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.
The Facebook JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls through JavaScript code from any Web site and makes it easy to create AJAX Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any Web site that serves static HTML.
Applications that use this client library should be configured to load in an iframe, not be rendered with FBML. This applies to either iframe Facebook applications that users access through the Facebook Web site or applications that users access directly on the application’s own Web site. The library supports every Facebook API method, except:
Using this client library is easy. Just follow these two steps:
That’s all. Now you start to call the Facebook API through JavaScript…
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…)
bits.blogs.NYTimes.com >_ Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up 
with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.
I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan. When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”
Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”
This has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her.
“The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most.
Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up.
“The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it’s dormant,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. (more…)
