Comments on: On Social Graphs

By: Jackson Fox

Jackson Fox — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:44:00 +0000

I think there's a meaningful distinction here. Rather than belabor this point, I'll be lazy and let Dare Obasanjo do it for me.

By: fred

fred — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:26:00 +0000

I’m not sure I’d agree Bertil. It’s hard to view Facebook as a value-free intermediary in our milieu. I’d say their role is much more active.

By: jkd

jkd — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:21:00 +0000

More Bob Shrum than Frank Luntz. Luntz at least came up with stuff that sounded good even if it obscured real meaning – going from “social network” to “social graph” both sounds worse and I think obscures meaning. People who use these sites know what “social network” means to them – and Facebook is trying to tell them they’re wrong? I hate to sing the same song over and over again, but it still amazes me that Facebook has been unable to absorb this very basic, fundamental (and at this point, pretty old) law of online social networking/utilities/software/graphs: don’t try to dictate user behavior. Yeesh.

Whether or not Facebook is set up for a big fall, this is one of those things that I think Zuckerberg is going to look back on in 5-10 years and think “I was really that concerned with that?”

By: Bertil Hatt

Bertil Hatt — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:51:00 +0000

By self-defining as a graph, doesn’t Facebook precisely gets out of the way, and state: “we are just trying to keep a big database working; social network is human, it is what you do, not us”?
I actually like the three tiered picture they are drawing:
- graphs,
- information access&format (apps)
- interpretation.