From a mashup perspective, SpaceBook is pretty incredible, incorporating (so far) 11 different Web APIs. However, for me SpaceBook is interesting because it makes use of semantic data provided via FOAF and the microformat, XFN. To do this SpaceBook makes good use of the Google Social Graph API, which aims to harness such data to generate social graphs. The Social Graph API has been available for almost a year but has had quite a low profile until now. Says the API website:
"Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you're left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful -- as a user, you might want to see who else you're connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn't been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers."Bravo! This creates some neat connections. Unfortunately – and as Ivan Herman regrettably notes - the generated FOAF data is inserted into Hilary Clinton’s page as a page comment, rather than as a separate .rdf file or as RDFa. The FOAF file is also a little limited, but it does include links to her Twitter account. More puzzling for me though is why the embedded XHTML metadata does not use Qualified Dublin Core! Let's crank up the interoperability, please!
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