Feb 12, 2008 Posted by Herko on Feb 12, 2008 in All things Web, Personal notes | 0 comments

The Giant Global Graph

I posted this arti­cle at designed.nu, a weblog is about design. Design com­men­tary usu­ally focuses on the aes­thet­i­cal and artis­ti­cal side of what is con­sid­ered design. But this par­tic­u­lar post is about the orig­i­nal design of the inter­net, the world wide web and the giant global graph. –Huh? The what? Exactly.

Let me explain. When just about any blog­ger com­ments on the devel­op­ment of the inter­net and the world wide web, long dis­cus­sions about web 2.0, web 3.0 and all kinds of con­cepts usu­ally fol­low. And when that blog­ger con­sid­ers to rename the world wide web into some­thing as obscure as the Giant Global Graph, this nor­mally is greeted with laugh­ter at that person’s expense. Enter the lat­est weblog post of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. –Huh? Who? Exactly.

When the ‘inven­tor’ of mod­ern day’s most suc­ces­ful tech­nol­ogy writes a post about the next step of the web –fol­low­ing its orig­i­nal design, but fuelled by the evo­lu­tion that it has made over the past few years (the www is only 18 years old!), we’d bet­ter start pay­ing atten­tion. All this Web two­pointsome­thing crap aside, he explains how he sees the evo­lu­tion of the inter­net, the world wide web, and the next layer: the giant global graph.

Basi­cally, the first abstrac­tion layer is what is referred to as the Net. The major ben­e­fit of the Net is that it doesn’t mat­ter how your com­puter is con­nected and how the cables go from one ‘puter to the other. The Net was/is designed to con­nect you to any other com­puter.
The sec­ond abstrac­tion layer built on top of that is what is com­monly referred to as the Web. The ben­e­fit this brought to the masses was that it doesn’t mat­ter where the doc­u­ments are located phys­i­cally, but you can access it’s con­tents any­where and anytime.

Most peo­ple think or assume that this is what the Web 1.0 was all about. Berners-Lee and his peo­ple over at the Cern labs want­ing to make their research archive freely avail­able to all Cern and asso­ci­ated researchers. As in doc­u­ments, files, web pages. But –as Sir Tim has explained many times already, they are wrong.

He now explains the ripeness for the third abstrac­tion layer which he refers to as the Giant Global Graph. This graph thing is a math­e­mat­i­cal term appar­ently and he does make some objec­tions to using it –but appar­ently it’s a com­mon enough term in sci­en­tific cir­cles, and as you just saw, that is where his roots are. The Graph sig­ni­fies the ‘cloud’ of per­sonal data and data rela­tion­ships that is avail­able on the web today. The term in this con­text is most often seen with the Social­Graph, which is the sum of all per­sonal friend­ship rela­tions you have cre­ated on all the social net­work sites out there. Actu­ally, Brad Fitz­partick and David Recor­don have a much bet­ter def­i­n­i­tion:

A social graph con­sists of who an indi­vid­ual is con­nected to based on the type of con­nec­tions, such as work, friend­ship, inter­ests, and loca­tion. It dif­fers from a social net­work, which con­sists of who an indi­vid­ual is con­nected to based on the existence/strength of (one type of) con­nec­tion, such as work. A social graph there­fore con­ceives of con­nec­tions in a typo­log­i­cal way, whereas a social net­work does so in a binary/spectral way. I.e. a social graph asks what type of con­nec­tion exists between indi­vid­u­als, whereas a social net­work sim­ply asks whether the con­nec­tion exists or how strong it is. Accord­ingly, a social graph is a more complex/higher-level model of a social sys­tem than a social network.

The Social Graph fol­lows the same ide­ol­ogy and pat­tern as the Semen­tic Web –the name Berners-Lee gave his con­tin­ued work on build­ing the web into it’s full 1.0 poten­tial. Basi­cally it means that you –as a user, not as a devel­oper– choose what rela­tion­ships you have with other peo­ple, and that your iden­tity is con­nected to your other online alter ego’s, and that this includes your net­work of friends.

For exam­ple: you join a social net­work site by log­ging in with your OpenID for the first time, and you get a mes­sage say­ing that because you used your OpenID, and because you have made your net­work rela­tion­ships part of the pub­lic sphere, those friends you have in your net­work and who are also a mem­ber of that social net­work site are listed for con­ve­nient adding to your friends list on that site. And why is this convenient?

Well, it fol­lows the rather sim­ple and thus pow­er­ful idea that friends are peo­ple too, and that they are not lim­ited to one net­work site like Last.FM. I mean, my friends are on Hyves (a pop­u­lar Dutch Facebook-alike site), LinkedIn (because I made them), Face­book (those with inter­na­tional con­tacts), Last.FM, Flickr, just to name a few. They’re the same peo­ple, why should I have to tell each site that I know them?

The ben­e­fits of this are obvi­ous, and the poten­tial for new and improved webap­pli­ca­tions are bound­less for now. But most impor­tantly, this brings the sim­ple yet fun­da­men­tal point of who owns my data (me!) closer. When imple­mented cor­rectly, I –the user– will be the one who decides what part of my net­work I want to share my music tastes with, and what part my resumé. And if this con­cept goes on, I can share con­tent other then iden­tity and rela­tion­ships as well, like my photo’s, or my ideas, or my scrib­bles, or what­ever. Data –more impor­tantly, my data, will be portable.

Lets call this the Web 4.0 (3.0 already hav­ing been claimed by the mobile con­tent indus­try). Naah, lets just call it what it really is: the evo­lu­tion of the Web 1.0. To finally come closer to what it was orig­i­nally designed to do.

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