Tim Berners-Lee on Social Graph: Ok, I Give

The term social graph is a catchy meme. The most recent manifestation of the spread of this viral term is Tim Berners-Lee who writes (in an absurdly disorganized and incoherent post) that he believes that the meaning of social graph somehow overlaps with his semantic web:

[from Giant Global Graph]

[...]

Its [sic: it's] 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.

I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph! Any worse than WWWW? ;-) Not the "Semantic Web" term has been established for a long time, I'm not proposing to change it. But let's think about the graph which it is. (Footnote: "Graph" also happens to be the word the RDF specifications use, but that is by the way. While an XML parser creates a DOM tree, an RDF parser creates an RDF graph in memory.)

So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents.

So Berners-Lee is trying to appropriate the social graph term to buttress up FOAF-ish notions embedded in the Semantic Web discourse. However, those concepts have not caught on in any serious fashion. Not like the premises of social networks, which is where the social graph concept has emanated. So, I don't think his attempt to muddy the social graph conversation with semantic web concepts will lead to a hybrid with any vigor. Tim, social graph has not been coined to rethink the web, but to try to refine the discussion around social applications.

I am not an advocate for the term social graph, but I am coming to understand the intent of those wielding it. They are trying to make a break with the term social network, which has become too broad, and too contaminated with the usage as 'an online, web-based service that links you to an explicit collection of other users of the service.' The rationale for a new term is -- as I believe Mark Zuckerberg was channeling, when he began to use it broadly -- that we have to consider the fact that people's actual social networks in the larger world -- offline and online -- include all sorts of subtleties about relationships; not the least being that some of our contacts do not use the web, and most are not all signed up to the same services. Or, stated more simply, every person has a social graph, and parts of their social graph may be represented within various online social networking applications, but the social graph in its entirety cannot be encompassed in any tool: it is too rich, broad, and open for that.

So... I have grudgingly come to understand the motivation for the social graph term. But I maintain that this decision to coin a new term is really not necessary, since the original social network has exactly the same meaning. But I guess I am just being an old curmudgeon, waving my walking stick at the young people, glaring at them through bifocals.

It's clear that the old term has become so tightly linked to the implementation of solutions like MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Friendster that it is increasingly impossible to use the term social network as originally envisioned by Granovetter, Milgram, Watts, and the other academics that have been doing important research on the subject for decades before we came along and appropriated the term. So be it.

I give. I yield to the inevitable. I will start to use the term as I have defined it above, which I believe was the motivation for it.

However, I also predict that the term will rapidly lose its delicious novelty and subtle distinctions, and will become synonymous with social network as people will apply it just as promiscuously as we have been with social network for the past five years.

Comments

[Steven Hodson]

Stowe,

If you are being a curmudgeon with this post I would hate to think what my post yesterday (Darwin’s Law doesn’t apply to the web) would make me :) LOL

[Chris Brogan...]

Here's why I think there's a new term, instead of using social network. I think that "social network" came to mean the container. Like MySpace is a container. Facebook. LinkedIN. I think the "social graph" is the actual guts, the what's inside, the value. I think that the second (or third?) phase of OpenSocial is to be able to take those guts and go wherever we want with it.

I think.

But yeah, I was on your side of this one. I didn't like the term. For whatever reason, it's like Nick Carr said. Once you see TBL use it, you think... hmm... well, maybe.

And now that YOU'RE saying it.. sheesh. : )

[Stowe Boyd]

Chris - It's more like I am giving up on fighting it. I don't know how much I will employ it, actually.

[Flemming Funch]

"Graph" is a dumb word, as to 99 out of 100 people in the world that means a curve in a coordinate system. That kind of word is useful to separate the insiders, who knows the secret meaning, from the outsiders, who just get more confused. So, not great for making anything clear to very many people.

But I think it is very useful and necessary to make that distinction - to have a term for the actual web .. I mean network ... I mean graph .. of relationships. Social network has long ago gotten to mean something else, something with a brand name on it.

I don't think Berners-Lee was all that incoherent.

[Bill Tozier]

You know, it's a lot like other terms from a technical (physics and mathematics) setting that get subverted because they get popular. "Complexity" used to mean a couple of things that people nowadays don't really understand---both to algorithms people, and to the folks I used to work with in Santa Fe. "Chaos" means something very specific but poorly understood by laymen about mathematical models of system dynamics, and how certain traits develop over time in a set of equations. "Fuzzy" means something very specific. As perhaps do "agile" and "open" and....

Words that get popular tend to get used often -- and thus they diversify (and "diversity" also means something, now, it didn't used to). Words aren't memes (and memes don't really exist), so as soon as enough people use the same word to mean something they understand differently from other speakers, the underlying definitions fork and become personal affectations, terms of art, and things old fogeys (myself, maybe you) don't recognize as valid or necessary.

So for instance: a graph is a mathematical abstraction composed of vertices (nodes) and edges that connect them. A network is a mathematical abstraction involving a graph, and some set of associated flows across the edges. Whatever software, models, web2.0 businesses or common usage says... that's what they are, and where they started. Whenever Mark Newman or Albert-László Barabási or Valdis Krebs say something about a "social graph" or a "social network", I can assume they mean something specific, and that I know what it is.

Anybody adopting these terms without the credentials of physics or sociology... all bets are off. I'd need to find out what they think they mean, in any given context.

They're not wrong. But it's not 100% useful for me when they use words in new ways.

We get used to it.

[mturro]

As I read it the main difference between a social network and a social graph is that I can belong to many social networks, but I have only one social graph.

[Tara Hunt]

Hey Stowe,

I agree with @mturro, the terms have different meanings. A social network is MySpace and Flickr and Facebook, etc...the single site where I interact with others. Social Graph is the web of connections we have generally. Facebook has made this all neat and tidy for us. Our connections are filtered and have a one-click mass interface for all of our communications, apps, groups, etc. As Zuckerberg says, they make our friendships more efficient.

Certainly, FB has pioneered the concept of the Social Graph, making something that we knew all along obvious...giving it a name. Personally, I want my social graph OUT of FaceBook. I want to be able to connect to it through my blog and other ways that don't require me to install another app (YAFBA - Yet Another FaceBook App). Gmail holds some of the key. Twitter holds other pieces. My blog holds a chunk. I'd love all of these services to blow open that Social Graph and give us the keys.

Oh wait, there are folks working on it...;)

[Stowe Boyd]

Tara -

As I said in my post, that change in the meaning of 'social network' is exactly why I am caving. Originally, the social network researchers described social networks -- the real ones in the world, not the applications -- in exactly the terms that people are now ascribing to 'social graphs'. 'Social networks' have now taken on the new, almost pejorative meaning os 'social networking application' -- like facebook or friendster.

So, I give. I relent. Uncle.

Although people should realize that the meaning of social network was a synonym for social graph's intended meaning, orginally. And in time, the oh-so-subtle difference between the two terms will be lost, and they will collapse together, and the term social network will prevail.

[Tim Callington]

I was listening to a story on BBC Radio 4 the other day about the Oxford English Dictionary's decision to reclassify the word "disinterested" to mean the same as "uninterested". Apparently so many people are using the words interchangeably that the original meaning of disinterested is becoming redundant.

The story reminded me of this post on the social graph, as both seem to boil down to semantics.

The phrase "social network" is becoming increasingly synonymous with software, but as you rightly point out, it's about much more than than that...we don't make and meet all our friends online of course! Somehow for me the word "graph" doesn't quite work either, it feels a bit too scientific for me. I might draw a graph to illustrate the connections amongst my circle of friends and contacts, but I wouldn't consider them to be a graph.

Maybe that's it, we should go back to "social circle" instead...it has a nice cosy air of coffee mornings and chats down the pub about it :)

[Jeremy Horn]

I agree. To refer to this as a social graph is taking too small, and possibly a distracted view. While it is clear that semantic web will play an increasingly important role, it is just one of those building block modules.

I elaborate further on my take at..
http://tpgblog.com/2007/12/06/modular-innovation-101/

Take a read, and please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you & enjoy.

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com