I Agree With Dave Winer (For Once)

Dave McClure has introduced the infelicitous term "Social Graph". But We should just keep on with "Social Network" which is a synonym, as Dave Winer points out:

[from How To Avoid Sounding Like A Monkey]

[...] 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? (Answer: we should, imho.) 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.

Hear, hear.

[Update: Looks like Michael Arrington has adopted the social graph term hook-line-and-sinker in this breathless post about a Google move against Facebook.]

Comments

[MikeD]

I've always thought of a social network as the people that are connected, and a social graph as the /ways/ in which they are connected. Nodes .vs. arcs.

[Dave]

re: social graph, i'm just jumping on the bandwagon... i believe zuckerberg was the originator of the term. possible it was someone else.

- "doug" mcclure ;)