On the 28^th of April, Ben Werdmuller introduced the Open Data Definition in a guest post on Steve O’Hear’s blog. The Open Data Definition http://opendd.net/ is one of the most recent efforts to build Data Portability between Social Networks and user data, for import and export of data between social sites. He discusses the current (what he refers to as) “half-solutions” available for transferring data, such as services giving the user access to his data through third party tools, and other existing solutions, such as SOAP, RDF and FOAF. However, it is lamentable that he focuses on dismissing the usefulness of such languages by pointing out their shortcomings, for example, saying that RDF is “…prone to ambiguity and overcomplicated implementation”. However, this may be part of a marketing strategy for his application, the ODD built into Elgg, the open source social application engine. Any reference to Google Open Social API is also noticeably missing from the post. 

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Last Friday, Google launched an API which supports Tim Berners Lee’s vision of the “Giant Global Graph”; the capabilities for developers to build services for users which allow them to almost instantly integrate their contacts into their own “Social Graph”. This has profound implications for the growth of the Semantic Web, as well as ethical issues regarding data protection. The launch of such an API demonstrates that the “Social Network” concept is becoming more evident than ever online. Research concepts from Social Networks, such as “Six degrees of separation” and network theory are now ever more transparent through the use of technology.

http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

The API enables a user to crawl the Web and retrieve XFN and FOAF tags to help construct the “Social Graph” relevant for that user, from pages such as Flickr, Twitter, and Six Apart. On the Google Social Graph site, Google indirectly refers to the ethical implications of retrieving public connections between people, by alleging that it only extracts connections which have already been publicly declared, and does not access non-public pages. The API does not provide compatibility with the programming tags of sites such as Facebook and MySpace. A user’s Flickr and blog account, or any other similar account, can only be linked and connected to that user’s Web identity if the user permits it.

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