clipped from: www.blogbusinesssummit.com   

Google’s new Social Graph API means it’s time to start using XFN

by Jason Preston | February 1st, 2008
The news is out today that Google has launched a Social Graph API - basically an open tool for charting social connections on the open web.
What this means, in short, is that XFN matters now. Google launched with some example tools that let you map out what link relationships they’ve found with your blog and other web sites.

This type of link data has existed for a while, and if you’re using WordPress, you may have already put it in. The big holdup has really been that until now there hasn’t been much use for that metadata—if you bothered to fill in all the information about how you’re connected to the people you link to, nobody cared. So why bother?

Well now Google is trying to pull the kind of relationship superdata that people are generating in Social Networks like Facebook (which, incidentally, Google can’t crawl like it can crawl the open web) out into blogs and web sites.