At Google they have created an API to look up a social graph. I found it particularly interesting to come across this, since I had been thinking about the same concept for some while. I even wrote something about it a while ago. The driving idea behind it is that we have many fragmented online identities. But, ofcourse, there is only one real identity, that is the body you’re carrying around all the time with you. It makes sense to somehow connect these online identities and identify the only single real identity. Now with the immense information base available at google it should be possible to create some smart page indexing and extract these information. But this is not what the social graph does: it makes use of the XFN standard to extract high-quality and consistent information. An example of an XFN compatible tag would be:
<a href="http://tanya.example.org" **rel="friend met colleague"**>...
In this example you do not only specify the url to which the hyperlink points, but also the relation. It drives the forming of a semantic web, where not only pages and resources are linked together, but also their relations are described. Very nice stuff, but at the same time also vulnerable for abuse and privacy infringement. Use it wisely.
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