Open Social - Google making progress

Here at Mashup Camp Chris Schalk from Google just wrapped up an excellent presentation about Open Social - the open source social networking environment spearheaded by Google along with partners like Myspace, Ning, Plaxo, and hundreds more.

Shindig, the ¨container" for social applications, appears to be ready for outtside development now. The lack of a container was a concern at the initial launch of Open Social.

One can make a strong case that Open Social and the Open Handset Alliance are the most significant open source projects now under broad deployment, both because they are backed by Google dollars and ingenuity as well as a legion of potential partnerships, and because they are helping with the mass migration of data, services, and people to open architectures where users are the key players in the online equation rather than the website creators or service providers.

Facebook does not currently support Open Social and remains something of a wildcard because Facebook is often a key component of good social media strategy. However developers can easily deploy both for Open Social and for Facebook and thus cover most of the bases.

Yahoo: We Are Open For Developers

Yahoo has just announced an expansion of what it calls the Yahoo Search "Open Ecosystem".

Yahoo has been a leader for some time in the Web 2.0 space with several applications and innovations such as photo site Flickr and adoption of OpenID. Recently Yahoo opened up their search application for more customization by developers.

Today's announcement marks a stronger level of committment to new standards that will support the growth and development of the semantic web through the adoption of microformats - basically formats that help standardize the way applications can interact with data. Yahoo is supporting microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN

As we noted in a recent post about Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the future, the promise of the semantic web is extraordinary as it allows for richer, more helpful, and more navigable relationships between the billions of pieces of information flowing online every day.

Developers will also want to look for Yahoo's soon-to-be-announced beta program to build "enhanced results applications" using Yahoo search, not to mention the developer launch party hosted by Yahoo at their Sunnyvale headquarters.

Diclosure: Long on Yahoo

The Social Graph API & Privacy Says Expert

David Recordon of SixApart has a great post on Google's Social Search API and some of the privacy issues associated with it. He co-authored “Thoughts on the Social Graph” with Brad Fitzpatrick (who joined Google last August to develop the API).

Last August David started developing an open source service that would crawl online relationship data and expose it via an API. He showed snippets of it on his blog (pictures and text), and also gave a brief demo at the Data Sharing Summit. He goes on to say, "We even came close to releasing an online tool which visualized all of your accounts and friends; instead we opted for demonstrating its power with a screencast showing how you could use it to find your friends. While this implementation of the API was based on publicly discoverable information (like Google’s), we simply didn’t feel comfortable shipping that project based on current implementations. More>>

MySpace Announces Launch of Developer Platform

As read on TechCrunch yesterday morning,

MySpace is finally getting ready to pull the trigger on its long-awaited platform for developers. Starting today, programmers can sign up to register for the MySpace API program, which will go live on February 5th. The APIs will allow developers to create social applications for MySpace much like they can already for Facebook. The platform will be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial platform, meaning that applications written for OpenSocial will work on MySpace with a few minimal tweaks.



More details will come out later about what exactly the APIs will allow developers to do, but at a high level they will allow for deeper integration into MySpace than can currently be done with Flash widgets. The APIs we believe will support Flash, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets, and give developers deeper access to MySpace member profile information and their connections. Developers also will be able to make money from advertising associated with their applications.

What it means: with all the talks about Facebook in the last 6 months, we tend to forget MySpace is still a major force in the social networking world. According to this recent eMarketer article, "The site received 72% of US visits to social networks in December 2007 alone" with Facebook a distant second at 16.03%. In terms of reach, MySpace had close to 72M unique visitors in October 2007 (source: eMarketer quoting ComScore) giving the site 40% reach of the US online market (Facebook is at 18%). In November, Compete data showed that only 20% of MySpace members were also on Facebook. So, if you're interested in reaching these 72M users, get in line to get a developer access.

Facebook Opens Up Platform

In response the Google's OpenSocial API which just launched with a splash at the beginning of November, and amidst a lot of critisicm of Facebook's 'closed' platform, Facebook announced yesterday that it is opening up its platform to make it available to other social networking sites. It is licensing its technology so that Facebook apps can run on other social networking sites other than Facebook. There are apparently 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications who can now potentially make their applications available on other social sites. Facebook apps are built using proprietary FBML markup.

And in support of this move, social network Bebo which rivals MySpace and Facebook also announced that it will be the first social network to license Facebook's technology thereby, allowing developers to extend Facebook's apps to Bebo. Facebook has faced a lot of criticism of late of its controversial social advertising campaign using beacons to track users and display their personal information publicly. This appears to be a move in the right direction for the company, however late and reactionary.

Demystifying The Social Graph

For the uninitiated, I will first explain what the social graph is and why it is so talked about today. Almost all of us are on some social network today. In that network, we are linked with people we know either because we were class mates or are colleagues or neighbors, etc. Now, try to imagine every person as a node in a graph and if two people are connected on a network, it means an edge or line is drawn between those two nodes in a social graph. One instance of it would be the following picture which illustrates a sample social graph.

As one can very well imagine, the whole world can be said to be a huge social graph. This graph has, for instance, an interesting property called six degrees of separation.

Now when a person has an account in a particular social network like Myspace or Facebook, they have an almost similar social graph in both of these sites. There are then many new social networks or services with social network features springing up all of which require or are based on our social graph. So presently, a user has to create a new profile and re-make all those connections that they already have in other networks to be a part of new network. For instance, if a person wants to join Friendfeed, they need to create new connections that they already have in MySpace. A solution for such a problem has been offered by saying that a user should be able to carry his social graph with him. That is, if each user has an open social graph that any service can access, then all the services that need social networking features would be very easy to implement. Thus, social graphs should be open and owned by the user rather than the social networking site as it is today where user data is not accessible by other services.

It is also understandable that Facebook or MySpace would not want to open up this information, as the social graph is the main reason that people come to these sites. Facebook is a platform which allows many applications to be developed using its social graph. Now if Facebook opens up, all these applications that need such information won't need to be on Facebook. Presently, a Friendfeed-like application in Facebook has more chances of success rather than Friendfeed's site, simply because Facebook owns the social network while Friendfeed doesn't. But if Facebook opens up, it loses this advantage.

There are presently attempts being made to solve this problem. Some of these are:

1) An open non-profit software for handling identity and the social graph that will manage user identity using OpenId. eg. manage the social graph on behalf of users therefore, enabling social applications to bloom.
2) Maybe, its OpenSocial which aims to create common standard APIs on which to build social applications. Note that it solves the above problem in a different way. While there may be many different social networks where users have social graphs, it creates a common, public API for accessing them and hence eases development of social applications. However, after its initial hype and release, response has been a bit underwhelming as I noted in this article.
3) Another attempt is Plaxo Pulse. In their words, it is an online address book which syncs with many other address books like Gmail and Yahoo that I own. You can also read a possible implementation of building an Open Social Graph.

An Open Social Graph that is owned by the user and not any company is needed as it will solve the many problems presently faced by users. Once it comes up, we can expect the bolstering of countless services that depend on the social graph of a user.

Image source: GNESPY.

OpenSocial Event

The OpenSocial Event on Wednesday was very well received and a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone who attended and to the speakers Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs at Google, Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, and Akash Garg, Co-Founder/CTO at Hi5 Networks.

It was a lively and interactive session. The video should be up in a week for anyone who missed it or just wants a recap. Continue the discussion online and here are all the photos.

OpenSocial and Facebook Comparison

Member Overlap Between Social Networks

Popular Apps on Social Networks

Ballmer - Facebook Stake Not A Mistake

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Monday his firm's investment of $240M for a 1.6% stake in Facebook was not a mistake.

"We didn't make a mistake," Ballmer told reporters at a business conference in Mumbai.

The deal values Facebook at US$15 Billion, and analysts have always maintained that Microsoft paid a steep price for a start-up that was deriving most of its revenue from an ad deal (with Microsoft) in which Microsoft was losing money on.

With the launch of OpenSocial last week the valuation seems senseless. Facebook is now trapped, trapped and trapped. They are trapped by Microsoft in their ad deal, their valuation has trapped them and it getting hard to recruit new employees and their closed system is no longer as attractive to developers who can develop applications for the open web via open standards.

Ballmer said "We want to succeed in the online advertising space". But at what cost?

OpenSocial Earthquake Felt On & Offline (Magnitude: 5.6 - Epicenter: Google)

The OpenSocial earthquake rocked Northern California Tuesday night. It was the largest earthquake in nearly two decades to rock the San Francisco bay area. The reverberations could be felt at far as Sacramento and Oregon, however online it was felt worldwide.

It registered 5.6 on the Richter scale. The witness said online properties such as Facebook suffered the most damage with no casualties reported so far.

OpenSocial, allows developers to learn one API and then write a social applications for any OpenSocial partner site. It is built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript. Thus developers don’t have to learn a custom programming languages. They no longer have to write seperate applications for MySpace, Gruuve, hi5, Friendster and many other sites. OpenSocial combines the user bases of all the partners sites which is estimates at 400 million users. The OpenSocial API allows developers to write once and use many times across many sites.

The timing of OpenSocial could not have been better. Facebook had hijacked the word "OPEN" to mean its closed proprietary programming language and network. The company was trapped by its advertising deal with Microsoft and needed a deep pocketed partner to buy it out. However, Microsoft had first rights of refusal on any future investments in the company. Facebook insiders figured if they raised the price high enough Microsoft would bail instead Microsoft kept matching all offers. Today Facebook if stuck with Microsoft as its advertising partner in the U.S. and internationally. Also, the insane valuation that the deal was consumated at has priced the stock options so high that it is getting harder for the company to hire new people.

There will be many aftershocks to come from this earthquake.

The Social Network Reality Show: High stakes, big money, false rumors

The game is social networks. The stakes are very high, and the news and rumors are flying fast, furiously, and inaccurately.

Here are some points about the "Open Social" vs Facebook battle for the hearts and minds of developers and, far more importantly, users:

1) After a $240,000,000 partnership with Microsoft many blogs lit up suggesting that Facebook recieved another 500 million from two other private equity groups. This rumor was false. It is very conspicuous in my view that the rumor rose and spread so fast, and that Facebook did nothing to quell it. This news is still shaking out over at TechCrunch which reported the rumor of the 500 million and now reports it was false. Another example of how news at the speed of real time may not be news at all.

2) Google says Open Social is open to Facebook and all are welcome (I believe them).

3) Facebook says Google was not keeping them in the loop on Open Social (I believe that as well)

4) Facebook says they may join the Open Social movement, but suggest they have their own great stuff coming shortly. I’m skeptical they can “out open” Google, though they probably could come up with some great new social networking applications quickly.

On balance I think Facebook is in trouble. Much of the recent hype - which was overdone anyway - assumed that Facebook would be the key beneficiary of the boom in social networking. That reasoning suggested that although Myspace was bigger, it was a “closed” environment and was favored by a younger and poorer demographic that would ultimately have less value to advertisers. Facebook, that thinking went, would continue to grow explosively, open up gradually, target advertising very directly, and become the dominant social networking platform.

All that changed yesterday, and it changed dramatically. Now it is Facebook that offers the "least open" platform for social networking, a position that will quickly become untenable.

So, what is Facebook worth in an Open Social world where even Myspace is a Google partner?

The answer is not $15,000,000,000.

Google Goes Social!

Google’s Open Social launches Thursday November 1. It will be a set of 3 APIs that will interface with a stable of early partners in the project including Friendster and LinkedIn, and Ning. Unclear to me is if the big social network players - Myspace and Facebook - will shun this solution in favor of trying to keep most of the balls in their courts. Eye-balls that is.

The really provocative challenge in Social Networks is whether to close them up and try to keep everybody inside your own network (Myspace’s approach), or to open them up somewhat and hope developers will create applications to interface with your users, but still try to keep everybody playing in your application environment by your rules (Facebook), or to open things up even more as Google will do on Thursday.

Google seems to be everywhere these days. The Google Phone or gPhone will be out soon and I predict the Google Phone will be a spectacular success. They may even launch their own cellular carrier network and seem to be on a tear all over the online space.

For Google Social the partners are big, important players including LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster, Ning, and more, but absent are the two key players in the social place, Myspace and Facebook.

If Myspace and Facebook keep doing their own thing it is going to be hard to predict how all this will shake out. Google historically has been a fabulous tech company but conspicuously failed with their “Orkut” social network which never took off in the USA though it remains popular in Brazil.

Will Google Social turn all this around? I just don’t know, but will be sure to check it out when available, and I'll see how easily it can be used to "socialize" some travel sites.

Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Ning fame has a superb summary of how Google Social works and how this might shake out with respect to the other social network players.