Berners-Lee: Web to Go from WWW to GGG

Tim Berners-Lee, generally credited with inventing the World Wide Web, has jumped on the “social graph” bandwagon, proclaiming the concept of detailing and sharing data across a social network of friends as the next leap forward in computer networks.

Rather cheekily, Berners-Lee in a blog post proposed changing the WWW of the World Wide Web to GGG – for Global Giant Graph.

While that step won’t be happening, Berners-Lee’s endorsement of social graph concepts lends major credence to the fact that the ideasunderlying today’s social networks, if not the businesses themselves, are much more than hype. He calls the emergence of the social graph a key “mental move” that will significantly drive the future development of the Web.

To describe this evolution, Berners-Lee noted that the Web is all about documents, enabling one to “browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on,” he said.

Berners-Lee has always touted the next step beyond today’s Web to be the “semantic Web,” an environment in which the meaning of documents – or more accurately, the electronic assertion of that meaning – becomes paramount. Berners-Lee isn’t moving away from that idea, but rather combining it with the social graph concept of explicit connections between people.

“It’s not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph,” he wrote. “The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.”

According to Berners-Lee, the key to enabling the social graph is open standards – such as the proposed FOAF (Friend of a Friend) format. It was the wide adoption of open standards that drove the exponential growth of the Web.

“If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know [someone], then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service,” he wrote. “So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us.”

As director of the World Wide Consortium (W3C), Berners-Lee continues to play a key role in the development of Web standards and directions. Berners-Lee referenced earlier definitions of the social graph, most notably an influential document by Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick that first put meat on the bones of the idea.