Is It Time To Retire the 'Social Graph?' Yesterday, when talking with Richard and Marshall about Google's plans to open up many of their services that deal with personal and social information, I made this remark: "Also, as an aside, I'd like to express my severe dislike for the term 'social graph.'" I first remember hearing about the term "social graph" in May while Mark Zuckerberg was on stage announcing the Facebook Platform.
That probably wasn't the first time the term was used, but it seems to be the time it entered our collective conscience and started being used with more regularity. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, "wait, what's a social graph? " It seems I wasn't alone in my confusion. How to avoid sounding like an monkey. Social network. Social networks and the analysis of them is an inherently interdisciplinary academic field which emerged from social psychology, sociology, statistics, and graph theory.
Georg Simmel authored early structural theories in sociology emphasizing the dynamics of triads and "web of group affiliations. "[2] Jacob Moreno is credited with developing the first sociograms in the 1930s to study interpersonal relationships. These approaches were mathematically formalized in the 1950s and theories and methods of social networks became pervasive in the social and behavioral sciences by the 1980s.[1][3] Social network analysis is now one of the major paradigms in contemporary sociology, and is also employed in a number of other social and formal sciences.
The Augmented Social Network.