This was the other big announcement on Friday (the first being Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo). Google has opened up the API for the Social Graph. Brad Fitzpatrick describes it as:

Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.

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Jeff Jarvis sees it as an a means to organize the public web into its own social network:

The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.

Using the Google API, Swift will be able to understand my social relationships without any explicit action from me.

I’m very excited about this because it is going to make our new web platform, Swift, much more powerful in that it will be able to go beyond Facebook or Linked In. Here’s how Raffi, our Technology Lead on Swift, describes it:

One thing that we can do is mine google for information about
my friends that i have not _explicitly_ stated in facebook or linked in — I
guess that’s the primary difference — facebook or linked in requires that I
state who my friends are and who i trust, whereas via this API google is
“inferring” who it is. The data can be richer this way.

Additionally - its not just going to be the friends that i know, but through
google we’ll also know who thinks i (as raffi) think is trustworthy, and i
can display that “back link” information as well.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 8:07 am and is filed under community2.0. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.