My Google Profile looks very lonely at the moment. I wish Google Profile crawls my social graph to find my other friends so that I can find my friends to ask them to connect to my Google Profile.
Connecting Through Social Graph
Google Social Graph allow developers to crawl our social network and find our friends on the net. According to Social Graph I have over 20 friends in Twitter. Some of my Twitter friends such as Jesse Stay happen to have a Google Profile. A visualization of this social graph will be something like :
Looking through the user social graph allow Google Profile to look up for potential connection that user may like to add in their profile.
Social Graph Openness
We love Google’s Social Graph because it is based on an open standard. It does not try to own the relationship in the internet. It does not try to construct a wall around our social interaction that can be a potential single point of failure.
XFN and Google Profile Custom Links
XFN provides a simple way to represent our relationship over the net. It allow us to say that Jesse Stay is my friend by attaching ‘friend’ attribute in the HTML anchor ‘rel’ attribute. XFN has a strong list of supporter.
Google Profile provide user the abillity to add links into their profile. At the moment I have listed 9 links in my profile:
It will be great if we can add custom XFN links to our profile so that we can define our relationship with our friends. I would like to add for example perhaps Rob Diana’s blog to my Google Profile and specify that he’s my friend :
<a href="http://regulargeek.com/" target="_blank" rel="friend met">Rob Diana's</a>
Well I didn’t exactly met Rob face to face, but I have been regularly reading his blog and join his blog discussion. Google Profile has the potential to be the next relationship hub on the net. Other applications can also glean this relationship metadata to suggest meaningful connection to users. Rick Klau will be posting a thread on Google Product Ideas for everyone to share their ideas on Google Profile. I am looking forward to join the discussion.
Curly Braces 
Given Facebook’s announcements, this may all be moot. Google has failed to capitalize on the amount of user profile information they gather and most of their social products have not received a ton of attention.
I like to see the web as a repository of information where user,like me, can get the most relevant information for my needs. Facebook effort is like a double edge sword.On one hand it allows developers to give user more relevant information. Others view that FB is trying to be the authority or even worst single point of failure on the net.
For me I like to have more than 1 options in my hand on how to get things from the web. There is nothing more painful than just having only 1 tool that can do the job for you. If that tool is broken, I need to wait for the service company to come over at my place to fix it. I want to have options or other alternative tool to do my task.
Let take a look at Open Graph by facebook. It is great ! But it will be even better if we can have more options for the social web. There are other alternative to Open Graph, e.g: Google’s Social Graph, that leverages open standard such as XFN or FOAF. I look forward for other open standard adopters to push the popularity of Google’s Social Graph.