Life is grand

In How To Avoid Sounding Like A Monkey, Dave Winer points out that all this harping about the “social graph” is slightly daft. A graph in that context is identical to a network. It has nodes and edges and operates in the same way we known networks to operate. In other words; call it a social network, as we have been doing all this time.

On the other hand I do understand the situation that makes it desirable to differentiate between a social network and a social graph. Ask people what a social network is and they say Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. They think of the actual websites. Ask someone what a social graph is, and if they know, they will say it is the network of connections arising out of a social network website.

To many in the field a social graph is what enables portability and interoperability between social network websites.

I still agree more with Dave Winer though. Call the network itself a social network and call the sites what they are; social network sites.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.