Google's Social Graph API

The blogosphere never sleeps, and the big story always appears just after you log-off. One such story was the launch of Google's Social Graph API, which all the big names blogged about shortly after I last checked my newsgator feeds on Friday (GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch).

As a researcher who studies so-called web 2.0 technologies I am very excited, although as web users it may be time to be mildly concerned (if you weren't already).

Whilst Google will only be drawing together publicly available information, to a certain extent such information has previously been private due to the difficulty in collecting it. If an academic wanted to create something similar, I can imagine them having a lot of problems getting it past an ethics committee.