On Facebook, tens of millions of users have been constructing the social network's most important asset: the social graph. As people add friends, Facebook gets to understand how its users know
each other and, ostensibly, earn some money in the process.
Google is building a Social Graph API to rival Facebook, although the Web giant is taking "a much different and more open
approach" to social graphing. Whereas Facebook operates under a walled-garden approach -- meaning everything that leverages Facebook's social graph links back to Facebook -- Google will allow third
parties to grab social graph data produced by links or data included on Web pages but not shown in a browser. Google plans to let third parties build the data into applications made for Open Social
and other initiatives. What we have here is a massive amount of private social data being made available to application makers so they can better target their applications and the
advertising that runs on those applications. Privacy issues abound--including letting users know just how extensive the data mining is through the Social Graph API--but third parties are already
jumping on board. Plaxo is adding the social graph data to their Pulse profile pages to show users' additional relationships.
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