Simon Willison’s Weblog

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub. Matt Biddulph crawls GitHub’s social graph using JUNG (the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework), JRuby and Yahoo! BOSS to find good leads on interesting developers in specific geographic locations.

# 12th February 2010, 1:17 pm / matt-biddulph, socialgraph, recruiting, github

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice... Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets.

# 22nd May 2009, 12:49 am / socialgraph, iphone, apple, socialnetworks, malcolmbarclay, tubedeluxe, londontube, appstore, sockpuppets

Social Graph API. This is freaking awesome. Input one or more URLs to your profile pages and it returns a huge dump of crawled relationship data, based on XFN, FOAF and OpenID links. No API key required and it supports JSON callbacks so you can incorporate it in to a site without even needing to write any extra server-side code.

# 3rd February 2008, 10:34 pm / socialgraph, socialgraphapi, json, jsonp, google

Giant Global Graph. Tim Berners-Lee points out that the Semantic Web is designed to solve problems such as portable social networks.

# 22nd November 2007, 12:30 am / portablesocialnetworks, openid, tim-berners-lee, semanticweb, socialgraph

Marc Andreesen on Open Social. Marc describes it as an open standard for implementing Facebook style “containers” that other applications can live in. My initial assumption that it was an implementation of the Social Graph paper ideas was incorrect.

# 31st October 2007, 4:58 pm / marcandreesen, opensocial, google, socialgraph

Google Announces the OpenSocial API. I doubt the similarity between this and Brad Fitzpatrick’s social graph paper are a coincidence—what IS impressive is that he only joined Google a couple of months ago.

# 31st October 2007, 4:34 pm / brad-fitzpatrick, google, socialgraph, opensocial, apis

identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin.

# 4th October 2007, 2:53 pm / identitymatcher, plugins, microformats, matt-biddulph, facebook, gmail, dopplr, openid, portablesocialnetwork, rails, ruby, socialgraph, twitter, fowa, fowa2007

Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5. “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.”

# 21st September 2007, 11:23 pm / socialgraph, google, igoogle, orkut, google-talk, gmail, openid, michael-arrington, techcrunch

Six Apart: We Are Opening the Social Graph. Six Apart put their cards on the table with respect to the social graph problem—focusing on OpenID, XFN and FOAF as enabling technologies. Be sure to watch the screencast demo of their new social graph visualisation tool.

# 20th September 2007, 9:19 pm / sixapart, david-recordon, openid, socialgraph, xfn, foaf

Thoughts on the Social Graph. I think social network portability will happen within the next year.

# 17th August 2007, 11:47 pm / socialgraph, socialnetworkportability, brad-fitzpatrick, david-recordon, openid