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Onaswarm Social Network Explorer

edit David P. Janes 2008-05-07 14:21 UTC 3 comments  ·  ·  ·

Onaswarm is now provides a interface for finding out the social network connectivity of webpages. Connections are discovered using XFN, hCard, FOAF, optionally Google's SGN services and in some instances custom APIs if account information is available to Onaswarm.

URI

Parameters

  • uri - the URI of a page you'd like to discover social network details for
  • wrapper - if "ajax", the results will be returned in JSON format
  • json_pretty - boolean; the results will be pretty printed
  • jsonp - if non-empty, the results will be placed in a JSONP wrapper
  • reverse - boolean; the results will reflect links to this page, as opposed to outbound from this page
  • google - boolean; add results from Google Social Graph API. In HTML mode, this defaults to True; in AJAX, False.
  • appkey - coming soon

Example Queries

form interface

all links from Twitter user "bvl" in HTML, augmented with Google SGN results

all links outbound from Twitter user "bvl", without Google SGN results

Dan Brickley's FOAF file

Notes

  • if our server is experiencing unusual loads, this API will return 503 errors
  • there's a lot more we could do with the FOAF files - tell us what
  • if we did FOAF output, would you use it?
  • we will be using appkeys to access to API in the near future, mainly to stop robots from crawling the web through our API!

Comment #1 — Robert Mark White

2008-05-07 22:33:20

I am very excited to about Onaswarm. I joined today and I am amazed at this site. I joined using openid, I gave it a few of my common userids and it found almost all of my site profiles. I fed it my foaf file url and it found the rest. WOW. It even found most of my contacts on most of the sites. If it had foaf output I would faint. I love he rss output. This is what data portability is all about. Now if it just marked up my contacts with xfn and had a hcard or vcard it would be complete.

Comment #2 — David P. Janes

2008-05-08 00:25:39

Cool --tell your friends!

XFN is there -- look at the link on the sidebar that says "Explore My Contacts"; that's your social network as XFN, including all the me links. I guess we should add a rel="me" to that page from the front page.

FOAF's in the plan -- how would you use it, he asks?

Comment #3 — Robert Mark White

2008-05-13 21:00:07

A foaf file has many important uses, that includes who I am, my contact information, my interests, where I have online accounts and who are my friends. I have my own foaf file that I have complete control over but by adding rdfs:seeAlso which point to other foaf files about me, that makes my own foaf file easer to manage. In this case my future Onaswarm foaf file that would support and/or add to my own foaf file information is a very important thing. More and more sites are starting to publish their members information in the foaf format, every time this happens there is that much less information that I need to publish in mine own foaf and that I can simply add a pointer to my other sites foaf files to get those kinds of information published about me.

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