Lately some of the more pretentious online folks have started calling those pretty pictures of how your Facebook profile (del.icio.us profile, LinkedIn profile, etc.) relates to other profiles a “social graph” instead of the previously-used “social network”.
No, no, no. Graphs have variables. Networks have connections. What we have here are connections, not variables. There’s no y axis on those pretty pictures, just lines depicting individual connections between data points. Therefore, there is no graph, even if you do make your data into a pretty picture. It could perhaps be a map or a diagram or a web, but it is not a graph.
Sensible commentary and a bunch of comments at (among other places) Rough Type.
edit: the original post on this was Dave Winer’s How to avoid sounding like an monkey . That post also has a bunch of background.
I saw the same thing in a recent Wired article on Facebook/Zuckerberg. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either, although maybe there’s a further meaning he’s not sharing with us. One of the perks (probably not the only one) of being a 23 year old billionaire is you mostly get to say what you want and not too many people call you on it.