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<dateCreated>Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Tom Morris</ownerName>
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<outline text="Google release social network data API" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"><outline text="Google have made an &lt;acronym title=&quot;Application Programming Interface&quot;&gt;API&lt;/acronym&gt; which they call the &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/&quot; rev=&quot;vote-for&quot;&gt;Social Graph API&lt;/a&gt;. I think the very phrase &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/02/01/the-clarity-challenge/#comment-24684&quot;&gt;social graph is bullshit&lt;/a&gt;, so I won't say that any more. From now on I'm calling it the social network data &lt;acronym&gt;API&lt;/acronym&gt;. Stupid name aside, it's a pretty good product.&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="I haven't bought into the OpenSocial hype. Too much rubbish about Facebook-style apps and widgets. Not interesting. It made all the investors and VCs cream themselves in an orgy, and all the business bloggers go on and on about Facebook vs. OpenSocial, as if that actually mattered in the long run (the social network fight is doomed to one winner - the Web - and that's harder to monetise than closed off stuff, the portals of the current web).&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="What Google's product does is quite simple. You provide it with a &lt;acronym title=&quot;Unique Resource Indicator&quot;&gt;URI&lt;/acronym&gt; and it'll return a list of linked resources - either other facets of your own identity (other pages you control, other social network profiles), connected friends and contacts or both. It uses a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;http://gmpg.org/xfn/&quot;&gt;&lt;abbr title=&quot;XHTML Friends Network&quot;&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/&quot;&gt;&lt;abbr title=&quot;Friend Of A Friend&quot;&gt;FOAF&lt;/abbr&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="The &lt;abbr&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt; performance is stunning. If you put in details of people who are big users of &lt;abbr&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://tantek.com&quot; rel=&quot;met acquaintance&quot;&gt;Tantek&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://epeus.blogspot.com&quot; rel=&quot;met acquaintance&quot;&gt;Kevin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://adactio.com&quot; rel=&quot;met friend&quot;&gt;Jeremy&lt;/a&gt; etc.), you get tremendously accurate and useful results. In the case of &lt;abbr&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt;, it functions much as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plaxo.com/info/opensocialgraph&quot;&gt;Plaxo's Open Social Graph&lt;/a&gt; tool, only more useful and a lot quicker (it's not probing each page - it's &lt;em&gt;Google&lt;/em&gt;, remember).&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="Now, for &lt;acronym&gt;FOAF&lt;/acronym&gt;, it's less accurate in a number of ways. It's not parsing &lt;acronym&gt;FOAF&lt;/acronym&gt; in the way that most folks probably would. I haven't quite pegged the problem yet, but there's something slightly weird going on with it. We've been discussing it on &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.freenode.net/swig&quot;&gt;&lt;abbr title=&quot;Semantic Web Interest Group&quot;&gt;swig&lt;/abbr&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (logs: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/2008-02-01.html#T20-21-05&quot;&gt;yesterday&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/2008-02-02.html&quot;&gt;this morning&lt;/a&gt;). And &lt;a href=&quot;http://dannyayers.com&quot; rel=&quot;met acquaintance&quot;&gt;Danny&lt;/a&gt; is quite concerned about the SGN pseudo-URL scheme that Google are using, and says it's breaking some fundamentals of Web Architecture (see his comments &lt;a href=&quot;http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/02/urls-are-people-too.html&quot;&gt;on Brad Fitzpatrick's blog post&lt;/a&gt;).&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="To be honest, I'm not too bothered about the SGN thing. You can specify in the &lt;acronym&gt;API&lt;/acronym&gt; call whether or not you want SGNs or proper URLs. Yes, it may technically be a breach of Web architecture, but it's not one that really concerns me too much. It seems slightly silly when we already have a method in FOAF of specifying account names (the &lt;a href=&quot;http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_OnlineAccount&quot;&gt;OnlineAccount&lt;/a&gt; class and it's subclasses, combined with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_holdsAccount&quot;&gt;holdsAccount&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_accountServiceHomepage&quot;&gt;accountServiceHomepage&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_accountName&quot;&gt;accountName&lt;/a&gt; properties - I use all of these in my &lt;acronym&gt;FOAF&lt;/acronym&gt; document to describe Facebook friends who don't have URIs but have unique numbers), but it's not the end of the world.&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="What's the new Google tool going to do then? Well, some people are going to use it for the fairly obvious first use - letting you import friends from other sites and prove one's identity etc.&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="This evening I've been figuring out how we get the data back out again and on to the Linked Web of Data. I've been prototyping an &lt;acronym title=&quot;Resource Description Framework&quot;&gt;RDF&lt;/acronym&gt;izer. It's pretty simple to do - nothing that is of any real difficulty. I'm using Python to prototype it, but hope to have it available in a few different languages very soon (Python is a given, PHP is too - maybe Ruby, and Java if I feel masochistic - and most definitely available as a web service). Okay, so we get the data out as &lt;acronym&gt;RDF&lt;/acronym&gt;, what then? Well, there are two things I can see which would be really cool. One is desktop caching. This is not hard. You could have a really neat little application that uses, say, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sqlite.org&quot;&gt;SQLite&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://librdf.org&quot;&gt;librdf&lt;/a&gt; as a little triple store. That way, when you run across a page on the Web, you could have a little sidebar or pop-up in your browser that would show you &quot;this person knows five people whose web pages you've browsed recently&quot;. Okay, you could do that without the &lt;acronym&gt;RDF&lt;/acronym&gt; and triple-store, but it's a cool use case nonetheless.&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="A slightly more practical and useful point is that we can use it as a scutter plan in order to pull in data about our whole social network. The combination of the Google Data plus some shareable rulesets and scripts could be a useful scutter plan. It'll be interesting to see how else this can be used as part of Linked Open Data.&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="What else, then? I'm pretty sure that a simple mechanism for &lt;abbr&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt; 'completeness' will mean that OpenID whitelisting for expanding hCards can become more popular, as I described &lt;a href=&quot;http://tommorris.org/blog/2007/11/05#When:14:06:04&quot;&gt;back on 2007-11-05&lt;/a&gt;. Mine is still based on &lt;acronym&gt;FOAF&lt;/acronym&gt; though - just because we haven't got the full stack together for &lt;abbr&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt; (it's almost there, and one &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; do it, but &lt;acronym&gt;FOAF&lt;/acronym&gt; for me already does everything that's needed).&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="&#13;" created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/><outline text="I've gotta say, SGNs aside, a big thank you to the folks at Google for making a big contribution to making &lt;abbr&gt;XFN&lt;/abbr&gt; and, to a lesser extent, &lt;acronym&gt;FOAF&lt;/acronym&gt; more useful. This is in the long-run more interesting than all the vampires and zombies crap on Facebook put together." created="Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:24:18 GMT"/></outline></body>
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