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 user’s social connections between sites, Google boosts the potential of a user’s 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 don’t have any friends on your site.” It’s 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 people’s 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 they’ve 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…