Just in time for the O’Reilly Social Graph Foo Camp this weekend, Google has released its Social Graph API. The API accesses publicly available pages and checks for relations between them.
Relations
Relations in this case are basically just some simple links between two or more websites, though they have to be marked up in XFN or FOAF formats to be indexed; e.g. XFN consists of a <rel> attribute to the <a> tag providing these values to describe a relationship:
- acquaintance, friend, contact
- me
- co-worker, colleague
- neighbor, co-resident
- parent, child, spouse, kin, sibling
- crush, muse, sweetheart, date
- met
Especially the first two bullet points are important for leveraging the social graph. The first one is obvious: my friends and contacts. Though the second one – me – is equally important because users can easily link to their profiles on other websites. Readers running a WordPress blog are probably familiar with XFN already because the blogroll can be marked up with those values already.
Is Google Owning my Social Graph Now?
This is the good thing: no, it doesn’t. It’s just an API and nothing is stored on Google’s servers (Update: This could be misunderstood. Of course, the data comes from Google’s crawler, so data is stored at Google. Though there are no profile pages build). Everyone can use it to display the data of their relationships in any way they want to. Plaxo is the first company using the API to make users’ public profiles more lively by aggregating data from their news feed – Plaxo calls it Pulse. That’s just one example how the data could be used, other companies or individuals will follow.
Just a Step
The Google API is just a first step making it easier for developers to build tools and products upon it. For endusers it is still a rather technical issue. They have to mark up relationships in blog posts if they want to really benefit from it already; well, DiSo to the rescue 
Also in most cases they have to run their own website or blog where they are able to add those relationships. So it’s also up to exisiting web applications and social networks to mark up profile pages and friends lists.
If you prefer a visual explanation of the API just watch the video by Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick.
Tags: API, Brad Fitzpatrick, co-worker, Google, O'Reilly Social Graph Foo Camp, Social Networks, web applications
