Google Releases Tool To Move Social Networks (NewsFactor)

The balance of power in social networking is moving from the Web site to the user, and that could be accelerated with a new tool released Friday by Google -- a Social Graph API (application programming interface).

By providing an interface so applications can link a users social connections between sites, Google boosts the potential of a users network and of developers applications, while possibly diminishing the value of any single Web site.

FINDING RELATIONSHIPS

In a posting Friday on the Google Code blog, entitled "URLs are People, Too," Google software engineer Brad Fitzpatrick wrote that the new API could help address the dilemma of the lonely social app. If a developer has built a "totally sweet new social app," he said, there could be a problem if people join and "they dont have any friends on your site." Its cumbersome to ask them to search and add all their friends from other sites, and even an address-book import may not work because the user may not have entered all of his or her friends e-mail addresses.

Enter the Social Graph API. It allows users to spend less time rebuilding their network for a new Web site or app because it "makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful."

Fitzpatrick said the API crawls the Web to find "publicly declared relationships between peoples accounts," just as the Google search engine crawls to look for links between pages. But, instead of returning links to HTML documents, it returns data structures that represent social relationships. In the new site or app, the API will ask users if they want to add as friends the people theyve declared as friends on other sites.

A FRIEND OF YOUR FRIEND

Fitzpatrick added that the API can also do such things as ask whether you want to add to your network a friend of a friend of yours. Nonpublic information, such as private profile pages, cannot be accessed with the API.

The usefulness of the new API will depend on whether XFN and FOAF catch on. XFN is XHTML Friends Network, and it is used to tag links in public-user profiles and blogs as being "me" or "friend" or other such relationships. FOAF, or Friend of a Friend, is a centrally managed file that has information about an owner and his/her relationships. The usefulness of the Social Graph API, which utilizes these kinds of tags, depends on the extent to which these formats become widespread.

Even before the APIs success is known, Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for industry research firm Forrester, said the Google API is an indication of the trend toward the future distributed Web, "where users will move from one community to another." He added that this will mean an individual can aggregate a network in one location, and then readily move it as he or she travels to other social environments.