TechMeme really likes Friday evening's Monkey piece, it's been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question -- what's the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and vice versa.

I got one thing wrong, apparently the term came from Facebook, presumably as a way of separating what they do from their predecessors.

Dan Farber reported in May. "Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a 'social graph,' the network of connections and relationships between people on the service."

Google Trends comparison of "social network" vs "social graph."

Google News archive search for "social graph."

Fred Wilson posted a comment pointing to a post where he wondered what the graph thing was all about. His post was one that inspired me to write my piece.

Buzzwords and phrases are useful if they describe something new.

For example, I remember when platform was new, but I didn¹t object to it, because it explained a concept that we needed a word for. Today it's still much in use, and there's little or no confusion about what it means.

I was doing audio blog posts before we had the term podcast, and I totally got behind it because we needed a word for what we were doing.

But social graph is not needed, it makes something simple sound complicated, and we totally need it to sound simple if the problems are going to get solved. They¹re not trivial problems, they¹ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes.

Another problem with new names for old things is that it tends to push aside the pioneers and makes it sound like newcomers are not also-rans. Fred had a reasonable gripe as a backer of Wasabe when Mint started getting credit for being a first mover. At least they didn¹t have the chutzpah to try to make it a trend and give it a buzzword.

Someone is being pushed aside with the term ³social graph² likely some competitors of Facebook like MySpace and LinkedIn, and some pioneers are going to lose credit for their innovation if it takes root. It may still take root, but I felt I had to say something.

BTW, the title of the post contains a grammatic error because I changed the title to monkey from something else and didn't look carefully at the resulting title.