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The web could become a friendlier place thanks to Google’s Social Graph API. This new service helps developers build applications that query public information about people and their relationships, saving users the effort of redefining their connections as they move from community to community, and from application to application.

Developer Home – Google Code via kwout

This information is gathered from public profiles on existing social networks, from blogs and from suitably formatted web pages. The systems understands and indexes data coded in XHTML Friends Network microformat

XFN: Introduction and Examples via kwout

or marked up with Friend of a Friend syntax

FOAF Vocabulary Specification via kwout

to define relationships between people, or to define “me” relationships between an individual’s multiple profiles held on different systems.

In the video below Brad Fitzpatrick describes the API and some of its use cases.

Building on a growing base of semantic web technologies this service is another clear pointer to the direction the Internet is taking, with markup focussed on meaning rather than presentation, and applications able to work with and augment each others data as a matter of course. The API will affect social networks, who will need to choose the level of openness they are willing to support.

Though the system uses only public data, the power to query and analyze could affect the way you choose to present yourself online. It could also lead to some interesting situations where connected people perceive different qualities in their relationships. It’s not just how you link to your friends, it’s how they link to you. Are your ears burning?

Reuters have launched OpenCalais a service that will encourage the development and growth of the Semantic Web.

OpenCalais via kwout

Aimed at developers and information publishers, OpenCalais is web service that can extract meaningful terms from well written text. When fed a newspaper article or business report the service will identify the people, places, monetary values, companies and institutions mentioned and will organize references to those terms to ease further research. In well structured business text Calais can also interpret and classify facts; recognizing and reporting joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, earnings announcements etc.

End users will not interact with Calais directly, but will access the service through third party applications, plugins and utilities. Development of these will be encouraged through programming bounties, the first offers $5000 for the development of a Wordpress plugin.

In the long term, initiatives like OpenCalais will help us work more effectively with the increasing flow of information that surrounds us. These are distinct strategic and personal benefits to be gained from generating, and being able to work with, structured information instead of being swamped by raw data.

From the 30th of January the number of OpenId users will triple to 368 million thanks to Yahoo’s launch of an OpenId service.

Yahoo! Inc. – Press Release via kwout

This makes signing up for services and communities that much easier, simply a login, no need to bother with double opt in emails or miss-typed (unreadable) Captchas.

But what effect will this have?

Remove barriers and actions become more likely.

Facebook applications illustrate this wonderfully. Sign-up is so easy that profiles have become immensely crowded. So crowded, in fact, that Facebook have released a cleaning tool to tidy things up.

Facebook Developers News via kwout

Active Facebook use is dominated by a small core of applications with the majority having less than 2% of their users active on any day.

Good News, Bad News about Facebook Application Market: Long Tail Rules via kwout

Many users, few of whom are active. The same pattern might well be seen throughout the web as OpenID removes the effort needed to participate. We could see more ad-hoc use as people log in, use once, and vanish for months or perhaps for ever.

Potential issues include:

• how to structure communities and directories when the majority of members are in the very long tail
• what expectations users have about data storage without participation
• where and whether an application needs to store user profile data at all

With a long tails of users storage becomes more of an issue, particularly when they expect to bring their data with them.

Drop.io already has an interface for expiring data.

Drop.io: Simple Private Exchange via kwout

Smaller sites and communities running on shared hosts with OpenId enabled Drupal or Joomla installations could well feel an effect with abandoned member profiles gathering dust and clogging interfaces.

If you publish your business address(es) on your website it makes sense to use a standard.

• It’s one less design decision for you.
• Visitors can work more easily with your contact information.
• You will be found more easily by some search engines.

The hCard microformat is a simple standard that is easy to work with.

To implement hCard you simply add some a few extra classes to your standard html markup to indicate which parts of your page contain address and contact information. This markup helps browser plugins and search engines understand your page.

hcard – Microformats via kwout

hCard – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia via kwout

Alternatively you can use the hCard Creator to do the work for you.

hCard Creator via kwout

The Operator plugin for Firefox automatically identifies the hCard information in any web page you visit and tucks it away in a toolbar menu ready for you to use to add a contact to your address book, or look up the address on your favorite mapping service..

Operator :: Firefox Add-ons via kwout

Technorati have a built a microformat search engine that scours registered web sites for contacts (hCard), event (hCalendar) and reviews (hReview).

Technorati Microformats Search: vancouver via kwout

hCard, and the other microformats, have been quietly establishing themselves over the past few years, and increasingly are being built into tools, services and applications. The potential benefits of adding a small amount of markup to give meaningful structure to contact information on a web page is well worth the effort.