Before 2007, the two words “social” and “graph” had occasionally been used in academia to discuss, literally, a visualization showing how people were connected by social relationships.

The earliest reference I can find to the modern sense of “social graph” is from a Facebook press release issued May 24, 2007:

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today unveiled Facebook Platform, calling on all developers to build the next-generation of applications with deep integration into Facebook, distribution across its “social graph” and an opportunity to build new businesses.
…
Applications will gain distribution through what Zuckerberg called the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information.

So there’s Definition One. Almost immediately following that press release, tech pundits began using the phrase aggressively in blogs and PowerPoint presentations. The first reference to it I can find in the popular media is a London Times article from September 11, 2007, which defined social graph as “a vast database of its users’ social and professional relationships.”

By September 2007, people were already growing suspicious that “social graph” didn’t actually mean anything new. Media and technology writer Dave Winter wrote, “Social network is a much less confusing term, so why don’t we just stick with it?”

But despite Winter’s early warning, “social graph” was here to stay. In October 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked to define the phrase during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. Zuckerberg said:

When we talk about the social graph, we’re talking about the set of connections, whether it’s friendships, business connections, acquaintances, that everyone has in the world. And this has always existed, we didn’t invent it. So all that we’re trying to do at Facebook is take the social graph that exists in the world and just map it out. Try to figure out all the connections people have in the world, the real connections. We’re not trying to make new connections. And once we have as accurate of a model, or approaching an accurate model of the social graph, then we can expose those connections in a way that our users our comfortable with their privacy settings, to a set of applications. Those applications can use those connections to help people share information more effectively. … The social graph is just this thing that exists in the the world and we just try to map it out.

In a November 2007 blog post, Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us the World Wide Web, lent his endorsement to the phrase:

Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting — it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

Since then, the use of the phrase has morphed and expanded. Today the term “social graph” regularly appears in news stories, presentations and marketing copy. Here are a few current examples:

• In a Forbes article this week, Dan Woods of Evolved Technologist divides the “social graph” into two, one for business and one for every other relationship, and says the enterprise-level social network still needs to be built. He writes, ”The enterprise social graph will likely outstrip the public social graph in both complexity and usefulness.”
• This month Mashable writer Adam Ostrow described social media as “providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.”
• An Internet advertising company markets itself this way: “Using patent-pending technology and social graph data, Media6Degrees provides major marketers with scalable ad campaigns that deliver a high return on investment.”
• A recent ClickZ article by Kate Kaye says, “Facebook has observers wondering whether the company will transform its sprawling social graph into an advertising network.”
• The Wikipedia entry on “social graph” says: “Concern has focused on the fact that Facebook’s social graph is owned by the company and is not shared with other services.”

So depending on who’s talking…

• There is one social graph.
• There are multiple social graphs for various uses.
• The social graph has always existed.
• The social graph was created by social networking sites.
• The social graph is an abstract set of connections.
• A social graph is a database that can be owned.
• A social graph can be transformed into an ad network.
• A social graph can follow people around.

Obviously there are some contradictions here. There appears to be just one point on which everyone agrees:

• A social graph is not a graph.

My point of this rather tedious blog post is that nobody agrees what “social graph” means because it was never precisely defined by the company that coined it, Facebook. “Social graph” has become one of those vague phrases people use to sound smart.

Fortunately, we can now use it as a bullshit detector. The next time you see or hear someone use the phrase “social graph,” ask yourself, “Does this person really know what they’re talking about?”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This week, columnists for both The New Yorker and The New York Times decided to hang their arguments on the fact that the decade has no name.

This is important. Names define how we think. The best way to get people to take a concept seriously is to name it with precision (“climate change,” “war on terror”); the sneakiest way to fight an idea is to give it a confusing name with sinister connotations (“death panels,” “illegal immigrants”).

What are some other things without names?

- The Apple tablet computer.

- The fourth Led Zeppelin album.

- The act of thinking outside the box.

- The H1N1 virus. (Which is, obviously, a name. But we were forced to retreat to a scientific name after a popular name—swine flu—was rejected for lack of precision.)

- The horse in this America song.

- A woman who catches fish. (OK, technically, Merriam-Webster says “fisherwoman” is a word, but I’ve heard people insist it’s not. It’s not in my spell checker.)

- The narrator in “Fight Club.”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I’m sure there’s a sensible reason for this sign to exist. But the hell if I can figure it out. Aren’t most places not bus stops?

(Spotted on an unremarkable street corner somewhere around Ridgefield Park, during a bike ride exploring the New Jersey suburbs Monday.)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Larrick and professor Jack Soll have been on a crusade to adopt a “gallons per mile” standard. What’s the difference? Here’s a story about their work from 2008. It says:

“Most people ranked an improvement from 34 to 50 mpg as saving more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 18 to 28 mpg, even though the latter saves twice as much gas. (Going from 34 to 50 mpg saves 94 gallons; but from 18 to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons).

“These mistaken impressions were corrected, however, when participants were presented with fuel efficiency expressed in gallons used per 100 miles rather than mpg. Viewed this way, 18 mpg becomes 5.5 gallons per 100 miles, and 28 mpg is 3.6 gallons per 100 miles — an $8 difference today.“

I had never thought about this before. But it makes sense: The higher the mpg number, the smaller the significance of each mile, because you cover more distance before you need to tap that extra fuel. We are used to thinking each number in a rating scale has the same value. It’s misleading.

The professors are using their math to defend small improvements in low-mileage vehicles—a strong argument for hybrid SUVs, which are scoffed at by most environmentally minded people. In fact, it makes a big difference. Here’s Professor Soll’s argument:

“There are significant savings to be had by improving efficiency by even two or three miles per gallon on inefficient cars, but because we communicate in miles per gallon, that savings is not immediately evident to consumers.”

I’m convinced.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

It’s an elegant word that comes from computers. (Merriam-Webster: boot: “to start or ready for use especially by booting a program <boot a computer> often used with up.”) Practically everybody knows how to fix a computer bug by hitting a restart button. The computer clears its memory, runs its start-up routines, and after several minutes, presto!, everything is new again. It’s like un-popping your ears or cleaning your glasses.

These days, many of our economic systems could use rebooting. Think about where you work. Imagine if you could shut the place down for a period of time, rethink everything you do, and then restart with all the current problems solved, inefficiencies purged, bugs fixed. Imagine if a company undertook a careful study of itself, figured out what it did best, trained and redeployed its people to solve its hardest problems, and came roaring back to life. It’s appealing, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, nothing works that way. Outside of the world of computers, few problems can be solved by taking something apart and fitting all the same pieces back together again. Heck, even modern computers are designed to be stable enough that you shouldn’t have to reboot them. (If Vista gives you guff, rebooting doesn’t help much.)

If you wanted to reboot General Motors, you couldn’t just shut it down, wait, and then try again. You’d have to spend a lot of money and human energy correcting a system gone wrong. You’d have to invent new things. Creation is hard, and language needs to reflect that. The makers of the new Star Trek film didn’t just re-shoot an old sci-fi flick with better special effects. They respected an existing template, but used it to say something new. It was hard, it was expensive, it paid off.

Reboot just sounds lazy. I submit a better word: reinvention.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This Tom Tomorrow cartoon (a portion of which appears above) articulates how insulting the phrase “content provider” sounds to creative people. A stooge in the cartoon asks, “Who do these storytellers think they are, expecting to be paid for their so-called work?”

It’s not a small point. Today, Web sites refer to all the information they publish as “content.” Yet it’s a degrading word and it’s has caused a serious branding problem. “Content” is a commodity shoveled out of a grain silo. It evokes packaged cereals, where the only variance is the difference between Fruit Loops and Grape Nuts. No wonder consumers think anything published online is cheap and interchangeable!

This label has proven impossible to shake. Tribune newspapers are handing out new titles like “content editor” and “director of content.” WNBC recently changed the name of the newsroom to the “content center” (then, to their credit, changed it back). Once you start listening for content, you’ll hear it everywhere, like nails on a chalkboard. I don’t mean to over-inflate what I do for a living, but I don’t generate content. I write stories or articles, I edit videos, I create presentations. I acknowledge the word “content” when I’m in a meeting or dealing with internal communication, but only because I don’t want to sound out of step.

By the way, the “This Modern World” cartoon I linked to above? It was published in March 1997. The more things change…

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Yesterday I was working on a short item for work about a photographer who shot a portrait of a trombone player. I was trying hard to come up with a concise, pithy headline to slap on it. (The item is part of a department in the magazine, so it doesn’t demand a full headline. Short headlines are hardest to write.) The best I could come up with was “The Music Man.” Weak.

The instant my alarm clock went off this morning, I had a curious phrase in my head: “Top Brass.” There’s my headline. Not great, but 10 times better than “The Music Man.” It’s crazy the things that go on in your brain while you sleep.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Whatever your day brings, at least you don’t have to ride around the city around in a vehicle with the word BIMBO on the side of it.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Item: Chicago’s Sears Tower is going to be renamed the Willis Tower, after the insurance company.

An insurance company should know better than to pull a stunt like this: Renaming a building is a terrible risk!

Here in New York, we’re proud of our old buildings and their names.

The Woolworth Building is still the Woolworth building. The Chrysler Building will be called that long after the last Chrysler rolls off the assembly line. All sorts of office buildings (including the former Wanamaker’s building I work in, and the Starrett-Lehigh building I used to work in) proudly summon the ghosts of defunct business. Even the Met Life Building, which is branded with a giant electric sign, still triggers in some people’s minds the sign that used to hang there: PAN AM.

My entire life, the Sears Tower has been the tallest building in America. We learned this in school. You can’t just pull out the wires and undo that kind of life-long branding. Now we’re supposed to start calling it Willis? Ugh, I don’t like it.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This may explain why, over the last decade, America invested billions in airport security and the war in Iraq, yet did very little to patch the vulnerabilities in our financial system. Both terrorism and banks are IMPORTANT. But terrorism is INTERESTING, while banks are not.

Even by sheer numbers, a thing with influence, that’s demonstrably important, is not always interesting. Consider the things we talk about compared the things that touch the greatest numbers of people.

INTERESTING: Plane crashes
IMPORTANT: Heart disease

INTERESTING: Vogue
IMPORTANT: Reader’s Digest

INTERESTING: A handgun in your nightstand
IMPORTANT: A fire extinguisher in your kitchen

INTERESTING: Media companies
IMPORTANT: Construction companies

INTERESTING: NFL football
IMPORTANT: High school sports

INTERESTING: Saturday Night Live
IMPORTANT: 60 Minutes

INTERESTING: PETA
IMPORTANT: AARP

INTERESTING: Ikea
IMPORTANT: Wal-Mart

Things that manage to be both? How about weather, schools and gas prices.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.