Dogs and Cats sleeping together…
Mass hysteria! (wait for it, 2:06) Ok, maybe not mass hysteria, but David Winer and Nicholas Carr - both very smart people, yet people who I find myself constantly annoyed with despite their obvious intelligence have written something that I could not agree more with!
I stumbled across Carr’s blog post talking about how dumb the latest web2.0 buzzword is - the “Social Graph”. Oh my god. How I’ve hated the emergence of that one. I never really spent the time on it to figure out exactly why it was so freaking annoying, it just generally struck me as one of those words that web2.0 talking heads come up with to make themselves sound way more important than they actually are. Kinda like “web2.0,” except worse.
Fortunately, David Winer actually did all the spot on analysis of why it’s so awful. I’ll steal the same money quote that Carr highlights:
before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what — they’re exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don’t we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don’t want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.
So yes, I find it odd, but please do just like Winer says. He’s 100% right.
