<p><a href="http://brad.livejournal.com/">Brad</a> <a href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/02/urls-are-people-too.html">has announced</a> Google&#8217;s <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/">Social Graph <span class="caps">API</span></a>. It is indeed cool, but not that amazing. There are a lot of <span class="caps">FOAF</span> and <span class="caps">XFN</span> 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 <span class="caps">API</span>). Of course, now <a href="http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87551&amp;topic=13824">you don&#8217;t get real-time parsing</a>. I really hope Google will work with <a href="http://kitchen.technorati.com/search/">Technorati&#8217;s Kitchen Ping Service</a> but it&#8217;s more probable that they launch their own microformat search.</p>

<p>So what&#8217;s the feature I miss so much? Contact merger. When I ask for <a href="http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findcontacts.html?q=http%3A%2F%2Falcidesfonseca.com%0D%0A">my friends</a> 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&#8217;s possible to merge them, but I would require the maximum of N-1 queries extra from the <span class="caps">API</span>. This will really slow it down for <em>friendly</em> people like me. Can&#8217;t powerful Google support this in its <span class="caps">API</span>?</p>