This is Bret Taylor's Graph API - the concept simplified the API a lot, and companies like Freebase copied it for their own data. Too bad it is not working...
Many of Ryan's complaints apply both to the graph API and to the older APIs, although one of them is that the graph API isn't maintained properly (which has been the case since the beginning).
The way Facebook's Graph API is structured can be applied to other datasets containing interconnected objects. It's like a REST service serving JSON, with a specific way to construct the URLs. I like it a lot. Here is a blog post explaining the Freebase implementation:
