Google Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API

This is going to be pretty cool once there are more supported sites (like Facebook). Hopefully that will be soon, I really want to use this.

Yea, without Facebook it's really lacking.

Does anyone whether this will be further integrated with data portability project? It's already sweetly useful, but its intersection with data portability and openID will be fairly important.

Its already built of open standards what further integration is required?

So, Google decides to rename the address book to Open Social Graph and makes a general API for everyone to adopt and gets some attention. Thats really big news. Welcome innovation.

This has nothing to do with their address book. It builds off previous social meta-data efforts, especially FOAF and XFN.

It's more an extension of their search expertise, and it looks like they should be able to extend it with some of the latent semantic indexing stuff that they already do to make it a useful and powerful tool.

What's innovative about it is the scale at which they are doing it.