The Scale of the Universe 2. The Social Graph is Neither. The Social Graph Is Neither I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further.
The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer. At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try and recreate the same web of relationships, over and over, by making people send each other follow requests.
Treehouses. Data. Memes. The Future. Images. Social Media. Printable Paper.