Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has blogged again, only a little over a year since his last effort (Blogging is great). His topic is the Giant Global Graph. Whatever it is, it's the third thing after Net and Web, and the third thing was always the Semantic Web. He writes:
So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents.
Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Obvious, really.
Later, he explains:
Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.
We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.
The top Google hit for "social graph" is Thoughts on the Social Graph by Brad Fitzpatrick, and there's a link to it from TBL's blog post. Then Dave Winer helpfully pointed out that this was just jargon from the mathematics of graph theory, and that "before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it?"
So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.
Well, Dave, Sir Tim didn't take your advice....
Even with that translation in mind, however, I'd still have to agree with what Lord Byron said about it: [That] he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel.
