Google’s Social Graph API: The Future of Personal Brand Management

FuturesNewsPersonal Branding

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabCylbapuM]

This video gives a glimpse of the future of our personal brand management.  I’ve talked before about how many social networks there are and how people quickly join them and secure their name.   There is far too many social networks and more are added each day.  We really need to be cautious about which one’s we join and give our information to.  I’ve said before that I feel that there are three piece of criteria for selecting which to join and which to hide from:  volume, credibility and relevancy.

Many of us participate in some of the social networks that fulfill this criteria, such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.  Google announced today that they are opening up a “Social Graph API” for developers.  They are clearly targeting and competing with Facebook’s internal social graph, which is a digital representation of our social networks in real life.

On Google’s site and in the video above, this might come off a bit technical for many, including me, so let me take a stab at it.  Basically, our participation on social networks has links to various other networks that we’ve registered in.  Google has found a way (and they said it was easy), to make these website talk to each other.  Therefore, developers can create applications that integrate the networks together.  The benefit to us is that you’ll be able to see which of your friends are on other services, forming a global neighborhood of your friends.

Why your personal brand should care:

  • Discover your friends that are using the same services as you.
  • Start to make sense of social networking and your participation on each website.
  • Be prepared for more social networks that integrate with your brand, which may be spread across many sites