The Google Social Graph and beyond

Referring back to my earlier post about The Semantic Web, I mentioned that new build projects should utilise things such as Microformats and RDF.

One of the main reasons for this was to provide people with better usability of social networks, enabling them to find existing friends easily on new social platforms and facilitate portable, reusable online profiles, portable social networks and consolidated identities. The Google Social Graph aims to address this by taking note of XFN and FOAF markup within pages indexed by Google Search.

The data is being made available by Google for developers via the The Social Graph API, all interesting stuff and now it seems they are also paying more attention to the hCard Microformat too. Good post on this by Frederic Lardinois on Readwriteweb if you want to dig deeper.

I think the most important thing to note here is that Google are evidently paying more attention to semantic markup and it will not be long before other Microformats in addition to XFN and hCard are noted and effectively used by Google.

Ahem, I smell the possibility of Google Review Search on the horizon