Jabber Watch: ‘What the hell is a Social Graph’
Thursday, September 20th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under
The internet has always been keen to house games of B*llsh*t Bingo. Only recently, the concept of the ‘social graph‘ caught a fire – mostly in discussions around the freedom to move from Facebook to MySpace to some other virtual coffee shop.The term has obviously attracted the anger of Dave Winer:
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.
How to avoid sounding like an monkey (Scripting News)You can see his point. The term was coined in the midst of a perfectly valid debate (imagine trying to leave Facebook today – that’s an awful lot of contacts and exchanges to lose), but is fundamentally no different to ’social networks’. The only angle it brings is one of movement – ’social network’ is static, while ‘graph’ places an emphasis on growth.