Tim Berners-Lee published a seminal and defining blog post today that maps his vision of the future of the Social Web - and I first read about it in an excellent post by Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb titled Social Graph & Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee's Graph is The Next Level.  According to Time Berners-Lee:

"…Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Obvious, really."

"….There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. There is a "Social Network Portability" community. Its 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 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. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents."

"…Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous."

"…I'll be thinking in the graph. My flights. My friends. Things in my life. My breakfast. What was that? Oh, yogurt, granola, nuts, and fresh fruit, since you ask."

I took the "essence" of Tim Berners-Lee's post on the Giant Global Graph (above) so I could summarize what I feel he's saying.   We evolved the tools that enable us to dis-enfranchise the information we're interested in from the container it's in (the website/page/program/network) and now we're at the point of needing to deploy a new layer of programming that enables mobile devices, desktops and laptops to interconnect at a higher, more "abstract" level.

It makes perfect sense to me.  years ago I used to more in Systems/Network operations for large Wall Street clients where I'd use products such as HP Openview and HP IT/Operations to monitor network and systems operations.  I noticed that a set of processes, systems, networks could be summarized, abstracted if you will, into symbols that would turn red, yellow or green, depending on the health of that device, system, network.

In fact, without the ability to "abstract" data - we'd quickly be overwhelmed by it.  Now we're moving into another era, a giant leap, where the programs and systems that house data are not longer important (The Web) - it's the data within those programs, systems and pages that is meaningful - and we have to find a way to pull that data out and interrelate it, perhaps in ways no one ever imagined - and that, in short, is The Social Graph of Tim Berners-Lee.