socialmedian and the Google Social Graph API
We've been playing around with the Google Social Graph API over here at socialmedian lately and have today begun to slowly add some features which make use of this API.
At socialmedian, our first use of this API is to guess at what other sites might also belong to an individual. i.e. in the example pictured below, in my profile settings, I have told socialmedian what my Twitter account username is as well as my FriendFeed user name and based on that, using the GSG API, we are able to instantly suggest some other sites which might be mine as well.
In this case, we accurately find my blog, linkedin account, facebook account, etc., which I can easily one-click now to add to my socialmedian profile.
This is a fairly basic use of the API around site connectivity. We'll be doing some more advanced work with the API soon around user connectivity which should be even more interesting.
In terms of our use of the API, here are some of the observations thus far:
What is the Social Graph API?
The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers. Developers can query this public information to offer their users dramatically streamlined "add friends" functionality and other useful features.
As this quick demo from Google shows, the API can detect how sites are connected/related and how people are connected based on public links on websites, marked up using Open standards such as XFN and FOAF, designed to express relationships online.
At socialmedian, our first use of this API is to guess at what other sites might also belong to an individual. i.e. in the example pictured below, in my profile settings, I have told socialmedian what my Twitter account username is as well as my FriendFeed user name and based on that, using the GSG API, we are able to instantly suggest some other sites which might be mine as well.
In this case, we accurately find my blog, linkedin account, facebook account, etc., which I can easily one-click now to add to my socialmedian profile.This is a fairly basic use of the API around site connectivity. We'll be doing some more advanced work with the API soon around user connectivity which should be even more interesting.
In terms of our use of the API, here are some of the observations thus far:
- We wish that more services would use the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markups It's very simple and more developers should be made aware of this. More developers should be made aware of the benefits of using these markups. Right now, hardly anyone bothers using these markups. It may not be a proper comparison...but developers started using proper html tags because that gave them SEO benefit.
- The response data isn't entirely clean so you need to be cautious and apply your own filters on top of it. As an example, for one of our team members, Nishith Shah, for twitter.com/neesheeth, Social Graph API thinks that friendfeed.com/neesheeth is an unverified claiming node. However, for friendfeed.com/neesheeth, it thinks twitter.com/neesheeth is a claimed node.
- Also, the user connections are understandably not in real time. So can't be used in situations where you need most up-to-date information
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Posted by redhat.pip.verisignlabs.com
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July 14, 2008 7:01 AM | Score: 0
It's also possible to make a collection from Gnip (http://www.gnipcentral.com/) and extract user information from a number of the sites you integrate.