Google Profiles has XFN now
Google Profiles just launched a new feature that's too dorky and obscure to warrant an official “Google blog” blog post, so the product manager on it said, “Brad, you're dorky... you should post it. … So sure, I'll blawg it here. — Google Profiles now have XFN rel="me" attributes on links.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a small step in a longer Google push to index the social web rather than own it. In 2007 the company was reportedly building a social network aggregator, and its December 2007 Profiles launch gave every Google account holder an outward-facing identity page; by early 2008 the Social Graph API let outside developers crawl exactly this kind of relationship markup across the web.
Adding XFN rel="me" attributes to Profiles links closes the loop in that pipeline: the page Google controls now speaks the same machine-readable identity dialect its own API indexes elsewhere. That the announcement ran on Brad Fitzpatrick's personal blog rather than an official Google blog fits both the feature's obscurity and its provenance — the Social Graph work came out of Fitzpatrick's group.
First-order effects
- Developers querying the Social Graph API can now treat Google Profiles as a verified identity node, confirming that a person's Google page and their links on other sites refer to the same individual.
Second-order effects
- Other profile-hosting sites face pressure to emit matching XFN markup; if they don't, Google's graph sees their users' claimed connections but cannot confirm them, tilting discovery toward services that participate.
Third-order effects
- Identity verification via bidirectional rel="me" links becomes shared infrastructure for the social web, with whoever crawls and indexes the graph — here, Google — holding a positional advantage no single social network owns.
The trend: The social graph is being re-implemented as open, crawlable markup rather than locked inside each network, with Google building the index layer.