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The Social Graph

Dec 6, 2008 | Random | 0 comments

Warning:  This is gonna get really nerdy.

The web today is all about “me” and “my” and “us”.  It’s very personal and very social.  But it’s still world-wide, in the sense that you have an online presence, but that presence may be split up between Facebook, your blog, twitter, google, your bank, cnn, and whatever other sites you may have personalized.

So the information that makes up the digital “you” is completely decentralized, denormalized and disparate.  Add in the extra dimension of the information that makes up your friends, and defining your social web looks like an impossible task.

What we need is a way to let the web know more about the relationship between one link and another.  Thankfully, the fine folks at the Global Multimedia Protocols Group came up with a very simple but very powerful solution.  The answer is XFN (XHTML Friends Network).  Below is the code that makes up a regular hyperlink on a webpage.

<a href="http://www.joe-schmo.com" >Joe's Page</a>

Now, take a look at the same link, if I use XFN, and Joe Schmo is a friend of mine.

<a href="http://www.joe-schmo.com" rel="friend met" >Joe's Page</a>

XFN does nothing to affect the behavior of the link, but it says something about what the relationship is.

So, take a look at the links I have in my blogroll:

<a href="http://florida.myersonconsulting.com/blog" rel="friend met sibling">
  Orlando Myersons
</a>
<a href="http://ilanasims.blogspot.com/" rel="friend met sibling">
  Tales of the Sims
</a>
<a href="http://www.myersonconsulting.com/blog/" rel="friend met sibling">
  Tucson Myerson Blog
</a>
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=8113173&#38;ref=profile" rel="me">
  Facebook
</a>
<a href="http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/109227840907787774824?hl=en" rel="me">
  Google
</a>
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/benmyerson" rel="me">
  Twitter
</a>

Now the web knows that I’m friends with, I’ve met, and I’m siblings with all three of my blogroll buddies, and it also knows that my presence on the web extends from this page to my facebook, twitter and google profiles.

So, who can make use of this?  It’s not like most casual web surfers are going around looking at the HTML source of webpages to see who knows who. Well, that’s why the beautiful nerdery known as Google has given us the Social Graph API.  This is an easy way for web developers to tap into the company’s giant index of the internet to see the Social Web.  Take a look at this here video:

He puts it together pretty well here.  I think it’s pretty cool, and I’m going to look to integrate this with my side projects I talked about the other day.