What’s the biggest social network in the world? Careful, it’s a trick question.

I started asking it about three years ago when I learned the answer from Tynt, a start-up that had stumbled upon a method for tracking what content is so important to us that we share it with others or keep it for ourselves. By tracking what we physically copy and paste from one digital medium to another — text, images, video, links, various forms of code — Tynt discovered that Facebook is not the social network. In fact, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and every other social networking site or app combined don’t even come close to the No. 1 way we share stuff: email is, by a margin of more than two-to-one.

universe is dark matter

“The universe is a big place. Perhaps the biggest” -Kilgore Trout

This is the best piece I’ve ever seen on the motivation behind my 2008 book about Twitter. I saw what would be an opportunity for real time data from our customers.

In our research, we started my radio show. One episode on data had a discussion where I heard the line “all of social media together is a fraction of 1 percent of SMS messaging”

As we discussed whether text data was being crunched by telcos, email content data, chat and more.. I had an epiphany:

MOST of human conversation will never be indexed.

What I say to other in the room while watching Superbowl ads, whether there are people in the room, the turning up and down volume and dozing off when there now hope for Denver are data points that are not being collected or even talked about.

You can put out the best content, ads that test through the roof and record setting ratings and it’s all thrown away if my brother stops by and says “I tried that product, it sucks”

Most of the universe is dark matter, but it’s all data. I think Zuckerberg gets this. His interviews in “The Facebook Effect” and Kirkpatrick commentary at the end of the book and in interviews that came with the audiobook spelled this out.

Zukerberber is not out to build the biggest web site. He’s building a social graph and that will dwarf what we see as Facebook.com today.

Read the article at MediaPost.com.