On Friday, February 1, Google launched a new API as part of its "Open Social" effort, a widely-supported initiative to provide common frameworks for developers of social networking applications. The Open Social Graph API will allow developers to handle the relationships between their users, allowing them to "add friends".

Google Engineer Brad Fitzpatrick--the creator of LiveJournal-- posted on a Google blog, "You can make it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new Web site and as a result, users will spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time giving your app the love it deserves.

Fitzpatrick explained that Google will "crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people's accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF...When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they've said they're friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site."