Google's Social Graph API

Finally, something useful for looking at social graph information in public data: Google's Social Graph API. I've talked  to a lot of people about the potential for encoding structured data in the public web and the interesting tools that are starting to crop up for finding that data and letting people act on it. Microformatted events and locations are cool and all, but the relationships between people are just as interesting, and not just as vectors for empty viral marketing bullshit advertising stories.

I want to be able to stalk my friends without having to lock myself and everybody I know into using Facebook. By "stalk", I mean things like: finding out which rock shows they're going to this month, what books they're reading, what trips they have planned, and the experiences they've recorded with photographs. And I want to get this information straight from the web sites where my friends are publishing this information, not from some intermediary aggregator who forces me to use their web site to see the info, jams ads in wherever it can, and asserts some sort of shady ownership over publicly available information. Nor do I want to have to sell my soul to some centralized profile management system that everybody else has to agree to use. I want full control over how I express my relationships to people, and I want the same for everyone else.

Hopefully this announcement will stimulate the makers of web publishing software to build in support for XFN and FOAF. Digging this info out of the public web is only half the problem; getting the info into the web in the first place is the other half. As an example, Movable Type should include a module or widget or whatever their jargon is that lets me specify links to my public profiles and automatically insert the appropriate XFN magic; same with FOAF and links to my friends' profiles and sites. Hand coding this stuff is tedious even when it's as simple as rel="me", and the publishing interface should hide the details from us, since we're not all geeks, but we all want to blog. (MT should also have an authoring widget for dropping a microformatted event into a post!)

Tim O'Reilly has more in-depth comments at O'Reilly Radar. As he points out, beyond this great first step, we need ways to get access to the information encoded within each profile pointed to by one of these relationships, and ways to follow the same relationships into and within private data sources. I'm not smart enough to speculate on what these tools will look like, but I'm more hopeful than ever that they are on their way.