Alcides Fonseca

Brad has announced Google’s Social Graph API. It is indeed cool, but not that amazing. There are a lot of FOAF and XFN parsers around, but being able to poll the web cache they have for google search. This really gets your requests time down to one (the API). Of course, now you don’t get real-time parsing. I really hope Google will work with Technorati’s Kitchen Ping Service but it’s more probable that they launch their own microformat search.

So what’s the feature I miss so much? Contact merger. When I ask for my friends I get this huge list of all my contacts in all my social networks. But I have friends that are in more than one social network, and then being repeated there. It’s possible to merge them, but I would require the maximum of N-1 queries extra from the API. This will really slow it down for friendly people like me. Can’t powerful Google support this in its API?