As I'm currently at the
SG FooCamp in Sebastopol, I had the possibility to directly talk to one of the heads behind Google's SocialGraph API and it really eases some stuff that NoseRub is trying to do in the current development version.
For those who did not hear of this API, here's the link to the project page:
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/
What it basically does is to give you URLs that are "socially" connected to a given URL. NoseRub can use this for people being able to add any "social" URL as their contact. When someone adds a blogpage of someone as his contact, Google's API is able to return URLs of other social applications like flickr or magnolia. Of course only if on this blog page, there are some XFN enabled links to those accounts. But with the DiSo Project we will probably see more and more of this stuff seeing grow on Wordpress pages. Livejournal and Typepad had that information embedded for quite some time now.
Google's Timing couldn't be better, as I was thinking about how to implement this crawler in NoseRub for quite some time now. So, this is really a time saver for me. And the API is very clean, so I already was able to add is a component to the NoseRub development branch.
