The Social Graph API in Google Labs Asks you to Explain Your Relationships rel=?
Links now carry much more data than just a URL, in case you have not yet noticed.
I was just working out various ways to add some of my missing Website feeds to Google Buzz when I came across this link… http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/. Google says, “We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.”
If you haven’t noticed the additional new XFN Link Relationship tagging provided within WordPress Links… here’s what to start paying attention to:
XFN explains that they now help users put a human face on linking. “As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes.”
XFN’s new rel= attributes, now found within URL hyperlinks, helps to define a small set of values that describe personal relationships.
“XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they’ve physically met, and other personal relationships,” say the XFN developers. “Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.”
The new Google API will let developers do even more with these relationships so, it’s time to start filling in the blanks. Are you using the new Social Graph API yet? If so, please comment on how you find value in it.
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