Google's Social Graph API aims to automatically map the relationships between 'friends'.

According to a Blogoscoped report, Google are claiming to crawl publicly available data on social networks or blogs (blogrolls and friend lists) which can then be used to show the connections that exist between different individuals. A demo can be found here.

Like others we are investing resources into understanding the nature of influence and to build tools that help us to understand and manage it. This type of API points to one important aspect of influence, understanding the degree of 'connected-ness' between different participants within a defined universe of influence. It also shows some of the challenges and holes that currently exist in trying to build maps of key influentials using public data sources.

Tags: Social Graph, Google, influence