Social Graph API

This is a new one from Google. This Open Api tries to gather information from a website and tries to link to other sites. This is a great idea as such because then even if you have your content distributed, a person could actually search and connect those contents. It gives the person more visibility and opens up more details about his personality, likes and dislikes, his friends and other social details. Though there are speculations about the negative effect that this will have on the community, crackers may use this information for malicious activities, I feel that the idea is great. The lesson that the content that must be protected should be protected and must be maitained by the needed takes charge here.

The Api requires that the data be formatted in a way so that the crawler (which only takes data which is visible in the Google search) may understand this and interpret. Say the 'rel' attribute is searched for terms like 'me' and 'friends' to actually connect to those other sites. The point here is that a single site which has all those links nicely tagged will serve as a starting point for all your distributed content and any person could correlate to your activities using that single site.

I tried this with blogger and it seems that the taggings are not done as yet for blogger. I hope this will soon come into picture. TechCrunch has an article about this. References are given below.

Social Graph Api From Google
Social Graph Api Docs From Google