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| Figure 1 |
Launched by Google in 2008 and was fully retired in April 20, 2012. The API lets developers locate links that make use of the XFN and FOAF labeling systems. For XFN as an example, if I add the personal or external URL (http://about.me/parklize) in my Twitter profile page (http://twitter.com/parklize) then you will find the rel="me" indication of the link as Fig.2.
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| Figure 2 |
Even though the API is deprecated, the following figure shows how it was working. It can get possible connections based on the URLs added based on the index of XFN and FOAF as mentioned above.
Besides, the OpenSocial, which has an ambiguous name with the Social Graph API led by Google as well is totally different and unrelated to each other. The difference is described in [2] as below:
Though the names are similar, Social Graph API is unrelated to OpenSocial.
- The Social Graph API was a means to access a crawl we did of XFN and other public graph data.
- OpenSocial is a standard set of APIs for embedding social gadgets in websites.
They’re both APIs, but APIs to different data, satisfying different use cases.
And recently W3C and the OpenSocial Foundation announced that as of 1 January 2015, OpenSocial standards work and specifications beyond OpenSocial 2.5.1 will take place in the W3C Social Web Working Group, of which the OpenSocial Foundation is a founding member. The W3C Social Web Working Group extends the reach of OpenSocial into the enterprise, HTML5 and Indie Web communities.