Behind the fanfare that was the Microsoft and Yahoo acquisition news yesterday morning as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leaked financial results for 2007, Google quietly swept in with the announcement of a Social Graph API (Application Program Interface) for the web.

Brad Fitzpatrick, who was a driving force behind the promise and success of LiveJournal, recently jumped ship to Google to spearhead a project that details the web’s many social inter-connections. For Fitzpatrick, it was turning the web from a medium of information sharing and gathering, to one of communal value. Here’s his problem statement from August 17, 2007 before he joined Google:

There are an increasing number of new “social applications” as well as traditional application which either require the “social graph” or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by “social graph” is a the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn’t exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that’s comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.

This is exactly the reason why Google swooped up Fitzpatrick after leaving SixApart. He’s right, people are getting frustrated using numerous usernames and passwords to sign-up for various social networks, blogs and wikis. But isn’t the “walled garden” approach the bread and butter for Facebook? Read more:

Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized “owner” of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I’m not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It’s a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn’t own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

With this in mind, Fitzpatrick and Google have created, in theory, the most efficient and disruptive mechanism for social sites and applications we have seen. However, as Nick O’Neill points out, the numbers game don’t favor Google’s initiative: with over 70 million users on Facebook, the Social Graph API is limited to public spaces such as Twitter, SixApart and Flickr.

Until the day where social spaces on the web become open, this API will stay dormant. However, if this does change, Google and Fitzpatrick are certainly the ones to do it. What do you think?