Social Network Portability Gets Closer

Posted on February 3, 2008
Filed Under Building work | | Written by Gary Reid

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Today Google announced the release of their social graph api.

we 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’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site

Basically this could make all of the work on XFN worthwhile.

If this works out in the best possible way it will be a huge dent in networks that try and lock you in by holding your network hostage.