About Social Graphs

With a typical social application such as MySpace, individual users can upload a picture of themselves, create their profile, and designate other users as "friends". Such social applications also offer the ability to create groups that share common interests or affiliations, and track individual/group activities.

Social applications use a social graph that is a global mapping of all users and how they are related such as:

• Personal profile information including contact information, personal tastes, body type, work history, or education

• Relationships between people

  • Friends

  • Business contacts

  • Membership in groups

• Activities for each user

  • Changes to the status or properties

  • New content created by other users

  • Message notifications from other others

Social applications may require a dedicated container (or server) the to manage the various profiles, friends, groups, and activities in the social graph. The OpenSocial specification allows social applications to manage social graphs with a set of common application programming interfaces (API) that expose methods to information about people, their friends, and their data. The OpenSocial specifications usually are used to develop social applications from inception to deployment.

In contrast, the SocialSite software is an end-to-end solution that adds social networking features to existing web applications by providing a server to manage the social graph, as well as a library of social widgets that can be added to an existing web page. Since the SocialSite software already complies with the OpenSocial specifications, there is no need to implement the REST API and the JavaScript API from scratch to create a social networking application. However, the SocialSite software does extend the OpenSocial REST API and JavaScript API specifications to provide a complete solution.