe there are opportunities to create unique experiences around the concept of “interest graphs” that can be built off the backs of uber-networks such as Facebook and Twitter. These networks can help find the right kind of audience to build a viable channel for new commerce experience. (Om Malik)

Our movie application (MovieIt) has been built on the very same idea. Users in our application have the opportunity to choose the people they want to follow, and connect with the ones they trust, instead of following all their friends.  Furthermore,our application has a large potential for making purchases happen ( which in our application is buying cinema tickets).