
AllFacebook.com has posted the attached image of Facebook’s “Suggests a friend to me” feature. Not sure what make a friend suggestable to another Facebook user, but if this algorithm can eventually be applied to the giant global graph, the web will truly become become a social graph.
The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people. Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you’re left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful — as a user, you might want to see who else you’re connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn’t been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.
We’re bidding adieu to 2007 with a look back at the breaking news, the big events and the must-have gadgets that captivated us this year (give or take a few weeks; we compile this list by early December). To get a glimpse of what’s been on our collective consciousness, we mined billions of search queries to discover what sorts of things rose to the top. We encourage you to check out our findings to see if you, too, reflect the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times.
Below is Tim Berners-Lee’s post that coined the term, ‘the Giant Global Graph’…and why I now own the GiantGlobalGraph.us, CloudGraph.com and GraphCloud.com domain names.
“Well, it has been a long time since my last post here. So many topics, so little time. Some talks, a couple of Design Issues articles, but no blog posts. To dissipate the worry of expectation of quality, I resolve to lower the bar. More about what I had for breakfast.
So The Graph word has been creeping in. BradFitz talks of the Social Graph as does Alex Iskold, who discusses social graphs and network theory in general, points out that users want to own their own social graphs. He also points out that examples of graphs are the Internet and the Web. So what’s with the Graph word?
Maybe it is because Net and Web have been used. For perfectly good things .. but different things. (more…)