By making social data more portable, Google is hoping to make social networks like Facebook and MySpace less relevant…
“Google has helped solved a problem that infects new social networks and applications–how to grow them, and fast…”
New York — Google on Friday launched Google Social Graph API, a new application programming interface (API) that is designed to help developers make use of social networking relationship data.
The Google Social Graph API provides developers with a way to leverage social relationships in their applications and on their Web sites. Developers can code applications which can link up people on the Web. That means that the new APIs will prevent social network users the hassle of redeveloping their entire network of friends when they join new networks.
“You can make it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new Web site and as a result, users will spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time giving your app the love it deserves,” explained Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick in a blog post.
The API takes the publicly declared relationships about your accounts, on Twitter, MySpace.com, and so on, and then your friends and their accounts, and makes that information publicly accessible for new apps. So, when you join a new network built using the API, you would not have to rebuild your social-network contact list.
For example, a developer using the Social Graph API could create a button for a Web site that would allow a registered user to easily “add friends.”
By making social data more portable, Google makes social networks less relevant. In keeping with its mission to organize and index the world’s information, Google would prefer to see a single network, the Internet, through which any data can be accessed and, it is hoped, monetized through its ad platform.
Here is how Fitzpatrick describes it in a blog entry: “So you have just built a totally sweet new social app and you cannot wait for people to start using it, but there is a problem: when people join they do not have any friends on your site. They are lonely, and the experience is not good because they can not use the app with people they know. You could ask them to search for and add all their friends, but you know that every other app is asking them to do the same thing and they are getting sick of it. Or they tried address book import, but that did not totally work, because they do not even have all their friends’ e-mail addresses (especially if they only know them from another social-networking site!). What’s a developer to do?”
Fitzpatrick explained that Google will “crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF.”
“When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they have said they are friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site,” he added.
Google will then take the final data and make it available to third parties, who can build this into their applications and Google will include this in their Google Open Social applications.
If Google’s vision proves appealing and social data loses its linkage to a specific social site, Facebook and MySpace may find their ability to retain users substantially diminished. Without the added value of social graph exclusivity, Facebook and MySpace become merely providers of Web hosting for the HTML averse. It is doubtful Facebook could sustain a valuation of $15 billion were it pitched as “Geocities, but with widgets.”
It is not clear yet how well Google will be able to monetize social graph data; during the company’s fourth quarter financial call Thursday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin observed that social network advertising had not performed as well as expected.
But the company may yet find a way to use relationship data to target its ads more effectively, provided the privacy issues can be worked out.
Privacy- and spam-related issues may pose roadblocks – despite Google’s efforts to stay aboveboard, the Social Graph API’s abilities may come as a surprise to some. Otherwise, as with any new thing, it looks like there will just be the matter of seeing if and how quickly adoption occurs.