On Friday Google released the Social Graph API. Essentially, the API helps you discover who your friends are by using a very clever method, it analyzes the XFN (those rel= found in anchor tags, which I never really understood why they existed) and FOAF markup. While the API can help you discover who your friends are on other sites, another interesting aspect of the API is that it can also discover what services a person uses by inputing the url of their blog, twitter, or other service that they use. For example, if I input the url of my blog and run it through he API, I will discover that other sites I use are:
http://digg.com/users/joshaidan/
http://twitter.com/joshaidan
As another example, if I enter the url for Darren Barefoot’s blog into the API, I’ll discover that the services he uses are, and their respective profile pages are:
http://digg.com/users/dbarefoot/
http://friendfeed.com/dbarefoot
http://ma.gnolia.com/people/darren
http://twitter.com/dbarefoot
http://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenbarefoot
With these URLs in hand, it’s not difficult to then grab the RSS, ATOM, (or whatever your favourite feed is) off of the site and then build your own News Feed. I’m starting to think that this Social Graph API could be the greatest jab at Facebook the Google Open Social initiative has thrown. Open Social is starting to build and provide the tools needed to break out of the All You Data Belongs to Us mentality of Facebook. Finally, we may be able to start building our own social networking site by stringing together bits and pieces of smaller social sites like blogs, twitter, flickr.
Time to build your own social networking mash up.
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