Above is a slideshow prepared by Paul Adams a senior user experience researcher at Google  detailing the differences between the current social web and the actual real life social graph.

This is a really well done presentation it exposes all of the current issues with how the major social networks are working at the moment.  The major problem seems to be that right now all of your friends are grouped into one large pool so everyone see’s everyone else’s updates. This unfortunately is not how real world social graphs work. In the real world most of us have a number of different social groups that will most likely never meet. The presentation looks at this issue in great detail showing the number of problems it can cause.

What I think is most interesting about this presentation though is that it pops up on the web during a time of great speculation that Google will be launching a new social network soon which people are saying will be called google me. This has been a hot topic for a while now and honestly I was not all that excited given googles track record with social applications. However seeing this presentations brings a lot more to the table and makes it seem like they actually may be on to the real next generation social network.  Of course for Google to compete with Facebook at this point they will need to nail a few additional things as well, the most important being the user interface.