Brad Fitzpatrick, of Livejournal and memcache fame, and now a Google employee, just announced the release of the social graph API. It leverages the public, explicit relationships declared in XFN or FOAF by various sites, and harvested as part of Google’s crawl, to expose someone’s graph in a form suitable for building applications. In these days of growing Facebook fatigue, this could help bring the vision of an ambient social network, where your graph (i.e. your posse) travels with you everywhere you go instead of being trapped in a particular site, one step closer to reality. Caveat: Google has shown its willingness to end support for popular APIs before, so there’s clearly risk involved in building anything dependent on this.

Social Graph API – Google Code

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Tags: socialgraph, api, google code