The internet is the social network
Google has released a social-graph API, which in theory — though, unfortunately, not in practice — is what the internet is all about: relationships and connections. — I've said it before: … So with its social-graph API, is Google trying to become …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands one day after Google launched the social-graph API that crawls public pages to map who knows whom, an extension of the OpenSocial push from November 2007 to make profile data portable across networks. The argument here — echoing Publishing 2.0's claim that email and phone contacts are the real social graph — is that relationships were never the property of any single walled garden, and that the web itself, properly indexed, is the network.
The timing matters because Google's own executives had just flagged the weakness of the platform-centric model: CFO George Reyes said in late January 2008 that social-networking ad inventory was not monetizing as expected, while Marissa Mayer noted Google would fold in social signals if social search showed promise. An API that reads relationships straight off the web is Google's answer to both — get the graph without depending on the networks' own failing ad inventory.
First-order effects
- Developers gain a Google-maintained way to discover public relationship edges across sites, so any publisher marking up friend lists immediately feeds a graph controlled by the search engine rather than by the social networks themselves.
Second-order effects
- Social network operators face the same open-or-wall decision OpenSocial forced: exposing graph data makes them nodes in Google's index, while withholding it cedes the 'who knows whom' layer to whatever Google can crawl — and advertisers watching Reyes's monetization warning will press for targeting that follows the person, not the platform.
Third-order effects
- If relationship data keeps drifting out of proprietary databases into crawlable markup, the social layer risks consolidating around whoever indexes the web — making search companies, not network operators, the de facto custodians of identity and connection online.
The trend: The social graph is being pried loose from individual networks and reconstituted as web-wide, indexable infrastructure, with search engines positioned as its gatekeepers.