The 'Social' 'Graph' - Hmmm?

And today's viral meme - The Social Graph Is Neither.   (Yes, you were hiding under a rock).
maciej brings up two points

• Its not Social : Its more Sociopathic than Social - with the services capturing any and every piece of information about you that they can.  On top of this, there is absolutely no effort to capture signaling.
• Its not a Graph :   The semantic definitions suck (what is a 'friend'?), there is no negativity ('enemy' anyone?), relationships are more complicated than this, and are far more time-dependent.

Really, the Social argument devolves to If you're not paying for it, you are the product.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing in and as of itself, but then again, maybe it is.

The Graph argument, however, is a bit more relevant.  To the extent that we actually assume that the graph resembles Society, we are barking up the wrong tree.  It can, however, be a useful construct that can be used to augment Society. A useful example is that an IM Exchange is not the same as a phone call.  However, it is a wonderful augmentation to a phone call...

My wife (on the phone) - "What do you think of these shoes?" (sends me a link via IM)Me (long suffering) - "Brilliant shoes!"

The closure is, however, both funny and depressing.  I'll let it speak for itself

The funny thing is, no one's really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what's basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text. 

Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook.