Giant Global Graph – Duh, it’s the people that matter

Techmeme is tracking a discussion about the Social Graph that got started with this post by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at his blog. Sir Tim asks the question is the Social Graph the next big thing. He says we had the Net, which was a descriptor of the Internet and the importance of the connected machines and then we had the Web, which was about the shift from computers on the network being interesting to documents documents on the network which are interesting.

And now we have the Social Graph.

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.

There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. There is a “Social Network Portability” community. 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!

Wow, how complicated can we make it. It should be obvious that since the invention of runners to carry messages it’s been about people communicating with people. Mail, telephone, email, IM, texting are all killer apps that have been about people communicating with people.

That’s why social networking is important. It’s not about the documents or what the documents are about, it’s about the people and what the people are all about. And yes, we do need a way to figure out how we are all connected other than telling everybody every time.

Maybe Plaxo for my social networks.