Is Being Open Now a Priority for Facebook?

If you've been reading TechMeme, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable!, or many other blogs today, you'll know that Google, Plaxo, and Facebook have now joined DataPortability.org. While it certainly isn't surprising to see Plaxo and Google join, some are making it seem as if Facebook's inclusion makes this a history-changing day for the Internet. I'm not convinced.

Facebook already supports the microformat hCard on public profile pages, which as far as I can tell is the only DataPortability.org standard Facebook supports beyond private RSS feeds. Facebook has always had a history of saying it wants to support open standards, as Mark Zuckerberg implied at Web 2.0 Summit last year by calling not being open a "flaw in the system." Zuckerberg did say that he thinks the social graph "is the user's data," so might this actually be a real step in the right direction? In the past, when asking Facebook about supporting open technologies, like those which are a part of the DataPortability.org stack, company officials always replied that, as Facebook was still a small company, they didn't have the resources to do so. What changed between a few months ago and today that all of a sudden supporting these technologies is a real business priority?

The real question of the day is if Facebook will follow through on its support of the DataPortability.org mission, "To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community." Or if this is just a marketing tactic given the issues from last week?

Battling Social Network Fatigue ... By Going Open

Back in February, plenty of us started to think about and discuss social network fatigue: the idea that people are getting tired of joining new services and having to reconnect with everyone they already know. Some have argued that this isn't a real problem outside of the Valley or that people are happy starting over as they move across networks. Social network fatigue is not, however, a made-up problem. If anything has changed, it is that we're now all much more tired of new social networks and the political battles to be "open" then we ever were earlier this year.

Before going to Paris for LeWeb, Blaine Cook (Twitter) and I stopped in Amsterdam to attend an event on federating social networks put on by Mediamatic Labs. Mediamatic is a partly government-funded startup in the Netherlands that builds social networking sites, mainly for non-profits with many focusing on the art community. Mediamatic has found that many of its clients and users have shared interests, causing the walls between social networks to become blurred. During the day, roughly 25 European developers and designers came together to look at how we can work together to help solve these issues. While the event was only a day long (and jetlag was certainly setting in by the end of it) one of the key takeaways for me was that we must be on the right track as the conversations follow the same direction in Amsterdam as they do in San Francisco. Mediamatic Labs will be hosting another event in February (see the company's blog) and in March there will be a WebCamp on social network portability in Cork.

During Web 2.0 Expo Berlin last month, I was introduced to two smaller projects, NoseRub and Lifestrea.ms, both of which originated in Germany. NoseRub (an open source project) and Lifestrea.ms are both social aggregators much like Facebook's News Feed. The key difference is that unlike Facebook, which only sucks content in, they're both built on open standards that let people republish their activities and content around the Web. A few weeks ago, Google and BBC Backstage hosted a BarCamp in London where a major theme was using open technologies to enable distributed social networks. Last week TechCrunch wrote about Spokeo, another social aggregator, created by Stanford students; social network portability was a hot topic at LeWeb3. And don't forget Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, socialthing!, and dozens of smaller efforts to integrate your various social services like the profiles on Threadless (past Radar coverage) or MetaFilter. This conversation is being fueled by energy from entrepreneurs and developers all around the world.

2007 was a year of solidifying open technologies like OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, XMPP, and others. The challenge now for 2008 is working together to build upon these technologies to create true data portability -- while keeping people in charge. Social networks may be different around the world, but the one common theme of all these conversations is that we're all getting sick of them!

Web2Summit: Opening Up the Social Graph

Brad Fitzpatrick and I just got off the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, where we talked about social networking love and hate. You'll see coverage elsewhere about what we said, though our slides can be found on SlideShare. Here, I'd like to take you behind the curtain and show how the talk came to be.

But first, what I hope will be the news: Today I announced a new service for developers that is a key piece of infrastructure that will help to open the social graph. Keeping track of friends online is not easy to do. You might let a service import your GMail address book today, but a week from that, the information is out of date. The Six Apart Relationship Update Stream is an endless feed of social relationship data, designed for Web services to be able to send and receive information when changes to social relationships on their service occur. This is a developer platform, not something for regular users. It launches today, streaming real-time public changes from LiveJournal and Ma.gnolia, averaging around hundreds of changes per minute, with updates from Hi5, GetSatisfaction, SmugMug, Plaxo, and Vox coming soon. (Disclosure: LiveJournal and Vox are owned by Six Apart, my employer.) This means that when I add a friend on LiveJournal, the feed I see on FriendFeed could be updated in real-time to start showing events from them as well.

As I've written in the past, people are tired of signing up for a new service and having to find, invite, and wait for their friends all over again. Brad tells a great, and very true, story about how when he signed up for Dopplr (a social travel website), he realized he'd had enough. Dopplr is a great example of a service that starts with one great feature; sharing with your friends where you are and what trips you're taking. It grew virally this year, spreading rapidly through the London and San Francisco geek worlds. Around the time of FooCamp, it had reached a critical mass of technologists all sharing Brad's frustration of having to find and invite their friends all over again in order for Dopplr to be really useful to them.

There is the argument to be made that sites like Dopplr should be nothing more than a Facebook application. I would strongly disagree, given the announcement of the upcoming MySpace platform. Companies such as RockYou and Slide -- the two top producing companies of Facebook applications -- will have to either choose a platform or write their applications to run on each. If I were a betting man, I would doubt that MySpace will be the last platform either, considering moves already made in this space by LinkedIn. Wasn't this a problem Java tried to solve many years ago? Instead, I would agree with what Jeff Huber said yesterday, "A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform."

How can we all make this happen?

In many cases, opening the social graph is not just about standards and data formats. Just as OpenID has helped to allow identity portability between services, OAuth will make it easier for all of our applications and services online to talk to each other. Opening the social graph is also not about all or nothing, rather giving people choice and control over their information, their profiles, their relationships in a manner which has to protect and benefit your users as well.

As Brad and I were working on our presentation, the evolution of names quickly came to mind. If you remember your Gaelic, Brad's last-name "Fitzpatrick" means "son of Patrick". "fitz," in essence, provides a way to disambiguate all the different Brads. Online, we've had the same concept since 1972: "brad@danga.com." Why is this related? Many services today don't let users add context to their profiles which can cross services. To any Facebook application, I'm nothing more than "24400320," which doesn't help connect my profile into the entire social graph. This is quite different than LiveJournal, which gives users privacy settings to choose to share things such as their email address and instant messenger screen-names--all shared using Microformats. Privacy is extremely important -- but if I would like to link my profiles on various services, why should I be prohibited from doing so?

As Jimmy Guterman wrote yesterday on Radar, "Either social networks will keep their walls up to force individuals to choose, or they will open up in the hope that they'll get the customer even if their competitor does, too. History suggests it'll be the former followed by the latter. For those sick of maintaining multiple profiles, let's hope the players work through the cycles quickly." I hope that these walled gardens will join us in placing users back in charge of their data and in opening the social graph.

Technorati Tags: oauth, web2.0, web20, web2summit

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