It’s long overdue.
Almost 4 years ago I started to get excited about what could be done with a social graph (or network, as we called ’em back then). My head swam with possibilities of a real trust network: get product and company reviews , prevent spyware and check validity of files, control process execution, and of course use your network for trusted searching. That last one let to the development of Lijit, which was been my life for the last 3 years.
I never imagined how hard it would be to actually get a graph. The “big guys” of MySpace and Facebook sealed their users’ graphs in TOS-protected Silos, and users grew wary of re-friending on every new web service. Open standards like FOAF and XFN were there, but no one really used them. It was beginning to look like social graph innovation would be limited to whatever the big guys wanted to allow.
So I’m excited about Google’s new Social Graph API. There’s a still a long way to go, but maybe with Google’s weight other services will allow users to publish their graphs and be available to this API.
Google went big by using the information in the Web’s link-graph. What exciting new tools will be possible when we have real access to the social graph?
Related: Not all links are created equal
