<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Scobleizer]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://scobleizer.blog]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Robert Scoble]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://scobleizer.blog/author/scobleizer/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Google starts linking social&nbsp;networks]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>Let&#8217;s see. I&#8217;m on Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Upcoming, Pownce, Plaxo, Yelp, MySpace, Flickr, Dopplr, and a few others.</p>
<p>The problem? They don&#8217;t know about each other.</p>
<p>Google, today, with its new <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/">Social Graph API</a>, is trying to hook all of those together.</p>
<p>Another problem? If you&#8217;re a developer and build a &#8220;foograph&#8221; your new application doesn&#8217;t have anyone on it. There&#8217;s nothing lamer than a new social network that has no one on it.</p>
<p>Google&#8217;s new effort lets you import friends from other social networks into your new application.</p>
<p>The details are on the new <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/">Google Social API site</a> (the sample apps should be turned on shortly but weren&#8217;t working when published this blog post) with more background <a href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/02/urls-are-people-too.html">from Brad Fitzgerald on the Google Code blog</a>.</p>
<p>The problem is that for apps to be able to sense all your connections you&#8217;ll need to add (rel=&#8221;me&#8221;) tags.<br />
<a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/googles-gathers-social-graph-information-from-the-web-launches-api/"><br />
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has a few more details</a> on this announcement.</p>
<p>In the test that they ran for me it showed about half of my social networks. I expect that will increase pretty rapidly as more social networking systems support the &#8220;rel=&#8221;me&#8221;&#8221; system.</p>
<p>UPDATE: <a href="http://blog.plaxo.com/archives/2008/02/introducing_pub.html">Plaxo just shipped the first app</a> (they claim) using this new API.</p>
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