The "Social Graph" Must Be Destroyed. Now.

In the annals of technology, there have to be few terms more annoying than "social graph"—Facebook's $18 euphemism for social network.

In speeches, Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 23-year-old founder, can frequently be heard describing how "the social graph" does this and "the social graph" does that, as he pads around stage in his Adidas sandals and fleece vest.

The term is so annoying that if the MacArthur Foundation gave out "genius grants" for annoyingness, people who use the term "social graph" would win the award—24 times, every year.

The term is so annoying that a fellow tech reporter recently threatened to throw their computer out the window if its use does not immediately cease. The term is so annoying that I'm not even going to link to another web page where it appears. You're just going to have to take my word for it, or do a simple web search.

Just in time, a grassroots movement has begun to relegate "social graph" to the dustbin of tech-term history.

Last week, the immortal Dave Winer threw down the gauntlet by charging that anyone who uses it "sounds like a monkey."

"If you don't want to sound like an idiot," Winer said, "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."

"P.S.," he added. "Copy editors, just change 'social graph' to 'social network.'"

It's not, as Winer explained, as if the term just materialized fully formed from the Harvard dorm room where Facebook's developers cooked up the site. Graph Theory is an esoteric branch of math that deals with patterns of connected nodes that roughly resemble the spider-web patterns the rest of us refer to as networks.

Somewhere along the line (I have a good idea where) Zuckerberg and friends decided that Facebook would sound a whole lot cooler if its network were described as a "graph." Now, as I've mentioned, it just sounds annoying.

Winer's post caused a sensation in the tech "blogosphere," (a term running a close second in annoyingness).

Nick Carr at Rough Type wrote that the term sounds like "some sort of embarrassing disease" and thanked Winer for coming to the rescue.

Josh Catone at Read/Write Web spoke of his "severe dislike" for the term, and asked if it wasn't time to retire it.

There are some opposing views. Robert Scoble—a former "tech evangelist" for, ahem, Microsoft—sought to distinguish between social "networks" and "graphs."

"My Social Network is my friends list," Scoble wrote, "But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that. For instance, did you know you can see everyone who is into skiing on Facebook? Did you know you can see everyone who is into Daft Punk?"

In his own comments section, Scoble appeared to soften his position slightly, saying, "I'll probably call it social network in the future, but looking at the people who are into, say, skiing, doesn't seem to be a network at all, but, rather, something else."

Winer later explained that his post had been spurred by something New York-based venture-capital blogger Fred Wilson wrote, which asked, "Why can't Facebook people call it a social network? How exactly is a database of people and who they know a graph?"

"Someone is being pushed aside with the term 'social graph,'" Winer concluded. "Likely some competitors of Facebook like MySpace and LinkedIn, and some pioneers are going to lose credit for their innovation if it takes root."

But all the high-minded talk about innovation, "first movers," (do I hear a candidate?)—and the differing ways academic disciplines describe patterns of connected dots, there is simply no avoiding a simple fact.

The term "social graph" is incredibly annoying, and it should be put out if its misery. For this reason, I am rooting for Microsoft to buy Facebook. Not just a little sliver of the company, but the whole thing, lock, stock, and Adidas sandals.

Then they can call it "social windows." It would be an improvement.

by Sam Gustin