Snip!t from collection of Alan Dix

The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people. 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 <a href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/">XFN</a> and <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.