What the Hell is The Social Graph & Why Should I Care About It?
<< by Tad Miller on January 4th, 2010
Image via WikipediaTechno-Buzzword Alert, if you want to live up to your Social Media Guru status in 2010 you’re going to have to start bandying about the word “Social Graph” in every other sentence, and while your at it you should figure out what it actually is.
Facebook was the first to really talk about the “Social Graph” as way to describe their social network, but Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal, and now an engineer at Google is really the first to really talk about practical applications and potential of social graphs. Brad defined the Social Graph as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related”
Essentially, the Social Graph is a mapping of a Social Network, which is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes,” which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.
