TwitterLove: Applying the Social Graph API
Date : 2008 02 17 Category : Tech & Development ProgrammableWeb
Want to visualize someone’s “following” list on Twitter? Thanks to this creative application of the Google Social Graph API you can. Even though Social Graph API was just released a couple weeks ago it didn’t take long before creative developers began seeing ways to put it to use. And as you can see in our TwitterLove profile the application uses 2 other APIs including the Twitter API to create a timeline and the Japanese service SimpleAPI.net to create thumbnails.
For a bit of insight into traversing through the social graph, developer Ko-Ji described to us his application flow using his own id of ‘fkoji’ as the example user to lookup:
1. Send an initial request to http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/lookup with arguments callback=loop&q=fkoji&edo=1
2. In the callback we look for “types” in any “node_referenced” nodes returned (where “types” are “me” or “contact”).
3. If type is “me”, then we have a starting point URL for this person.
4. If type is “contact”, then we push the node to a contacts array.
5. If contacts array is not empty, then we send a request to social graph api again with a query of contacts twitter urls.
6. In the callback we do the same process as above and if we find “fkoji” in their contact, we know they are contacts of each other, so we put a heart icon.
7. We use the SimpleAPI.net service to get their thumbnail images.
You can also get more details doing a View Source on the TwitterLove HTML.