Targeted Personal Knowledge Graphs in Professional Networks. From Hunters to DAO and beyond

NOSTR protocol is about Social Networks. What came first to your mind when we mentioned social Networks? Many people compare NOSTR-based apps with Twitter, but Twitter is far from a social movement. The most extensive social network of mine is not Twitter or Mastodon. Not even Facebook, where my wife and professional recruiter found me. It is Linkedin!

It was never about Twitter.

Twitter was launched around 2006, but before it was.

SixDegrees.com (1997): As mentioned, it was the first to allow users to create profiles and friend lists.

LiveJournal (1999): Allowed users to keep a blog, journal, or diary and make connections.

Friendster (2002): One of the first to use the term “social network,” it allowed users to connect with friends, post pictures, and share content.

Hi5 (2003): Popular in Latin America and Southeast Asia, users can create profiles, connect with friends, and share photos and videos.

LinkedIn (2003): Focused on professional networking, it allowed users to connect with colleagues and other professionals.

MySpace (2003): Allowed users to create profiles, have a list of friends, and share music and other media. It was particularly popular among musicians and artists.

Orkut (2004): Developed by Google, it was popular in Brazil and India.

Facebook (2004): Initially limited to Harvard students, it quickly expanded and became the dominant social network.

I was an earlier adopter of a Live Journal and always was about long-form content, but my LinkedIn is a big part of me.

Future of Targeted Social Networks

By targeted, I mean a social network of people with a common interest and goals with some passion and topics that unite them, or maybe it is a place where you could find folks that were extremely hard to find on Facebook, like posts with food, cats, and boobs. The first successful and long-lived targeted social network for me was LinkedIn.

From Hunters Middle Ages Guilds to LinkedIn and DAO

People get together around profession and mastery from the early beginning. I think Hunters was the first tribal guild )). It is not only about a job search. It is also about mastery of skills, pride, and status and showing who you are. I know many folks have LinkedIn, but the root of the problem is not a topic of social media. It is more around a corporate culture that heavily shaped social media. It should be different.

LinkedIn got Evil?!

It is a classical story. The project was started with good intentions and goals, but somebody else's business is eager to make money. In general, it is two simple strategies:

• Lock users' data in a platform
• Limit access to this data and make money on top of it. Millions of profiles are now locked in prison with limits to connect and search. Recruiters struggle the most.

If LinkedIn kills your profile, it is practically the end of your recruiter career.

I am not looking for a job.

Nowadays, we have industries and professions that depend completely on platforms like Linked In because we haven’t invented a Google for people or, let’s say, Google for professionals, and the best that we have is LinkedIn, Xing, Monster, Stepstone focus on the broken idea of a job search. Your job is a subset of your activities, skills, and interests. I am a YouTuber and NOSTR enthusiast keen on decentralized tech, open technology, and open source. I am a tea lover and keen on cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, and all these stills and interests contribute to my professional profile and form my bubbles of people. I am looking for:

• people
• interesting challenges
• Confirmation of my skill
• proof of my knowledge and achievements from a network
• verifiable skills, I do not want to attend another interview in my life. Big dream — i give you my profile based on a verified data point, and we could chat about our shared values. I tried to prove that I knew JS or design patterns over and over and over again.

It is not about content; it is about relationships !!

We don’t see a forest among the trees…

Targeted Social Graph

We are over-focused on content, but the real asset of social media that people often need to understand is a social graph. Your connections matter a lot. Your connections and audience could say more about you than your content. We do not have tools today to express our connections meaningfully. You can connect or follow on Linked In, but human relations are way more complex, even in professional areas. it is all about portable social Graphics and portable audiences. Work relations or skill relations is more about what you do for others. Interoperability is a cornerstone of any protocol, so we need to find a way to describe our relations interoperably. Semantic Web made a few attempts to do.

“Friend of Friends” (FoF)

Semantic web folks created the first try to make a portable social graph. In a semantic web, we have a concept of anthology. An ontology is a formal specification of a conceptualization. In simpler terms, it’s a way to define the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that exist for a particular domain. In the semantic web context, ontologies are often expressed in languages like RDF (Resource Description Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language), or Turtle. The concept of a “Friend of Friends” (FoF) ontology is often used in the context of semantic web technologies, social networking, and data modeling. The idea is to create a structured representation of social networks where relationships like “friendship” can be formally defined and queried. This is particularly useful for applications that require a deep understanding of social connections, such as recommendation systems, targeted advertising, or social analytics. The problem is that we have limited relation descriptions, so you mimic this person's link.

“Description of a Career” (DOAC) and Resume RDF

“Description of a Career” (DOAC) ontology focuses on capturing various aspects of an individual’s professional life. This could include:

1. Basic Information: Name, contact details, and other personal identifiers.
2. Skills: A list of skills the individual possesses, possibly categorized by domain (e.g., programming, management).
3. Qualifications: Academic background, certifications, and other formal qualifications.
4. Work Experience: Past roles, responsibilities, and achievements.
5. Projects: Specific projects worked on, the role played, and technologies used.
6. Endorsements: Recommendations or endorsements from colleagues, supervisors, or other professional contacts.
7. Goals: Career objectives and plans.

We are still not there.

Resume RDF does a similar job but still does a pure job in relations. Some ontologies define your work relations in terms of organization structure. We need relations in the context of skills and what people do. We made a Web3 app together. We run a fantastic event, etc. Something that gives an understanding of what you do for other people with other people.

It should be Personal.

A social network is a HyperGraph of Interconnected Personal Knowledge Graphs. Personal Knowledge Graphs are a relatively new topic in a data space, but it is a future and critical tool for AI-powered agents.

The center and context of any Personal Knowledge Graph is You. It is your data and your values. The critical part is that this data should stay with you and be portable and interoperable. That's why I spend so much time on ontology and data formats.

NOSTR Context

Nostr has one considerable supper power — All events are signed. It means it is an end verifiable, immutable, and temper-proof. We are almost there. We already have a backbone of social features that have more powerful relations. could enrich

NOSTR missed social graph features

Now you see a problem. More than a list of followers is required. We need to find a better way to describe an interaction experience with other people in the context of skills, knowledge, interests, and what they do for the community and us. Don’t be a stranger! You could tell much more about your relation to a person.

NOSTR missed events

As far as NOSTR protocol goes with an idea of kinds of events, it turns to a complex path of extending a protocol with particular human activities. One area is a people’s lifetime events

• job or project
• achievement or
• Completion of the task for DAO
• Skill and skill recommendation One more potential feature — maybe I want to follow selective events from a person only related to some types of activities

The DAO friendly

DAO will change the way we work shortly. For some of my friends, it is already a reality. It is hard to build a reputation in a highly anonymous environment. I see a big undiscovered potential for Target Personal Social Graphs powered by NOSTR for talent and partner search. But it will be a topic for the next article.