Is the social graph Web 3.0? 23 Nov 2007

In a blog post on Wednesday evening, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, not only bestowed his blessing on the irritatingly-fashionable term "social graph" but elevated it to the capitalised "Social Graph". According to Nicholas Carr, this is a sure sign that we have a New Paradigm on our hands. Here's an excerpt from Berners-Lee's article:

"The Net links computers, the Web links documents. Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, 'It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important'. Obvious, really.

"Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing - but the system doesn't know it...

"Its 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!"

I'll bet Mr. Berners-Lee was disappointed with Google's OpenSocial too then...