Freeing up the social graph

WSJ.com – Real Time: “Friendster has various community-related plans to make money off the network. But we can see some other applications. For instance, Friendster could license its service to law enforcement. Forget the photos pinned on the corkboard: Just plug in profiles for all the major players, and see connections that weren’t obvious before. Corporate governance could get a boost as well. Steve serves on the compensation committee of a company whose CEO’s husband invested in his start-up? Outrageous! And here’s the Friendster network to prove it.”

This ties in with my idea of using similar software to track criminal conspiracies by matching up people and connections, with the added angle of tracking the connections against a time-dimension as well.