Web's inventor & the social Web

ZDNET blogger Dan Farber says the social Web just "reached a new stage of legitimacy" with a recent post by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor (in 1989, BTW). Berners-Lee says the Web has evolved in people's minds from connecting computers to connecting documents (maybe this was "Web 1.0") to connecting the things those documents are about - from relationships to all manner of interests and activities. For example, Berners-Lee said, "biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances." Building on that, he later added that "it's 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." In his blog post, Farber was making the connection between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's term "social graph," or "the network of connections between people," and Tim Berners-Lee's use of the term.