The news is out today that Google has launched a Social Graph API - basically an open tool for charting social connections on the open web. They say it best themselves:
We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.
What this means, in short, is that XFN matters now. Google launched with some example tools that let you map out what link relationships they’ve found with your blog and other web sites. Your report looks something like this:
I’m assuming this list will grow as you all start adding relationship metadata to your blogrolls. I’m going to go start filling in ours.
This type of link data has existed for a while, and if you’re using WordPress, you may have already put it in. The big holdup has really been that until now there hasn’t been much use for that metadata—if you bothered to fill in all the information about how you’re connected to the people you link to, nobody cared. So why bother?
Well now Google is trying to pull the kind of relationship superdata that people are generating in Social Networks like Facebook (which, incidentally, Google can’t crawl like it can crawl the open web) out into blogs and web sites.
In all honesty, I can’t say I’m too upset about the idea. I’ve always thought that there’s so much more to linking than just links, and this is a cool way to start quantifying that information.
In WordPress, if you want to start adding the XFN metadata, just go to your blogroll tab, then edit any one of the links, and expand the “Link Relationship” tab. Looks like this:
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