Opening up The Social Graph

Here’s a little nugget which could turn out to be something big. Google have announced their new Social Graph API.

In layman’s terms the social graph is the representation of me and my contacts, and how we relate to each other (the friends list on Facebook is a good example). Problem is, you build one set in Facebook, one in Myspace, another in Twitter, yawn, you get the picture. Google’s API will mean they’re all nicely tied together so you only need to build your contacts up once and any app can use them. (That’s a vast oversimplification but you get the idea).

I’ll let Josh Porter explain better.

I’m wondering what this means for Facebook. When you think about it, Facebook’s major USPs are

1. Everyone’s spent a buckets of time signing up to it and building their social graphs (admit it, that’s the most fun part!)
2. You can run applications on it.
3. You can send each other messages.

But what happens when any online application knows who your friends are? Why are we going to need Facebook any more? What about when your email program links to your social graph - why would I bother using Facebook’s crappy messaging function? As Pete Ashton was ranting today, It doesn’t even let us search messages! Grr.

And then there’s Opensocial. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so.

If you’re to take one thing from this, buy your domain name now (e.g. antoniogould.com). In the future we’re all going to be defined by our URLs.