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- Introduction
Developer Guide
Example Apps
About the 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.
How does the Social Graph API find these connections?
The Social Graph API looks for two types of publicly declared connections:
- It looks for all public URLs that belong to you and are interconnected. This could be your blog (a1), your LiveJournal page (a2), and your Twitter account (a3).
- It looks for publicly declared connections between people. For example, a1 may link to b's blog while a1 and c link to each other.
This index of connections enables developers to build many applications including the ability to help users connect to their public friends more easily. For example, in the image below, Brad just joined Twitter but has no friends on it. Using the Social Graph API, Twitter could provide Brad a way to find out that his friend Jane is also on Twitter. Here's how: Brad has linked to his homepage (b3) from his Twitter profile (b1) and also from his homepage (b3) to his LiveJournal blog, Bradfitz (b2). On LiveJournal, Brad is friends with Jane274 (j2), but Brad doesn't know that Jane274 (j2) also has a Twitter profile (j1). Since the Social Graph API has indexed that Brad and Jane already have declared a public friendship on LiveJournal, it can let Brad know that he might want to add Jane (j1) on Twitter as well.
