Mark Cuban is, as usual, insightful when he describes the potential of Facebook profiles to be used as the basis for smarter social applications outside of Facebook. His call for a truly open Facebook API is a must-read for anyone thinking about open social networks.
When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don’t. I’m not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere….
I happen to think that far better search and ad serving solutions can be developed around a combination of user published information and user activity It just seems to me that if Facebook were to give me an option of publishing a laundry list of relevant information about myself to external Facebook API applications, such as search and ad serving networks that those applications would serve me better results…. The options that would enable smarter use of the web are endless. Not everyone would avail themselves of what I call Personal Database Publishing to enhance the internet experience, but I believe enough would.
Of course any application can currently ask for this information and many do. But I dont want to have to publish and maintain a database for every application I want to use or happen to use. Nor do I want to have to maintain multiple social network accounts to make this information available. I recognize that this is the exact problem that Google wants to solve with their OpenSocial. But they are too late … If Facebook opens their API up further and allows for its use outside the Facebook.com domain.
While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don’t think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building “social applications” misses the point. We don’t want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn’t about a social UI. It’s about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google’s breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn’t give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created. And that will be the downfall of OpenSocial. If all you can build are Facebook-like applications, Facebook wins.
We all want what Mark describes: a definitive place under our own control where we can describe who we are and what we care about so that applications can use that data to provide us with smarter services. We don’t really care whether that repository is at Facebook or Google or any other site, or perhaps even if it’s an aggregation of data from many places, but we do want it to become more useful to us. Not just more useful to the holder of our profile, but to every site we touch on the internet. Whichever company gets there first, to a truly open, user-empowering, internet-turbocharging social network platform, is going to be the net’s next big winner.
One place where I disagree with Mark is in his assessment of Facebook as the only social network with data about real people. He opens his argument with this statement:
The beauty of Facebook, as opposed to Myspace and other social networks is that the people on there are for the most part who they say they are, and Facebook does their best to dismiss those who aren’t. This simple differentiation makes the membership base of Facebook far more valuable than any other social network.
That comment is clearly wrong. My profile on LinkedIn, on dopplr, on jaiku, on twitter, are all really me. So is this blog, and my “museum” at tim.oreilly.com. As is my Flickr photo stream, and even Flickr’s set of photos tagged timoreilly. For that matter, so is a substantial subset of everything that gets returned about me by a Google search. So is even more sensitive information like all the financial data I’ve got at Wesabe, or the one-click and purchase history information I have stored at Amazon. Not to mention my favorite dark horses in the social networking race: my email, IM, and phone accounts have even more social network data about me than my overtly “social” apps, as soon as the latent social graph in these applications is made available.
So, no, it isn’t too late for OpenSocial. But it is too late if Google frames the problem too narrowly. Imagine a desktop “operating system” where the only APIs were those that allowed you to build desktop UI components, and gave you no access to deeper levels of the system. No one would take such a platform seriously. You couldn’t develop real applications. Yet Google (and others) have been pushing the idea that APIs to Javascript widgets are sufficient. Google made a major wrong turn when they withdrew their SOAP APIs in favor of the gadget approach.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the lightweight accessibility of gadgets. But it’s clear that Google has fallen into the Microsoft trap once referred to as “the strategy tax.” Google wants to keep too much control over what their developers can do. And that’s the beginning of the end for them.
They need to reframe the problem. What would it take for me, as a user, to “authenticate” information about me that appears elsewhere on the web (Brad Fitzpatrick’s original “elsewhere.im” idea, now embodied as the SixApart Relationship Update Stream), and for applications to be able to follow that authentication stream? What would it take for me, as a user, to have fine grained control over that authentication, so that some applications could see all of it, and some could see only a little? What kind of system would make it easy for me to manage the data that appears about me, to reduce duplication of effort, yet to give me a single credential that I could proffer as a proxy for “the real me”?
I think Amazon is the only company that really understands that we’re in the process of building an internet operating system, and is building services with the depth and power that will be required to create the next generation of computer applications. So far, they’ve focused on lower level services, but in one sense, isn’t what we’re looking for a kind of “one-click” that would use our stored social data to inform and activate new applications? (I take that back. I think SixApart gets it. Hmmm…Amazon ought to buy SixApart, purely for the social networking API play, and do it right….)