Google Social Graph API

As I said before, I really believe in the internet as a social network, as opposed to all the ‘social networks’ that are only social to the contacts that have registed on the same site. For example, I have a blog, and profiles for Plaxo, LinkedIn, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and I’m probably forgetting a couple more (such as Flickr and Picasa Web).

As an example, wouldn’t it be great if I could automatically find my friends from one application I’m also using when they have an account on another application I’m also using? Well, Google announced the Social Graph API that makes this possible. This could be the Semantic Web Killer App.

When I read about this, I instantly tried to make a FOAF file, using the FOAF-a-matic, that would use RDF to present my social graph. However, I also looked at XFN, and for now I’ll just stick with that as the only thing I have to do is add a rel attribute to links I make from this blog. And as I’m kind of lazy, I went for that.

I’ll wait until I got to install the Drupal FOAF Module, along with some other like the buddies module, so that I don’t have to generate the FOAF file myself. And more importantly, this will avoid me having to think about manually updating my FOAF file.