social media

Google knows your friends, and your friends’ friends.

Google, today launched a new API, something that could be a revolutionary new tool for social apps and the social media in general — The Social Graph.

This latest API from google will allow developers of social apps grab what is normally the essential-most piece of a social-startup’s puzzle from the public web and that is the information of who knows whom. One way this can be used, according to google, is, for example if a new user signs up with your cool new social network — your network, thanks to the API, already knows whom that person knows and to how. So, all the friends of this new user who are already on your network, can automatically be in his/her buddy list there. Pretty cool huh?

I almost forgot to mention the most interesting part, All this, thanks to those ‘rel’ tags made oh so famous because of nofollow, in web links.

“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. “

Come to think of it, google has been, since the beginning, been using social graph data to make their SERPs look so good. however, the recent increased usage of XFN and FOAF data in these rel tags (XFN – the XHTML friends network and FOAF – Friend Of A Friend, are standards based linking meta-data mechanisms let you specify when you link to a URL, how are you related to the person who owns that URL) google has made it really easy for developers working on so many applications other than search to harness the usability of social linking.

More on: Google Code, Tech Crunch

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