About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.

We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.

Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.

You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer

A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!

This post originally ran under the title Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes and was very well received. See that link for extensive conversation in comments.

Today Google released a product, called Google Me, that aims to change all of that. For a price - though not a monetary one.

When someone searches for a name that matches a Google Profile, that profile may now be displayed at the bottom of the search results page.

Google Profiles have a lot of potential as big, standardized online identities. They are tied to online accounts on other websites and they contain lots of interesting information about people. There's a lot of potential for outside developers to build interesting things on top of these profiles. See, for example, Glenn Jones's awesome project Identify, something we wrote about this weekend.

We're a little concerned, though, about yet another way that Google is going to gather more information about us as individuals.

A Deal With the Devil?

Ask almost anyone if they would like to be able to change the Google results for their name and you'll get a hearty "Yes." What would they mean by that? Probably that they would like to have the ability to remove unsavory information about themselves from the Google index.

That is certainly not what Google Me offers! The program offers people control over their search appearance only in as much as they are willing to give Google more information about themselves. Google's Joe Kraus explained to us that up to four Google Profiles will appear at the bottom of a results page. For people with common names, the more information you've filled out in your Google Profile - the more likely your profile will be selected for display.

Thus the offer of more control over your Google persona is an illusion - you only get to hope to influence it by giving up even more information about yourself to Google. "You don't like how much we know about and tell other people about you? Well you can change that...by telling us more about you."

The offer isn't even that exciting so far. By placing the Profiles at the bottom of search results pages Google leaves the primary source of information about us, the top 5 results on the page, unchanged.

We'll probably take this opportunity to spruce up our Google Profiles, in large part in hopes that the data will prove useful for future data-centric innovation. When asked about that, Google's Kraus told us that "Google doesn't do a lot of forward looking things; we serve our users' needs and then we iterate."

We simply don't believe that. We think that a discussion of Google's long-term interests in accessing personal data and our interest in letting them do so would be a good idea.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.

We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.

Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.

You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer

A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!