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

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

First(?) Widget ad spotted on CJ

No, Commission Junction hasn’t joined the cool affiliate networks and launched a widget advertising platform.

GAP, who have an affiliate program there, today announced something they call an AdPod - It’s a javascript that can be embedded to your website, and the widget will use meta-tags and keywords to dynamically display products and ads from gap that complement your web-page’s content; much like how adsense works with text-ads from google.

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Video Startup Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Yet another social shopping network acquired

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Amazon 2.0s it’s affiliate program even more, launches (monetizable) Widgets

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The Official eBay facebook App goes live

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!