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.