Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

The coffee stain on the notebook is a nice touch

Am trying Google Chrome as my preferred browser – so far so fast!  It’s good.

Google is noting our connections and friendships online, not just our content. I am no developer (not even close) but I like the principle here which is that our online connections count.

Google Labs on the Social Graph API :

Build critical mass on your website

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

Only public data

The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.

Note: what this means is that public friendships or connections are found by search engines, for example, the Utopian College of Emergency for Medicine (UCEM) has a public facebook page which can be found by anyone as Google searches it, whereas my private Facebook cannot be easily found, unless you know me, as it will not be listed by Google.

If you want to be found online, make sure your sites are public

Finally, Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick comments:

“By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.”

This is a great definition of the Social Web, or Web 2.0.

Some of you may be aware of the new Google Wave, it’s one of Google’s new initiatives and I call it a ’3D conversation’.  It’s had a mixed reception but I think it will be here to stay.  Currently it’s being tested by around 100,000 users, Sydneysider Frances Jones does a great overview as a newbie non-techie.

For me, as I’m beginning to tentatively play with Google Wave (thanks Vijay for my invite) I think it will amalgamate all those different social media and communication tools (eg facebook, twitter, email) into one place.  It’s a bit awkward, fiddly, I’m missing my friends to play with on there but that’s why Google have released it for testing so that non-techie people can give it a go and let them know what works and what doesn’t.  I’m still at lesson one: how to find people and talk to them.  Lots of explanations out there, but read Frances’ post and here are the Google guys — a big improvement on their over an hour conference presentation when it was first released.