The Social Graph Circa 2004, in Europe
Did the term “social graph” really just start “popping up a few weeks ago.”
NO! But it did NOT “pop up” but a few months ago, either.
The intital public use of the term “Social Graph” does not date to any one blogger’s post or even to its mass commercialization by Mr. Social Graph himself, Mark Zuckerberg, as of May 2007.
Facebook acquired the domain name socialgraph.com in July of 2006, but the origins of the term apparently date from at least years before, when academic researchers studied the phenomenon in Europe.
In October 2006, Strato AG, Europe’s “second largest Internet Service Provider” (according to Sun Microsystems), announced a “PATENT-PENDING SPAM FILTER WITH SOCIAL GRAPH ANALYSIS.”
The technology for “SOCIAL GRAPH ANALYSIS” stemmed from an alliance formed in 2004 between Strato and The Institute of Machine Learning at Berlin’s Humboldt University, aimed at anlayzing social communication patterns, such as “THE NUMBER OF TIMES ONE PERSON COMMUNCIATES WITH A SET OF OTHERS.”
What about the Facebook “social graph”? WHAT social graph, I underscored yesterday in: Facebook Plots Social Network Patent: What Graph? and exposed last month in Mark Zuckerberg Maps U.S.Patent for Facebook SOCIAL NETWORK Engine.
While Mark Zuckerberg started the social graph game, and spurred the Web to play along, he is actually firmly in the social networking camp when it comes to bolstering his mult-billion dollar IPO chances via a U.S. Patent wager.
In fact, although Facebook threatens Facebook application developers with expulsion from the Facebook Platform if they dare to use the phrase “social networking” in relation to Facebook, Mr, Zuckerberg, himself, is betting his own personal financial fortune on social networking.
Go figure? Even the true origins of “Facebook” itself are subject to a Zuckerberg-centric interpretation.
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