The first was portalization. This was the period that Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, MSN and AOL were the primary destinations for web surfers. 

The second trend is de-portalization. This trend still exists today and is made up of two elements. 

• Firstly, there are more publishers of content than ever before. This is made up of a growing number of professional publishers such as GigaOm, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb. It also involves a huge number of publishers who publish as a hobby, through various blogging platforms. 
• Secondly it is made up of a new type of portal, we can call it a social portal, which serves as a hosting platform and  an application server for individuals who wish to have their own Internet presence, and a place to interact with their friends or colleagues. These social portals - such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Linkedin - are joined by the morphing of the old portals (Yahoo and AOL in particular) into something more like a social portal. The key new element in a social portal is the fact that the content consumed is almost all user-generated, and therefore free to the hosting platform, whilst serving as a rich basis for interaction and engagement. The term social network has been used to describe these portals. But they are, in fact, portals with social features.
  
• The new publishers and the social portals now account for a huge proportion of internet traffic, and almost all of the growth in internet traffic. From being a medium, the Internet has evolved into a rich, interactive, communications infrastructure.

With the rise of social interaction on the Internet several new questions are posed. Users now leave behind a rich trail of information about themselves and their friends in each environment they inhabit. They also share information about themselves with friends. New sets of data, highly valuable to an advertiser - are being created as users actions leave behind an audit trail.

This new data is the subject of much discussion. Who owns it? Who can share it? And with whom? These are issues of Control and Access.

That is the context in which the debate about the social graph has arisen.