Graphing the social graph graph

Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook.
A lot of the usual suspects of social network bloviating are speaking (I count two women out of 20 named speakers), including representatives from Facebook, LinkedIn, O’Reilly (Tim himself), Forrester Research, TechCrunch, and of course Scoble, and others.
The conference describes itself as
> for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications.The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9; an optional pre-conference workshop is Sunday, 10/7.
If you’re interested, you can register at EventBrite.
They’ve certainly populated the conference title well with buzzwords. The term social graph, popularized by facebookistas (and annoying to those who consider it an obscure jargon synonym for social network – oh, and don’t get jonas luster started on how social network software is not the same thing as a social network) seems to be everywhere these days, and of course people love to talk about recognizing and capturing (or detecting, heh) patterns.
For a counter view of the importance of Facebook’s social graph as a platform for application development, check out the truth about facebook apps: most people ignore them:
> Once installed, most widgets are ignored.
>
> Slide’s “Top Friends” boasts the most active users: 2.7 million people, or 20% of its user base, use it every day. The app with the highest engagement percentage: “WarBook,” a medieval fantasy game, is played by 18,000 people a day, or 42% of its install base. The “iLike” app, oft-cited as a Facebook success story, may be less popular than we thought: 646,000 people, or 9% of its install base, use it daily.
(via cwodtke’s tweets, who recently noted that she and I seem to be on some sort of convergence path)