Everything is Social
People are by nature social, they have always been so. Prehistoric people were social, Neolithic people were social, the Mesopotamians where social, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Elizabethans, and even web 1.0 developers where social. By design, our technology has also been designed to be social, from written language to books to email to instant messaging. In fact, everything is social. Just about every physical object can be used in a social setting, rocks, bullets, and flowers.
Blogs too are social, it allows one group of individuals to share information and knowledge with a whole set of people, who in turn can comment, share, and add to that information. But since Facebook, social is sometimes meant to mean something different. Most features in Facebook have a element of social spam that forces a response. I people that first discovered Facebook because they received a spammy email from Facebook saying that someone they might have known, most likely some one they had an email correspondence, had joined Facebook. Facebook’s first spam social behavior was to email everyone in every of their users contact list, this behavior is the same as the Melissa virus. Facebook’s first element of social spam is borrowed a mass-mailing macro virus.
Everything is social and if everything is social, everything that is connected has a social graph. Facebook has managed to capture people and their relations to their friends, family, coworkers, church members, etc. Facebook has coined the pseudo geek speak social graph to describe a persons relationship to their friends and family. If everything is social, then everything has a so called social graph.
For example, since blogs are social it has a social graph of all the people have have posted comments. If Mark Zuckerberg would have designed WordPress, the blog platform I use for my blog, then each person who left me a comment would receive email telling them that if they wanted to participate in recent blog posts and even unsubscribe to the email they would need to sign up. WordPress.com and Discuss, the hosted commenting service, has millions of emails of people that have commented on blogs! If they choose to exploit and zuckerpunch all those people they can.
Everything and everyone is inherently social, technology like Facebook is not making users any more social it just simplifies how we interact with each to the like button.