Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick’s influential post earlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold’s analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on to position the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph – which Sir Tim labeled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!

Note that Berners-Lee wasn’t specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):

1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents — "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.

The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:

"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. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."

Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "…at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected – for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.

What’s more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term "thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system." The following scenario sums it up very nicely:

"Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Conclusion

I’m very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I’m not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term ‘Graph’ or ‘Social Graph’. It really doesn’t matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this ‘next level’ of the Web. That’s what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.

Incidentally, it’s great to see Tim Berners-Lee ‘re-using’ concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it’s fantastic he is reaching out to the ‘web 2.0′ community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.

Related: check out Alex Iskold’s Social Graph: Concepts and Issues for an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex’s latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).

Online reputation company Rapleaf sent us some interesting statistics about the most prominent OpenSocial companies, along with Facebook. Rapleaf gathered data on users of MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 – five social networks on the OpenSocial platform – and also gathered data on Facebook users. Some highlights, followed by full details below:

• The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between Myspace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use Myspace.
• Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male.
• 52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.
• Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites.

Facebook Users
- 2.6 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 63% female, 36% male
- 17% <18 yrs, 52% 18-25 yrs, 21% 26-35 yrs, 5% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
- 2.9 major social networking sites used on average
- 62% are on Myspace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 10% are on Plaxo, 22% are on Hi5

Myspace Users
- 11.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 63% female, 36% male
- 20% <18 yrs, 40% 18-25 yrs, 27% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.4 major social networking sites used on average
- 15% are on Facebook, 2% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 6% are on Plaxo, 17% are on Hi5

LinkedIn Users
- 0.8 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 38% female, 61% male
- 2% <18 yrs, 9% 18-25 yrs, 49% 26-35 yrs, 24% 36-45 yrs, 16% >45 yrs
- 3.2 major social networking sites used on average
- 16% are on Facebook, 25% are on Myspace, 12% are on Friendster, 16% are on Plaxo, 8% are on Hi5

Friendster Users
- 2.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 58% female, 41% male
- 12% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 36% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
- 3.0 major social networking sites used on average
- 10% are on Facebook, 44% are on Myspace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 5% are on Plaxo, 26% are on Hi5

Plaxo Users
- 1.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 62% female, 37% male
- 16% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 24% 26-35 yrs, 10% 36-45 yrs, 11% >45 yrs
- 3.6 major social networking sites used on average
- 20% are on Facebook, 53% are on Myspace, 11% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 15% are on Hi5

Hi5 Users
- 4.5 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 60% female, 39% male
- 21% <18 yrs, 44% 18-25 yrs, 23% 26-35 yrs, 6% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.8 major social networking sites used on average
- 13% are on Facebook, 43% are on Myspace, 2% are on LinkedIn, 13% are on Friendster, 2% are on Plaxo

Tafiti is a new experimental search site from Microsoft. It has rich visualizations and aims to meet the needs of people doing research on the Web. Tafiti runs on the Silverlight browser plug-in platform (Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash) and requires you to install Silverlight if you haven’t already. The underlying search engine is Microsoft’s Live Search.

AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight has an overview of Tafiti. I checked it out too and found it to be an interesting visual experiment, along the lines of other visual search interfaces like Ms. Dewey (a Flash-based talking search engine developed by Microsoft). Microsoft knows that it needs to innovate in search to have any chance of making inroads into Google, so this is another experiment along those lines. Indeed the latest Hitwise stats show Microsoft falling even more behind Google and Yahoo:

Tafiti won’t ever be a mainstream search engine, because ultimately speed and efficiency are what most punters want in a search engine – and Google continues to deliver on those things. However I can see Tafiti becoming a nice niche search engine for researchers, given more iterations. It may well contribute some technology to a future version of Live Search too.

Every week we have a feature called Read/WriteWeb Files, in which we investigate a current hot topic or company in Web technology. This week we’re going to focus on Online Music, something that is becoming more and more prevelant as broadband speed increases and social software functionality gets better. Our network blog on digital lifestyle, last100.com, will also be focusing on Online Music this week and AltSearchEngines will list their Top 10 music search engines. So I’m quite excited by what we’ll discover over the following 5 days about online music!

When you think of music on the Web, there are roughly three main eras:

1) In the time of the Dot Com companies, it was P2P systems such as Napster and Kazaa that defined online music. Ultimately though P2P systems were defeated by the record companies and their heavy-handed legal tactics.

2) Enter the iPod and iTunes, which define the current era of online music. Apple’s combo of a killer devide (iPod) with an online music storage system that syncs with the device (iTunes), has come to dominate the market. You can hardly walk down a city street these days without seeing those familiar white earplugs in someone’s ears. Competitors such as Microsoft (Zune) and Real Networks (Rhapsody) are in the game too, but they’re a long way behind Apple and likely to remain so.

3) Perhaps the next defining period in music will be streaming music over the Internet. Already this era is underway, with startups like last.fm (recently acquired by CBS) and Pandora making their mark. Most of the big Internet and media companies have horses in this race – Yahoo Music, MSN Music and AOL Music, to name a few.

Beyond iTunes

This new generation of online music has a big focus on recommendations, personalization and social networking. There are a multitude of startups looking to become The Next Big Thing, from Fairtilizer (our review) to SeeqPod (our review) to MyStrands (who recently took $25 M in funding to enhance their personalization system). Even Apple, traditionally not big on social software, has recognized that it can’t sit back on its laurels in online music – they recently announced My iTunes widgets, to enable you to share your music, movies and other media with friends.

My iTunes

So this week the Read/WriteWeb Network (R/WW, last100 and AltSearchEngines) will be exploring online music. If you have any suggestions of things to look at, please leave a comment. Also check out this week’s R/WW poll: What is your favorite online music streaming service?

That’s a dramatic and possibly even sarcastic headline, but it was derived from a real question asked in our current post comparing indie blog platforms Six Apart and Automattic. Commenter jm wrote:

“the other vision is that blogging is dead vs myspace/facebook stuff. Where is the need for a individual expression tool when the whole business is moving to social? they were just pre-2.0…”

Another commenter, Jason, quickly retorted:

“I’m not so sure blogging is dead, jm. New blogs pop up on every few seconds and the emerging markets in Asia and Africa are just starting to be tapped. Blogging has certainly evolved over the past five years, but its final shape has yet to form.”

Obviously blogging is nowhere near dead, but jm does raise some interesting issues. With the rise of MySpace in the last couple of years and now Facebook in 2007, many people aren’t writing personal blogs anymore. Having said that, both Six Apart (with Typepad and Vox) and Automattic (with wordpress.com) are clearly targeting personal – and social – bloggers with their products. So it stands to reason that both of those companies are threatened somewhat by social networks. Although the counter to that is that the overall market pie is growing.

Why People Blog

There are many other reasons, apart from being social, that people may want to blog. One is to focus on a niche and essentially treat it as a media website, which is what we do here on Read/WriteWeb.

Another reason is to join a distributed conversation about shared interests – usually a half social, half work activity. Newbie blogger Marc Andreessen’s blog is probably of that type, as he wrote about today in his Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far post. Marc goes as far to say that “…in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact.”

The Best Blogs Are Social

Marc’s post focuses on how blogging has in some ways usurped traditional forms of publishing (books etc). But I think R/WW commenter jm actually hit on a more interesting tension – between blogging as a social communications tool and social networks like MySpace/Facebook. Matthew Ingram has (as always) a great perspective on this, in a post entitled Do blog comments still matter?. Like Matthew, I think comments are vitally important to a blog. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret – right now increasing the comments and discussions on R/WW is my number 1 priority. The reason why is because blogs are at heart a social medium. Blogs are a publishing platform, sure, but they are a social publishing platform.

Now, we’ve seen some very cynical and exploitative uses of blogs over the past year, along with a lot of stats manipulation. It makes me despair at times, but then I think about how the best blogs have resisted the sleeze and have become platforms where discussions bloom. These are blogs where the writers actually write for their readers, and not just to get page views. A good example is my friend Joshua Porter, whose blog Bokardo is a great resource about social web design – and there are always excellent discussions happening on his blog.

Admittedly it’s hard to get discussions going on a blog, but the blogs that at least attempt it and actually write for their readers — these blogs are the most compelling in my view.

So back to the original question – is blogging dead? Not on your life! Blogs, social networks, newspapers, any other form of publication – all have social aspects to them. It is a spectrum really, with social networks at one extreme and a 19th century novel at the other. But there’s room for all types of social publishing platforms.

Cat photo by junku

Davide Casaleggio sent a tip to Read/WriteWeb about a video his company produced exploring the future of media. It is a very cool 6-minute video, which takes some educated (and imaginative) guesses at how the Web and media will evolve over the next 40-50 years. In the short movie, Google, Amazon.com and Second Life are the big winners – with Google buying Microsoft, Amazon buying Yahoo, and Second Life becoming the dominant virtual world.

The core future media concept is the Agav – an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people, places in the virtual worlds”. Here’s where it gets interesting. In 2022 Google launches Prometeus, the Agav standard interface, and Amazon creates ‘Place’ – a company that replicates reality. Then in 2027 Second Life evolves into ‘Spirit’, where people can become who they want to, via avatars. And then finally, the ‘Google overloads’ moment – when Prometeus buys Place and Spirit! By 2050 virtual life is the world’s biggest market and Google/Prometeus reigns supreme.

Of course it may turn out different, but the video does make you think about where the Web is headed. Check it out…