From numerous platforms and apps – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare – we are seeing a clear and continued evolution toward making it easier for consumers to declare not just their past or current actions (status updates, check-ins, etc) but their interests (as individuals and as groups) and even future plans or intentions.

There’s Google’s new privacy policy, Facebook actions,

With the likes of Pinterest, people can more easily than ever express their likes, tastes and passions. With apps like Springpad, they can also share what they plan to buy or watch or places they hope to visit or travel to.

Established (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) and emerging (Pinterest, Springpad, Fab, The Fancy) platforms are collectively making what we call the “interest graph” the next important trend in social media, community, user participation and marketing.

But it’s the latter, by inviting effortless expressions in the form of pins, springs, and shares, that is creating new opportunities for both consumers and marketers.

It’s now easier than ever for consumers to discover things they care about, express their interests, find inspiration from those with like minded passions, and share or publish the content, products and items that reflect those passions.

And as consumers more willingly filter themselves by interest, brands can more effectively focus their messages, content and utility on those who will welcome it.

Better yet, they can begin to identify and “harvest” intent, helping users bridge the gap between discovery and action with useful, timely and relevant information and offers.

The promise for consumers is not only fewer annoying interruptions but alerts, information, price changes that help them make better decisions. The promise for brands and marketers is increased efficiency.

As with all previous social platforms, consumers will embrace the technology on their terms. They’ll use it if it’s easy, rewarding, connects them to the right people, and invites them to shape the experience. They won’t really care whether advertisers or brands show up or not.

Yet brands need four things in order to really take advantage of the interest graph.

A strategy to add value by inspiring discovery and enhancing engagement.

--that calls for more than simply putting content in the space or adding a button to your site.

The ability to distinguish the difference between a like and an intended action.

--figuring out how to determine whether people are sharing what they own, or simply think is cool, or  posting what they actually want to buy -- issuing a consumer generated RFI so to speak.

Enough scale to make it worth the effort.

--ideally a brand wants to be able to market to the data, not simply rely on consumers

A way to measure ROI

--whatever investment is made in time and money needs to generate a return in recommendations, traffic and sales conversion

As is often the case, technology, consumer behavior and brand understanding don’t all happen at the same time.

Usually the technology appears first, in response to an opportunity or need. Consumer participation shows the developer what works and doesn’t work and begins to define how it gets used. Brands that are paying close attention start to experiment. The majority of marketers show up a year or two later. And often still with the wrong strategies and tactics.

So where are we now?

In order for social networks to truly reshape our experience of the rest of the Web, developers must first understand the relationship between our social graphs and our interest graphs.

The Social Graph

A social graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Social graphs are mostly created on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.

The Interest Graph

An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball. Interest graphs are generated by the feeds customers follow (e.g. on Twitter), products they buy (e.g. on Amazon), ratings they create (e.g. on Netflix), searches they run (e.g. on Google), or questions they answer about their tastes (e.g. on services like Hunch).

What everyone in Silicon Valley and “Venture Land” conceive of as the real game-changing model involves capturing and capitalizing on the “interest graph,” he says. The company that succeeds in doing so would be “close to the Google search paradigm because it would be right in line with demand generation and with discovery that relates to product purposes.” Thus, it is the interest graph that defines the middle ground between Google and Facebook — between search, advertising, and the social graph.

I think we can be sure that whoever can collect a record of your current interests and package them for advertisers stands to make a lot of money.