ReadWriteWeb

With the news coming out of F8 this week, it was hard to not get caught up in the enthusiasm for Facebook Connect, the new authentication methodology which will allow you to login to third-party web sites using your Facebook ID and port your friend graph from Facebook with you. On the one hand, you have to admit this is revolutionary. The web will be transformed from the still (somewhat) closed system it is today, to a massively social experience - it's the "always logged-in internet." On the other hand, the company bringing this web to us is Facebook, the same people who had to be told by their users why Beacon was a huge mistake. Do you trust Facebook to control the next iteration of the web?

Information overload is a topic that keeps coming up, especially among users of social media services. As you add more friends and more services, the amount of content produced can become overwhelming to keep up with which leads to quality items being lost amongst the "noise." Noise-reducing apps like AideRSS or Moopz (both of which we love) highlight the best content, but their one drawback is that they determine relevance based on what the community thinks - and that may or may not be what you find interesting or important. With the new social search service from Delver, however, you can leverage your social graph to find just the information you're looking for from the people you admire and/or trust and that makes finding content a much more personal experience.

Signal Patterns, makers of scientific-based social web apps, have just released a Facebook app whose goal is to help you find new friends based on an in-depth personality assessment algorithm. This app matches people based on their unique personality traits - not just "rough" personality types. If that sounds a lot like some dating web sites you've heard of...well, you're right. Signal Patters is essentially offering eHarmony for Facebook except instead of love connections, they hope to offer you a better way to find friends. The question is, is that something we need?

Yahoo! announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup. Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has an in-depth review of that platform.

Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed today. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. Here's a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.

O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns conference, which was held this week in San Diego, brought together key people who are shaping the newly born social platforms industry; platform providers, app makers, investors, advertising networks, etc. Our own Sean Ammirati was one of the speakers and has already covered some of the most important bits from the conference, including Charlene Li's keynote. In this post, we'll quickly recap and highlight some of the important announcements and important data that we were able to extract. We also have a short interview with RockYou! founder and CTO Jia Shen.

Charlene Li gave the opening keynote at today's Graphing Social Patterns conference. The keynote was titled "The Future of Social Networks" and Charlene clarified that specifically she was focused on five to ten years out in her presentation. Her basic thesis is that in the future, 'social networks will be like air.' In other words, it will be ubiquitous as you navigate across the web and sites will feel inadequate (like you can't breathe) if a user's social network isn't part of the experience.

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user. The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using "normal" search engine.

I love me some screenscaping and mashups and data portability, but when it comes to personal information things get a little more complicated.

I'm in San Francisco today at Dappercamp, an event concerning a tool that's always got the rights of those it interfaces with in mind as an issue. Keynote speaker Mitch Kapor just told the group that the foundations of the web are sharing and openness and that intellectual property rights online should be constructed around and respecting those qualities.

It was a refreshing way to frame the often contentious relationship between corporate content publishers and those of us on the margins seeking to mash things up, but similar issues are beginning to arise in terms of personal and interpersonal information about users.

Although only announced hours ago, Plaxo's Pulse is already using the new Google Social Graph API. They got a head start due to a collaborative effort between their Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr, and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. Now, the Plaxo public profile pages will serve as the flagship example of what this new API has to offer.

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.