Re: New SGAPI method: otherme - Ade Oshineye - com.googlegroups.social-graph-api

9 messages in com.googlegroups.social-graph-apiRe: New SGAPI method: otherme

From	Sent On	Attachments
Brad Fitzpatrick	11 Jul 2008 16:04
Ade Oshineye	13 Jul 2008 09:24
Brad Fitzpatrick	13 Jul 2008 18:43
Brad Fitzpatrick	13 Jul 2008 18:46
Ade Oshineye	14 Jul 2008 09:45
Brad Fitzpatrick	14 Jul 2008 10:05
Dale Newfield	15 Jul 2008 13:38
Brad Fitzpatrick	15 Jul 2008 13:50
Brad Fitzpatrick	30 Jul 2008 11:39

Subject:	Re: New SGAPI method: otherme
From:	Ade Oshineye (ad...@google.com)
Date:	07/14/2008 09:45:34 AM
List:	com.googlegroups.social-graph-api

At the moment any tool based on the idea that the user enters some of their urls and the system works out their urls will still have to implement something like the following algorithm:

#pseudo-python userUrlsSet = set(["somebaseurl"]) urlsToVisitSet = set(["somebaseurl"]) visitedUrlsSet = ()

while len(urlsToVisitSet) > 0: for url in urlsToVisitSet.copy(): #network call to sgapi fetchedUrlsSet = fetchOtherUrls(url) visitedUrlsSet.add(url) for fetchedUrl in fetchedUrlsSet: if fetchedUrl not in visitedUrlsSet: urlsToVisitSet.add(fetchedUrl) userUrlsSet = userUrlsSet.union(fetchedUrlsSet)

Note that this is approximately O(N**2) and that it hammers Google servers. However it has the benefit that if a user enters just one url we can find all the other urls. It would be _very_ useful if the SGApi could do this and expose it as one call.

2008/7/14 Brad Fitzpatrick <brad...@google.com>:

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 9:25 AM, Ade Oshineye <ad...@google.com> wrote:

Are these links meant to be bi-directional? The following 2 urls give different results implying that the SGApi can only follow links between accounts and doesn't infer relationships:

... though I'm curious what you mean by "doesn't infer relationships".

There are no me links from bradfitz.jaiku.com:

http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/lookup?pretty=1&q=http://bradfitz.jaiku.com&edo=1

So if you start there, it's a dead-end. What would you expect it to do? (I do plan to add a fuzzy=1 option in the future, where if a node is uncontested we could walk up the me edge in the wrong direction. Fuzzy mode would only be for when human reviewers are involved.)

http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?pretty=1&q=bradfitz.com

http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?pretty=1&q=http://bradfitz.jaiku.com

2008/7/12 Brad Fitzpatrick <brad...@google.com>:

The Social Graph API was launched February 1st right before the Social Graph Foo Camp. The main Foo Camp starts today, so this seems like a good time to launch some more SGAPI features.

So far the Social Graph API has only had 1 method (/lookup) and 1 other debug method (/testparse). Now there's the first new high-level API, "otherme".

No docs are written yet, so consider this a sneak preview if you'd like:

http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?pretty=1&q=bradfitz.com http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?pretty=1&q=davidrecordon.com

Parameters are:

q - comma-separated list of URLs/emails that a user has said are theirs jscb - JSON-P callback, optional. pretty - optional boolean: pretty-print sgn - optional boolean: include sgn canonicalizationd details/nodes (including sgn mboxsha1sum nodes)

Response is all the other URLs that user has, not including the one or more you passed in in the 'q' parameter. They're keyed by URL and include all the new attributes that are being parsed (name, photo, rss, atom, etc).

Note that this is simply a mechnical transformation on the /lookup method, not offering anything that wasn't possible before. It's just that the transformation was tedious and error-prone and silly to have to repeat in each client library. Hopefully putting it in the server makes it more convenient for everybody.

Why is this useful? A lot of websites are now letting you list your other websites/profiles on your profile, but it's just as annoying to repeat this information on every site as it is to redefine your friends everywhere. If the site incrementally hits this API in the background as you enter profile URLs, the site can then recommend you link/share your other websites. Examples of sites that let you enter your other profile URLs and could use this API include: Pownce, Digg, Vox, Typepad, Movable Type, Plaxo, Friendfeed, Mugshot. And that's just off the top of my head from sites I'm familiar with. I'm sure there's a bunch more.

(Also new: Google Profiles[1] data is now served live, rather than from crawl data. It'd be nice to do this optionally also for other willing sites in the future so I did Google Profiles as an experiment and to setup the infrastructure for it.)

Docs to come soon. Let me know if there's any questions/requests in the meantime.

- Brad

[1] http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me