The MySmartChannels viral connector is a simple process that makes it possible to invite someone (that may or may not have a user account) to participate in the consumption (and possibly, creation) of channel content. The objective of this feature is to make it nearly a friction-free process to involve other people in the flow and visibility of channel content. But as we unveiled this capability to our closest beta testers, we noticed something peculiar. As users invited new and existing MySmartChannels members, the association objects that we were creating [purely for tracking purposes] started to resemble a social interaction map. In fact, as we studied the relationships, we recognized that it is naturally mapping the relationships between authors, invitation recipients and target channels – a good indication of social networking with specific regard to information topics and occurrences. This is kind of exciting, because our platform derives this information without asking users to give up anything, or submit any information. Furthermore, we get this data for free – no additional development costs. In greater detail, there are two possible "acceptance" events for each invitation: - A contact signs up as a MySmartChannels new user in response to an invitation; and
- A user (possibly a new one that just signed up, or possibly an existing one) accepts the invitation to view the target channel of information item.
Each of these events is represented by a tri-nary association of the form with the following roles: - inviterID is the MySmartChannels user that sent the invitation;
- inviteeID is the (possibly new) MySmartChannels user that accepted the invitation; and
- targetID is the MySmartChannels object to which the invitee was invited to view.
Access to such information lets us answer our own internal queries such as: - Which MySmartChannels objects are responsible for attracting the greatest number of new users?
- Which MySmartChannels users are responsible for attracting the greatest number of new users?
- Which MySmartChannel objects had the greatest number of invited visitors?
- Which MySmartChannels users are the most active inviters?
Also, interestingly, these associations help us to fill in a FOAF map because they provide insight into at least one type of relationship between users. In a sense, this is emergent because it builds a relationship ontology through pheromone-like association objects that are naturally "dropped" as users interact with each other. Making the leap to generate a variant of XML that describes this ontology is trivial. As you may recall, I have always felt that an association-based platform (of some sort) is necessary to achieve social mapping objectives. Furthermore, traditional relational databases will only serve to stifle advances in this field. Our platform (while not intended to serve as a social networking platform), was designed to yield "unintended consequences" – and it looks like this happens to be one of them. | 
