Video of Kevin Marks of Google describing the background behind the Open Social API.

Tim Berners Lee: a cloud around connections between computers and web documents.

New set of complexities. New social sites being built all of the time.

We assume email is part of the web and part of your default experience. Younger people hate email. They only use email to talk to us. We think of email being us. But they think of their social network as being them.

All these things on the web we think of us as documents are actually people. People have links between them. Links between web sites that are people are expressing relationships. XFN and FOAF.

Social Graph API: finds web sites that can be treated as people (blogs and social network profiles) and returns the links between them. These are the publicly declared links on the web. The Social Graph API allows you to find out the friends they have and have already expressed.

The Social Graph API puts a cloud around finding me and finding my friends on the web. These connections can be discovered and used in other places. Open Social abstracts out these relationships and enables you to build this into your application. The cloud is people friends, actions and data.

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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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