{"id":982,"date":"2007-11-22T08:22:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-22T15:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=982"},"modified":"2007-11-22T08:22:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-22T15:22:48","slug":"is_the_social_g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=982","title":{"rendered":"Is the social graph Web 3.0?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it looks like there’ll be no escaping the “social graph” term. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, in a blog post<\/a> last evening, not only bestowed his blessing on the social graph but elevated it to the capitalized Social Graph, a sign that we have a New Paradigm on our hands. Sir Tim suggests that the Semantic Web (recently dubbed “Web 3.0”) was really the Social Graph all along, and that the graph represents the third great conceptual leap for the network – from net to web to graph:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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 …<\/p>\n

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!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Goodbye WWW. Hello GGG.<\/p>\n

But while it’s true that technologists and theoreticians desire to abstract the graph from the sites – and see only the benefits of doing so – it’s not yet clear that that’s what ordinary users want or even care about. That’ll be the real test to whether the graph makes the leap from mathematician to mainstream – and it will also tell us whether a social network like Facebook has a chance to become a true platform or is fated to remain a mere site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it looks like there’ll be no escaping the “social graph” term. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, in a blog post last evening, not only bestowed his blessing on the social graph but elevated it to the capitalized Social Graph, a sign that we have a New Paradigm on our hands. Sir Tim suggests […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}