Category Archive

This is a big day for the Social Web. Plaxo, my employer, and one of the strongest advocates for opening up the Social Web has some big news. Announcing that they’ve reached a definitive agreement to be acquired by Comcast. The vision is big, and it’s all goodness for the open Social Web story and how it can go mainstream in a big way. Great stuff.

Well, another “big week” is off with a bang! Google has just announced its Friend Connect project along with Plaxo [reminder/disclaimer: I head up marketing there], who is announcing they’re becoming a “social graph provider” in support of the initiative.

Dan Farber of CNET interviewed me and has a nice writeup on Google Friend Connect and how it compares with last week’s announcements from MySpace and Facebook. Here’s an excerpt:

John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, said that Google’s Friend Connect is “flipping the model,” from walled gardens to a more open Social Web.

“Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation’s proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially-enable any website or web page?

That’s a big, bold vision that Plaxo is 100% aligned with. As to Facebook and MySpace, it is certainly great to read the rhetoric they are now putting forth. The meme of data portability, open Social Web, and Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web has certainly caught on!

Alas, the devil is in the details, and we haven’t seen any details (yet) from Facebook, just a Friday blog post signaling intent. Might be great, and we hope it is, but it’s not clear what the actual substance will be. With regard to MySpace, the rhetoric is over-the-top goodness, including a declaration of the end of the era of walled gardens. Alas, the details, as they currently exist, for their “Data Availability” effort fall far short of the vision many of us share for users having ownership of their data, control over who can see it, and freedom to take it with them, wherever they go across the Social Web. In the MySpace “Data Availability” model, the user can take their data for a walk anytime they want or to any place they want, but the data remains on a tether. There is no notion of copy, move, or sync. Participating sites must agree to have MySpace serve the data live in their page. That’s a half-step wrapped in a beautiful flag of openness.”

There is also a great story in the Washington Post, by Peter Whoriskey. I had a great a chat with Peter, and here’s an excerpt from his piece:

At the same time, Web businesses have begun to create standards for social site interactions on the Web — OpenId, OpenAuth, OpenSocial — that has further enabled users to move easily, and socially, from one Web site to another.

Such changes seem likely to alter the nature of the big social sites, people in the industry said, as the social aspects they are known for become accessible across the Web.

“The real question for a Facebook or a MySpace is: Is it best to think of them as a place like Studio 54 — a place where everyone wants to get in because all their friends are in — or is it more like some kind of utility?” said John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo, a company that maintains relationship information for 20 million members. “This is the evolution of the walled garden to the social Web.”

So, as the sun rises on Silicon Valley, I think it is the dawn of a new era. Very exciting.

We’re now updating our Social Web ecosystem chart to show where we think Friend Connect fits in:

For a more detailed explanation, I refer you to my post on the Plaxo blog.

My head is spinning. I can hardly keep up. In the latest news, according to Dave Morin at Facebook, is the announcement of Facebook Connect:

“Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.”

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch writes:

“Facebook connect is Facebook’s first honest attempt to allow access to Facebook user data outside of Facebook itself. The company is describing it as giving third party applications access to much of the same data as Facebook applications have today. We’ll know more in a couple of weeks when it formally launches.”

Like MySpace’s announcement of yesterday, the general spirit sounds great and totally aligned with the data portability and open Social Web memes. But, of course, the devil may be in the details. Eager to connect with Dave to learn more and see what this means for sites like Plaxo Pulse.

This sure sounds great:

“These are just a few steps Facebook is taking to make the vision of data portability a reality for users worldwide. We believe the next evolution of data portability is about much more than data. It’s about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.”

Caroline McCarthy of CNET has a nice writeup with some insight into the backstory:

One Facebook insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said to CNET News.com that the project had been in the works for quite some time, and said the announcement wasn’t issued as a response to MySpace’s “Data Availability” project.

Update:

David Recordon of SixApart and the OpenID Foundation has an insightful writeup on the actual details of yesterday’s MySpace announcement:

“After this announcement I had the pleasure of speaking with a reporter who was on the briefing call. He explained that MySpace said that due to their terms of service the participating sites (e.g. Twitter) would not be allowed to cache or store any of the profile information. In my mind this led to the Data Availability API being structured in one of two ways: 1) on each page load Twitter makes a request to MySpace fetching the protected profile information via OAuth to then display on their site or 2) Twitter includes JavaScript which the browser then uses to fill in the corresponding profile information when it renders the page. Either case is not an example of data portability no matter how you define the term!”

Indeed, the devil is in the details.

I can hardly believe what’s happening these days. The biggest companies are all racing to out-open each other. And while some moves are more PR-ware than genuine embrace of open standards, user control, and data portability, there is something really significant going on here.

Just read an interesting piece about Nokia by Anders Bylund over at Ars Technica. Apparently, Nokia is fully acknowledging the sea change the Internet is having on the mobile space:

During Nokia’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo seemed to change the direction of the entire company. “Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an internet company,” Kallasvuo told his shareholders. “Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively.”

Of course, Nokia has an amazing track record of corporate re-invention, getting it’s start in life as a paper mill!

Earlier this week, we saw a bold move by Sprint, Comcast, Google, TimeWarner, Intel and others to pool resources (billions of dollars) to roll out high-speed wireless services across the country.

Yesterday, MySpace said it would open up access to profile data, and declared the end of the era of walled gardens!

And in recent days, I’ve been in numerous discussions with various large companies, and in every case, I have been blown away by the strength of their embrace of “open.” Why is this happening? It’s because the Internet is now the central shaper of corporate strategy for almost any business related to information, data, or media. And when the Internet is central, traditional strategies for lock-in are doomed to fail. Market advantage now must be created in other ways.

The result? 2008 will be an historic year.

A story breaking right now, according to VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon:

“MySpace is planning to introduce a set of new features that will allow its users to access their data on other sits, it is announcing today. The News Corp. owned company is calling this initiative “Data Availability,” which is a not especially clever take on the name of another group that’s working for great user data access across sites, called Data Portability — that MySpace is also joining.”

As Eric reports from the con call, they are announcing this along with Yahoo!, eBay, and Twitter. Focus seems to be primarily on profile data, like user’s photo.

I’ll add more facts and commentary as this story unfolds. But I think this is another great sign of an acceleration in the opening up of the Social Web.

Update:

Here’s a quote from MySpace:

“The walls around the garden are coming down—the implementation of Data Availability injects a new layer of social activity and creates a more dynamic Internet,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. “We, alongside our Data Availability launch partners, are pioneering a new way for the global community to integrate their social experiences Web-wide.”

Coverage at Silicon Valley Insider.

This is a really cool move, focused on one of the main friction points — having to recreate our profile at every new social site we join. Here’s more from the press release:

“Data Availability pioneers a new way for users to dynamically share their user generated content and data with websites of their choosing. The Data Availability initiative is founded first and foremost on the simple and comprehensive user control of their own content and data—users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with. Additionally, rather than updating information across the Web (eg. default photo, favorite movies or music) for each site where a user spends time, now a user can update their profile in one place and dynamically share that information with the other sites they care about. MySpace will be rolling out a centralized location within the site that allows users to manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to engage with.”

The effort leverages OAuth and restful APIs. I’m looking for more details to see whether they’re fully leveraging open standards or introducing any proprietary formats.

More detailed coverage over at TechCrunch, from Michael Arrington.

And Caroline McCarthy of The Social has a nice writeup, declaring correctly, I believe, “This is a huge deal.”

I particularly like that they are saying this will be open to any site that wants to participate, including Facebook. Expect to see support at my employer, Plaxo. (We love all open Social Web initiatives equally.) Hey, Joseph, can you get on this?

Once again, Louis Gray has spun up a good conversation in the blogosphere, this time with a post focused on the magic of getting services that aggregate lifestreams to catch on as activity centers. Mashable’s Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins joins the fray, pointing out that at this stage, these services seem to fare much better with the early adopter crowd than with mainstream users.

I think there is an interesting question in all of this, “Can lifestreaming and aggregation go maintstream?” After all, as Alexander van Elsas points out, based on his research, the vast majority of content aggregated by FriendFeed is “tweets” (a word unknown to the vast majority of Internet users at this moment).

I’m pretty confident that aggregation is here to stay, and that the concepts of lifestreaming and aggregation will become core elements of the mainstream Web experience. But, for that to happen, we will need to see quite a number of pain points addressed, something I’ve written about recently.

Right now, there’s way to much friction in the Social Web. Each site I join asks me to create a username/password pair, enter my profile data, import my address book, and manually stitch together (again) my local piece of the “social graph.” And each aggregator asks me to tell it all the services I use (my blog URL, my Twitter username, where I share photos, etc.).

Missing from the picture is what I call a services layer for the Social Web, which wraps up a bunch of cool and important technologies, including OpenID, Oath, microformats, Social Graph API, and the OpenSocial stuff, into three basic utilities:

The result will be a virutous cycle of social discovery of new sites through seemless interoperability with the aggregator services. This won’t happen overnight, but it is what we’re totally focused on at Plaxo, and it’s a really exciting opportunity. Thanks to Joseph Smarr at Plaxo for these slides from his recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb helps us sort through the latest.

Our friends over at Digg blogged today about their enhanced support for data portability:

“The Data Sharing Summit in San Francisco was a gas. It was a real pleasure to work with like-minded people from organizations, large and small, all supporting DataPortability. At the Summit I had the chance to show off Digg’s latest DataPortability enhancements. Although the enhancements are not visible on Digg.com, if you use Digg together with other social networks, these enhancements can make the Web more fun and useful. Among the recent enhancements:

- We’ve added XFN to your user profile. XFN is an open standard that makes it easier for other social Web sites to recognize your Digg friends.

- We’ve improved support for hCard, another open data format for communicating Digg user names, nicknames, and photos, so that your favorite friend-following tools can more easily display your friends’ activity.

- We’ve added RDFa, making Digg part of the “semantic web” where Web pages become more sophisticated, beyond simply words and pictures.

These efforts support our philosophy that you own your data.”

This is another great sign of the momentum building for the notion that users own their data and content and should have control of who they share it with and the freedom to take it with them weherever they go across the Social Web.

And trust me, there’s a lot more to come. We entered the year with a bang, with many saying “2008 would be the year of data portability.” I have to say, I have never been more certain of our industry’s collective ability to deliver on that promise. What we need to work on becomes clearer and clearer, and more significantly, all the big players are now unconflicted in their support of all things “open.”

What if all the big players, who are the custodians (not owners) of vast treasure troves of personal data, could agree on standard ways of providing access to contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, profiles, photos, etc.? Is there anyone who doesn’t think that is the future we should be working towards?

Heads-up, if you run a service based on lock-in of your users’ data, think about another plan, or get out of the way.

Update: Here’s the view from TechCrunch.

Adobe is opening up Flash (a bit)…

VentureBeat reports:

“Adobe’s goal … is to create a consistent runtime environment for applications running on computers, televisions, mobile devices and consumer electronics.”

And, according to ReadWriteWeb:

“Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format.”

Time for a “golf clap,” I say. Cheerio.

As a veteran of open standards for the Web, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Flash. It really delivers on the promise of the Web as a new medium, especially in applications like YouTube. Honestly, it blows my mind, and I love it. If only it weren’t proprietary.

Do you know how it all happened? Macromedia bought a little company with a vector-graphics runtime.

According to Wikipedia:

“To jumpstart its web strategy, the company made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool originally designed for pen-based computing devices. Because of the small size of the FutureSplash viewer application, it was particularly suited for download over the Web, where at the time most users had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to Macromedia Flash, and following the lead of Netscape, distributed the Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share.”

Then, somehow, they got Netscape to bundle the Flash runtime with their browser. And it was that magical/crazy moment in the “browser wars” that created the conditions for something truly unprecedented to happen. Microsoft blinked.

Yep. The browser was to be the “new OS.” That made everything Web-related life-or-death for Microsoft. What should Microsoft do in response to Netscape integrating some random vector graphics animation runtime? Quick, quick, copy them and cut a deal to get that thing into our browser!

I was working at that time to get broad adoption of a competing vector graphics format, one that had the benefit of being truly open, but that’s another story…

And so Flash became a ubiquitous “standard” of the Web.

Fast forward 15 or so years. Microsoft is head-butting Adobe with Silverlight. And so we see “Adobe Open Screen.”

CNET shines a spotlight on the tussle between competing “write once, run anywhere” visions. Thank you.

More on the Flash vs. Silverlight battle at ComputerWorld.

I wonder what Marc Canter, godfather of opening up the Social Web thinks about all this?

I was heartened by a piece from the BBC, about how the Web is still in it’s early days, a piece done to mark the 15th anniversary of “the day the web’s code was put into the public domain by CERN.”

I feel so blessed to have been a part of the Web from the earliest of days. I came down to Silicon Valley (from Portland) at the beginnings of the ’90’s to go to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, after having a born-again-capitalist epiphany upon the fall of the Berlin Wall. (I had led a decidedly non-capitalist ’80’s, for sure.)

And I am about to have my 15th year reunion this weekend, so am in a reflective mood. Shortly after graduation, I landed at Silicon Graphics, then the hottest company in the Valley, where I ended up leading the effort to develop the first turnkey web server and the first WYSIWYG HTML editor, under the first “web” brand anywhere, “WebFORCE.”

I have to say, from the moment I first saw the Web, I was a believer that this was something of extraordinary proportions and potential impact.

As for whether the Web is in its infancy or not, I have to confess that I really like what Tim O’Reilly said at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, that the phase we are in the midst of is as important to humanity as the emergence of writing and reading and the coming together of societies in cities. While that might strike many as Silicon Valley hype, I have to say that I agree.

Human intelligence is about to ride the Moore’s Law curve in a way that was not possible before the emergence of the Social Web. Computing in the cloud, together with wisdom of (your) crowd, will make you smarter, more knowledgable, and more capable of withstanding the jarring changes coming down the pike.

For a little bit of (awkward) fun, here’s a link to the short video clip that I had developed for the press conference in January of 1995 to introduce the WebFORCE product line. Yes, it looks cheesy in retrospect, and the phrasing is clearly stilted. That said, there were many around me who maintained the notion that the Web was nothing much to get excited about, a frivolous diversion from the things that really matter.

Here’s to 15 years of proving them wrong, and to many more to come!

UPDATE: Here’s another image I found of the WebFORCE Indy (motto: “To Author and To Serve”)

As is our want, those of us who spend a fair bit of time blogging and tweeting like to jump on any juicy story about blogs or Twitter, and Kara Swisher has certainly served up one that everyone can sink their teeth into, including Robert Scoble, Sara Lacy, Larry Dignan, Jeff Clavier, and Dan Farber, to name a few. Her piece, entitled, “Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name,” reveals the results of an informal survey she did of 100 people at a wedding on the East Coast. The finding? These decidely non-Silicon Valley folk hadn’t even heard of Twitter. The horror!

In many ways, I didn’t find that shocking. Twitter skews very much early adopter at the moment. It’s loudest advocates are professional bloggers, who use it to get an edge on their clay-footed rivals of “old media.” Just this weekend, I was at a dinner party in Silicon Valley, attended by a small cadre of startup folks whose experience runs deep in the enterprise software sector (not the consumer Internet funhouse). One person, who is now stepping over into the consumer space, asked my opinion of Twitter. Before I could answer, two people asked, “What’s Twittter?”!

So, should Twitter employees or investors be worried? I don’t think so. This service has legs. In terms of potential, I would liken it a bit to Yahoo! in 1994. Over the course of that summer, Yahoo! provided an early adopter crowd an invaluable way to discover the blossoming world of the Web.

But for those who hadn’t yet downloaded Mosaic and started “surfing” the Web (with the help of Yahoo!), the whole thing smacked of ridiculous. Free software. Services with silly names. And a bunch of fairly crude sites to poke around on at modem speed. It was all too easy to miss the potential of the new medium.

I believe that we are right now on the cusp of the Social Web, a massive transformation of the Internet via a new set of services that bring who-you-know to any website or application. It’s really hard to predict which of today’s early Social Web tools will be the next Yahoo!, Google, eBay, or Amazon, but I am fairly confident some of the new crop of Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, Pownce, Jaiku, or for that matter, the big kids down the block, Facebook, will graduate to the Big Leagues.

My advice? Keep an eye on that Twitter thing.

Also, Mathew Ingram makes an apt comparison between Twitter and ICQ’s early days.

P.S. While writing this, I reminded myself of the early days of Yahoo! with this nice little history. One anecdote that it omits, which I think is true, is that after Sequoia’s Mike Moritz funded David and Jerry, they started to look for a “real name.” Mike, a big fan of short memorable company names, said something like, “If you change the name, I’ll take our money back!”

Tonight, Louis Gray shared his “media consumption workflow”…

As my regular readers know, I am a proponent of the notion that we are in the midst of a profound transformation in media, a seismic shift as the Web becomes “social.” If I’m right, the pace of change is about to accelerate dramatically, as an open Social Web unleashes a wave of innovation as significant as what we saw in 1994 and 1995. This time around, it will be sites, applications, and devices that harness a new “who-you-know” layer of the Internet.

Not surprisingly, as this major wave begins its swell, the suite of social media technologies and tools available to us is evolving rapidly. RSS, readers, blogging, microblogging, aggregators. Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plaxo Pulse, Seesmic, Thwirl, FriendFeed. Keeping up all these things sometimes feels like a full-time job.

As the tools available to us expands, each of us must find his or her own way forward. And, since the core of the transformation is social, we’re probably all well served by sharing our own lessons learned along the way. That’s the spirit behind a post this weekend by one of the rising voices in the blogosphere, Louis Gray, entitled, “My Social Media Consumption Workflow.”

His post inspired me to take a moment to share my own social media workflow — and how it’s been changing.

I confess, I’m a bit of a latecomer to blogging and to RSS. I have not (yet) become a user of a “reader” (other than the lifestream aggregators, which leverage RSS, but abstract that away by surfacing the notion of subscribing to people, rather than content feeds). Before last summer, when we launched Pulse over at my company, Plaxo, I viewed blogs as things that I read and sometimes commented upon, and I was obsessed with using blog search tools, like Google News and Technorati, to see what was being blogged about on subjects I cared about. Soon, I was heading further down the pathway, blogging myself, following hundreds of people’s lifestreams in Pulse, and then, Twitter!

So, how do I start my day now?

I fire up the browser, and open up a series of tabs: my blog, Techmeme, Twitter search engine Summize, Plaxo Pulse, Twitter.

Why my blog first? Advice from Jeremiah Owyang, who, early in my blogging days, encouraged me to take my blog seriously, and to start each and every day looking at the metrics.

Then, Techmeme — to see at a quick glance what the top tech “memes” are. At a minimum, that let’s me know if my day is to be consumed with controversy (as it was early in January during what came to be called “Scoblegate”). It also lets me see emerging stories that are relevant to my readers, and that I might want to embrace and write about. These are typically items related to the opening up of the Social Web, such as when a large player implements OpenID, Oauth, or microformats.

I then quickly pop over to Summize and do searches on my name and my company’s name, again to see if either trouble or opportunity is brewing. I love this tool, and I love how people in the Twittersphere react to outreach from strangers. (I need to do a separate post on the “return of civility” that Twitter is bringing about.)

From there, I head over to the tabs for Pulse and Twitter.

In Pulse, I get the lifestreams of people I know fairly well. The joy comes from seeing stuff from my family, my co-workers, and my real-world friends. Increasingly, though, I am finding key nuggets from people I don’t know all that well, such as seeing whenever Louis Gray comments on a blog that uses Disqus for its comment management.

In Twitter, I never know what I’m going to find. For me, it’s a bit like a party, full of randomness and social play. Many of the people I follow in Twitter I don’t actually know. (Although, over time, I come to feel that I do.) Twitter tells me what’s bubbling up, long before it gets on Techmeme.

One other tool I use, but don’t start my day with, is FriendFeed. It’s and aggregator that is very popular with the A-list bloggers and Twitterati, so it, like Twitter and Techmeme, offers a good insight into rising memes.

Okay, enough for now. Who knows how I’ll be using all this stuff next month, or which new tool will get added to my kit?

Caption: Joseph Smarr and Pete Cashmore “Partying Like it’s 1999″

I’m back in the office after two action-packed days and evenings in San Francisco for the annual Web 2.0 Expo. It was a huge gathering at an historic point. Are we on the cusp of the open Social Web or the brink of a “nuclear winter” — or both?

I loved this quip in a piece by CNET’s Caroline McCarthy regarding a pre-launch startup, Chi.mp, co-hosting an open bar party with Mashable:

“Amid the drunken revelry and pulsing electronic music, one prominent tech-industry veteran at the party was asked exactly what Chi.mp is. ‘I’ll tell you what Chi.mp is. It’s venture money getting set on fire,’ the jaded observer replied. Surveying the buoyant crowd, he added, ‘This feels a little like 1999.’”

But over-the-top partying aside, the vibe for me was tectonic. I could feel the strain of enormous tension built up along the traditional intersections of the industry’s continents. Microsoft introduces and demonstrated their bold “Mesh” initiative, which pits their cloud computing against Google’s. Yahoo! announced a sweeping makeover as on open platform, but is fighting for its independence from an unsolicited takeover bid by Microsoft. Will Yahoo! have the time to see its open efforts blossom. And if they become a part of Microsoft, how will such efforts “mesh”?

Tim O’Reilly reminded us all that there is something really big going on, and that we should not get distracted by the business headlines. I found his talk inspirational, and I agree with his thesis that the Web, especially the Social Web, is a driver of change in human capability that will have as dramatic an impact as the development of writing or the creation of cities. “Are we done yet?” he asked the crowd, with the fervor of a preacher or Presidential candidate. “No!” came the response.

And in what was one of the most well-received talks of the Expo, here Joseph Smarr of Plaxo articulates with great clarity one area in which we clearly are not “done yet,” deploying a new service layer that will remove the friction of the Social Web:

Here’s one of the key slides from Joseph’s talk that shows the Social Web services layer that we believe is about to emerge:

I also had the privilege of having meetings with most of the big companies, and I heard things that would have seemed impossible even a year ago. The commitment to opening up, to open standards, like OpenID, and to interoperability, is really quite amazing. 2008 is going to be an historic year, for sure.

Today was a great day at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a *huge* turnout and lots of interest in the meme of “opening up the Social Web”. The topic gave rise to many talks and panels, and was featured prominently in a keynote by no less than Tim O’Reilly himself.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo (a guru of all things “open”) brought his A-Game to a presentation on the emergence of the open Social Web. He laid out a vision for an ecosystem with the user at the center, an explosive growth in the number of socially-enabled sites, and intermediating between the user and those sites, a new service layer, comprised of identity providers, content aggregators, and (the missing piece of the puzzle) social graph providers.

His talk got rave reviews in the Twittersphere (and in “meat space”). I captured most of it on video, so will share various nuggets. Here’s the first clip I’ve uploaded, where Joseph lays down the vision for the ecosystem:

Joseph’s post on his talk, including a link to download his slides, is here.

In response to yesterday’s announcement of integration of the Disqus smart commenting system with the Plaxo Pulse social network, influential blogger Louis Gray wrote a piece on his thoughts overall on Pulse. He likes much of what Plaxo offers, but wonders whether a service known primarily as a business tool can convince people to project their lifestreams into it. He writes:

“This isn’t to say Plaxo hasn’t considered the problem of making such a dramatic shift in the public eye without losing its existing customer base. No doubt with the issues I brought up in mind, Plaxo has enabled categories of contacts, from “Business” to “Friends” and “Family”, making it possible that I could show my personal streaming data only to Friends and not Business contacts, for instance. That’s a smart move, one I expect other lifestreaming services to borrow. But not even this granularity solves the basic problem of what the site is known for and what they’re now trying to be. Putting wings on a car doesn’t make it an airplane.”

Is Plaxo really trying to put wings on a car? [Disclosure/reminder: I head up marketing at Plaxo.] Louis is correct from a marketing/brand perspective. For many people, Plaxo is a little piece of software in their Microsoft Outlook, providing a way keep their business contacts up-to-date. But Plaxo has always had bigger aspirations; the vision has been a “people layer” for the Internet, with each person having a unified and self-updating address book, leveraging the network effect. That unified address book would sync with Outlook, the Mac, AOL, Google, Yahoo!, the mobile phone, and more. And it would be accepted at just about every website. And inside that address book? Not just your business contacts, but everyone you know and care about, including, of course, your friends and family. In a few words, a major “who-you-know” play.

When we were contemplating Pulse, which brings your address book to life, enriching your connection to the people you know and care about, we had to answer a key question:

Would many of the 20 million current Plaxo members find the new functionality interesting and useful, and would people be willing to categorize the relationships they are declaring in Pulse as family, friends, and business?

After all, the first generation of social networks had trained people to “friend” just about anybody. We were convinced that there was a BIG market opportunity to take the concepts of social networking and recast them for a more mainstream, post-college demographic. The idea? Give people control over what they share with whom. We were and are convinced that the real Social Web will be like an iceberg. The blogs and tweets and other fully public content is the shiny white ice visible above the surface of the water, but running deep and wide is the mass below the waterline: the private and semi-private conversations between family and friends.

The greatest delight I get from Pulse is the simple pleasures of sharing photos and commenting on them between members of my family. That includes three generations of family members, distributed across the country.

Anyway, enough for now. Here are two charts answering the question of whether putting wings on the car can allow it to fly:

Explanation of these two charts available in my original post on the topic.

Two weekends ago, the blogosphere’s latest “bitchmeme” (group dialogue on a single topic, often kicked off by one blogger’s rant) centered around this question:

“Is it okay for content aggregators to fragment a blog’s conversation by allowing comments that do not flow back to the original post? Is such a practice stealing?”

I won’t rehash the whole discussion here, but here’s a few of the central posts, in addition to mine:

Tony Hung:
“Fine, I’ll Say It: Shyftr Crosses The Line“

Louis Gray:
“Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?”

Robert Scoble:
“Era of Blogger’s Control is Over”

The general view that emerged was that bloggers should get over it, and learn to live in a world where they are not in control of where the conversation flows. While I agree with that, if someone could figure out a way to allow comments to flow back from the various aggregators, that would be a good thing.

Enter Plaxo and Disqus, who have just launched a working solution to that very problem. In a post on the Plaxo blog, Joseph Smarr, who seems to show up wherever there’s a meaty open Social Web problem to be solved, describes the situation:

“Plaxo’s mantra is always to ‘give our users control,’ so naturally we’re in favor of letting blog authors share their feed inside Pulse and providing a way for comments generated inside Pulse to flow back to the original blog. The problem is, there’s no standard way of programmatically interacting with the comment system on an arbitrary blog. So while it’s never been our aim to “trap comments” inside Pulse, there hasn’t been a good way to set them free. Until now.”

The solution is a mechanism whereby bloggers who use the Disqus “smart comment system” can indicate that to Plaxo when they’re hooking up their blog to their lifestream in Pulse. When they do, any comments made on their posts within Pulse get posted out to their actual blog. The result is the best of both worlds: larger audience, via exposure within Pulse; but with all comments enriching the discussion on the original post.

This is a great example of evolving beyond the “walled garden” model of social networking.

Now, if we could get WordPress to allow this feature on their hosted solution (so that I could enable it here.) Please, WordPress!

UPDATE: Here’s the official post on the Disqus blog, talking about the strategic context and the enabling API.

UPDATE: A nice piece on the topic by Mashable’s Mark “Rizz’n” Hopkins.

[Reminder/disclosure: I head up marketing at Plaxo.]

I am addicted to Summize, the recently launched Twitter search tool. I use morning, noon, and night to track what is being said about my company, about me, or about any of several subjects I am passionate about. That allows me to spot product issues early and to find out what new features are delighting users.

One frustration I have had is that many of the tweets are in other languages, which has meant that I have only a vague idea at best of what they are saying. So I was very excited this morning to see a new feature in Summize: every page now has a “Translate to English” link! The automatic translations are not perfect, as you can imagine, but they are certainly good enough to give me insight into how people are reacting and to see if there are any issues with various localized versions of our service.

Go, Summize. Vielen dank! Merci! Gracias!

Readers who turn here just for my coverage of the emergence of the Social Web, please forgive this off-topic post. I saw this evening a post on Webware by Daniel Terdiman about how the comic strip Dilbert is getting a “Web 2.0″ website, that enables greater interactivity with the audience, and it reminded me of a long time ago, when the Web was a truly new medium…

The year was 1994, and Netscape was still called Mosaic. Silicon Graphics, the company I worked at, was the hottest in the Valley, making the super-fast 3D wokstations that were transforming the entertainment industry (and a whole lot more). I was a product manager for the Indy workstation, and an early convert to the new religion of the Web. Soon, I would spearhead the launch of WebFORCE, the industry’s first turnkey web server, and WebMagic, the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

But first, we were just getting our feet wet with having a website that helped customers and prospects get the information they needed. The support team had snagged the domain www.sgi.com (a move that would ultimately lead to a renaming of the company from Silicon Graphics to just SGI). The Web was so young, and there were so few websites, that Silicon Graphics was one of the Top Ten web destinations (along with our arch enemy, Sun).

I headed up the product team’s effort to create a really cool section of the website for the Indy workstation. We had a lot of stuff to work with, and tried more than a few out-of-the-box ideas. One of them was to come up with some fun ways to play up a unique feature of the Indy: it was the first computer to ship with digital video support, with each system having a digital video camera on the top (what would now be thought of as a webcam). In truth, it didn’t really have much use at the time, what with limited bandwidth and no web, but it was “cool” nonetheless.

Scott Adams had recently done a number of Dilbert comics on videoconferencing (and how ridiculous it was at the time), and I wanted to include one of them on the Indy website. So, I called up United Media, and negotiated the first-ever content licensing deal for the web, featuring a comic strip. They were, as you can imagine, unprepared for such a call. In the end, I paid them a few hundred dollars for a single strip. But I also invited Scott over for a visit and got video of him drawing Dogbert, which I posted to the site, as well. (We wanted to push the envelope of multimedia for the Web.)

Thanks for the memories!

OpenID has been gaining momentum in the last year, with support from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, and a growing list of companies. And just last week, OpenID was mentioned on the Today Show, of all places. So it muist be mainstream? Well, almost.

From here to mainstream, we need to see much better user experience. Clickpass and Yahoo! have made progress there already, but more is always welcome. Today, JainRain, a small outfit that is a driving force of the OpenID effort, introduces an ID Selector wdiget. What is it?

“It’s a widget that you add to the existing OpenID login form on your website. You embed a snippet of javascript code into your page, and it writes in an HTML button tag styled to match your CSS.”

Great to see efforts like this that aim to make adoption of this important technology easier, both for sites and for users. That said, I tend to agree with Allen Stern that broad adoption will likely come not from getting users to embrace OpenID, but by making OpenID invisible (as in the Clickpass implementation, for example).

Nice writeup by CNET’s Rafe Needleman at Webware, here.

In a recent post, inspired by Robert Scoble’s “How to Fix the Web,” I laid out the framework for the ecosystem of an open Social Web. I envisioned that the user will be at the center, with clear ownership and control of their personal data and content, enjoying the freedom to take it with them wherever they go across the web.

Making that possible, will be the three core elements of the Social Web service layer:

- Identity Providers
- Social Graph Providers
- Content Aggregators

In a guest column today on GigaOm, entitled “The Social Map is All About Me,” Mark Sigal lays out a case for the importance of the third one of these, “the need to aggregate.” Mark asserts that “regardless of where my content and data originate, I have a right to pull this data into MY sandbox, a sandbox where I track my threads, organize my media, filter my views and push my content wherever and however I please.” I couldn’t agree more.

In a world in which nearly every website is socially-enabled or socially-aware, we will all desparately need a dashboard that brings order to the chaos of fragmentation. That dashboard will allow us to aggregate and manage our own “lifestream” and to make decisions about what parts to make public and what parts to share with family, with real friends, or with looser ties. (Plaxo Pulse is an example of such as aggregator today.) That aggregation dashboard will also bring together into one or more rivers of news, the lifestreams from the people you want to follow. (That function is common to all of the aggregators out there, including Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, and the new gorilla entrant, Facebook.)

There are other many other consequences of having a “dashboard for the Social Web,” which I won’t get into in this post. But one that does seem particularly relevant, is the establishment of a user-controlled profile for the public portion of the Social Web. An example of one is the image at the top of the page. Its my actual page, hosted at johnmccrea.myplaxo.com. It combines the portion of my lifestream that I have aggregated into Pulse and marked as “public.” It also shows “me” across the web (at least those identities I have chosen to assert publicly as me). Behind the scenes, Plaxo is leveraging Google’s Social Graph API to make that identity consolidation super easy. The page is maked up with microformats, which means that it is machine-readable, which makes the data usable by other services without re-keying by the user.

Now, imagine if the URL for the page were to become an OpenID…

…but that’s a topic for another post, at another time.

The Data Sharing Workshop is getting into gear this morning at SFSU. About 50 people in the room, representing a wide variety of companies and technolgies. Kickoff speakers have included folks from Google, Microsoft, Plaxo, and SixApart.

Here’s a video of Joseph Smarr of Plaxo trying to frame the key problems that might be worked on:

And here’s a picture including three “share bears” (Chris Saad, David Recordon, and Joseph Smarr, plus Kevin Marks of Google):

UPDATE:

Here’s a nice shot from Marc Canter’s fiery kickoff talk:

I, along with many of you, am fighting hard to keep my head above the surface, as I tread the rising waters of the nascent Social Web. New sites are popping up every day. Join one, and you’re likely to go through a drill that’s become all too familiar: Generate another username/password pair. Recreate your profile. Slurp in your GMail or other address books. Build up your friends list all over again. In the process, generate a ton of connection request emails (also called “bac’n” — not quite spam, but not good for you).

Robert Scoble highlights these problems in the upcoming May issue of Fast Company magazine in an article entitled, “How to Fix the Web.” Those of us working on the problem, appreciate the continued advocacy from Robert, who became a poster child for the issue of “data portability” in early January. Sharing the controversy with Robert, I did feel some intense heat from a very polarized debate at the time, but in hindsight, the pain was worth it. Within days, the DataPortability.org workgroup managed to sign up Google, Plaxo, and Facebook, in a move widely credited with setting the stage for 2008 to be the year of data portability.

For those interested in helping move the ball forward, I encourage you to attend the Data Sharing Workshop in San Francisco in the next two days. It kicks off at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

In my view, we are really on the cusp of the opening up of the true Social Web. Making it all possible is a collection of building block technologies (OpenID, Oauth, microformats, OpenSocial, the Social Graph API, and one or two still-missing pieces). But none of those technologies is anything a user needs to know about or understand. These enabling technologies need to get wrapped up into three or more critical services of the Social Web: Identity Providers (examples Clickpass and Yahoo!), Social Graph Providers (stay tuned: Plaxo? Facebook? Others?), and Content Aggregators (Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, Facebook, and a new one every week!).

Want more detail on this vision and how it snaps together? Be sure to see Joseph Smarr’s talk next Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Or see the great post by Kaliya (a.k.a “Identity Woman”), who is facilitating the unconference aspect of the Data Sharing Summit.

[Disclosure/reminder: I head up marketing for Plaxo.]

In a piece not-so-flattering to Plaxo over at TechCrunch (it’s okay, I’ve developed a thick skin), Erick Schonfeld shined a spotlight on the invite-only beta launch of a new “address book sync” startup from the Netherlands, Soocial. According to the post and the company’s website, they’ve developed a multi-way, automated sync solution for address books, very much like a piece of functionality which is a core part of the Plaxo solution.

This blog, dedicated to the emergence of the open Social Web, with users owning their data and having the freedom to take it with them between all tools and services, applauds the arrival of Soocial. And, as someone who has worked at Plaxo for just over two years, I also welcome them to what I call the “deep end of the data portability pool.”

What do I mean by that? Automated, multi-way addess book sync is the Holy Grail of data portability. When it works flawlessly, it is damn-near magic. Make a change in any one tool, and it automatically shows up in all the others. Your hard drive crashes? Not a problem; there’s a copy in the cloud.

But behind this “magic” is some of the hardest work in the software business. Why? Rock solid APIs are few and far between for the various tools, and in the absence of such APIs, any company that wants to do sync has to jump through a bunch of technical hoops to make sync work at all. Oh, and if in jumping through such hoops, something goes a little bit wrong? There is Hell to pay. Sync is an unforgiving master. Mess up a person’s address book (in all the tools they use), and you may lose that customer forever.

Soocial claims to sync with just about everything out there, from mobile phones, to the Mac, to GMail, but there’s a gaping hole in their coverage for launch: Microsoft Outlook. Oh, the tales that could be told about the fine art of syncing flawlessly with this ubiquitous tool! Colleagues at Soocial, we know the pain. (Vocabulary word: “thunking.”)

But, no matter, this is great news all around. More choices in the market is always good. Users love it, and vendors are forced to make their offerings better, and to double-down on differentiation. It will be interesting to see if Soocial can overcome some their current scalability issues and round out the offering with a high-quality Outlook sync (and unveil a business model; current offering is free).

Data portability remains really hard work; let’s hope that the industry’s collective efforts make all this simple, easy, and universal!

Caption: David Recordon (left) and Joseph Smarr (right) at the Social Graph Foo Camp

Recently, Joseph Smarr and I were invited by David Recordon of SixApart to take a look at something they were about to launch, called BlogIt. We got very excited and had lots of ideas about where they and we (Plaxo) could go together with this. It just launched, so I can now talk openly about it.

BlogIt is a very cool tool that embraces one of the foundational notions of the open Social Web: that once someone gets into using one social application, they will quite naturally begin to use multiple social applications, whether that’s social networks, blogs, microblogs, content aggregators, or whatever. The natural consequence of that is fragmentation, which, in the current “walled garden” phase of the Web, creates all sorts of hassles, inconvenience, and missed opportunity for richer interaction.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is right, I think, to say that BlogIt “could be the start of something big.” At the core, BlogIt makes it easy to quickly create and publish a blogpost from within a social network or application, and have the post go to multiple destinations and get promoted from multiple sources (for example, Twitter). The first implemenation targets the Facebook platform, but obviously this can go to other networks, such as MySpace, Orkut, Plaxo Pulse, etc. via the Google-led OpenSocial platform.

What I like about it, is that we are still in the early phases of social media, social networking, and the opening up of the social web. Social networks and content aggregators can be a great way to mainstream the social media experience, and help millions of voices that are not currently heard jump into the world of blogging. How? By making it really easy to post — and to have a pre-existing audience — in the form of the local social graph(s) of the user.

David’s done a nice post, helping explain where this all fits in and where SixApart might go with this. Brad King, of TechWorldNews, also has a nice piece that puts this into a broader perspective. (I enjoyed my interview with him earlier today greatly!)

Saw in Twitter that TechCrunch is taking the money raised at their party with PopSugar down in LA and donating it to two organizations working to open up the Social Web: the OpenID Foundation and DataPortability Workgroup. How cool is that?

Wow. It seems only a year ago that “open” and “data portability” were just a big dream for a small but passionate grass roots movement. Now, it seems clear we are on the cusp of the whole thing opening up.

Thanks expressed by David Recordon on behalf of OpenID here.

I really like how the things are shaping up. Kinda funny, Michael Arrington is at the vanguard of the “new journalism,” in my view. And the rules are not written. I like that he took this step to jump into the story and show support for the folks trying to open things up.

I’m on the other side of things, as a marketing guy, trying to be at the bleeding edge of “conversational marketing,” which means I am not just shoving out press releases with quotes from paid analysts. I’m increasingly jumping in and being part of the direct telling. Interesting…

In a move thats been expected for a while, Facebook has just enter the lifestream aggregation space (alongside Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and a list of companies that grows nearly every week). Out the door, they are only supporting handful of external sources (Flickr, del.icio.us, Picasa, and Yelp), but they say many more are on the way.

Does this move make sense? Absolutely. Is it, as TechCrunch’s Mark Hendkrickson says, a threat to FriendFeed? Sort of. Eric Eldon, of Venture Beat, raises that question, as well.

But I see this as a very natural evolution, as we make our way from the era of “walled gardens” over to the open world of the Social Web. In that world, the user will be at the center, owning their own data and content, with the freedom to take it with them wherever they go. In that ecosystem, their will be a service layer that connects the user to myriad socially-enabled sites. That Social Web sevice layer will have three main components:

- Identity provider
- Social graph provider
- Content aggregator

Some players, like Facebook and Plaxo, will likely provide all three services, while others might focus on one or two. For example, Clickpass and Yahoo! are clearly playing in the “identity provider” space already, with consumer-friendly implementations of OpenID. The social graph provider space is the one that doesn’t yet exist, but is at the core of the vision for “data portability.” Expect interesting developments there in the coming months.

Other coverage include’s Mashable’s Paul Glazowski, here, and a nice piece by CNET’s Caroline McCarthy, which raises the interesting question of whether there is a revenue arrangment involved. Interesting question…

A debate is erupting in the blogosphere about whether it’s okay or not for comments on blogposts (or other user generated content) to be splintered off in various RSS readers or social media aggregators, such as Shyfter or FriendFeed or any of a number of other services that enable users to project their lifestreams into them.

This is indeed an interesting discussion, as we are just now on the cusp of the Social Web, a complex ecosystem with as-yet undefined rules. Their will be identity providers (OpenID providers, such as Yahoo!, AOL, Clickpass, and some day, Microsoft), online identity consolidators (i.e. Google Social Graph API and Plaxo public profiles), portable social graph providers (hmmmm, stay tuned), and myriad feed aggregators (seems like a new one every week; first Plaxo Pulse, last summer, and now in recent weeks: FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, etc.).

There is a real tension here: Comments out on the anonymous web tend toward the sophomoric; whereas comments inside circles with identity bring out the best in people. Right now, in the absence of the full-blown open Social Web, we see various experiments underway that try to bridge that gap. In the process, it appears that comment threads are being “stolen.” I don’t think anyone is really trying to make a big play based on hijacking the comment thread.

There’s a bunch of interesting problems to be worked on here, and I expect rapid progress.

Here’s the posts from the debate so far: Louis Gray, Matthew Ingram, and not to be missed, Deep Jive Interests.

Update: Robert Scoble has jumped into this “bitchmeme” saying the “Era of blogger’s control is over.” I agree that bloggers should embrace the organic spread of their influence through the conversation fragments across the web, but also think we tool providers can apply some smarts to the problem to stitch some of this stuff back together.

As you know, I’m a big fan of Twitter, and believe that is is becoming a core platform for any conversational marketer. But Twitter’s sprawling success creates the need for an ecosystem of tools to help us slice and dice the conversation cloud. Fortunately, the team at Twitter has provided APIs that enable a vibrant developer community to emerge, with new tools popping every week.

Today, I was excited to discover a new Twitter search tool that jumps ahead of Terraminds (now defunct) and Tweetscan (my go-to search tool in recent days). Summize is the first Twitter search tool that appears to be a commercial offering, rather than somebody’s side project. My thanks to Adam Ostrow at Mashable for the scoop on this new offering (which I learned about via a tweet from Pete Cashmore).

Summize is clean and simple, and has a professional look that inspires confidence. Let’s hope they can back that up with scalability and reliability. In addition, Summize provides RSS feeds for any search term, and one feature that I’m really excited about: search by language. Want to know what people are tweeting about your brand (personal or corporate) in French, German, or any other langauage? Summize to the rescue!

Over at Plaxo, where I head up marketing, that kind of granular search is really important. Our service is available in English and six other languages. Seeing what people are saying about the company or product in the languages we’ve localized in is invaluable. And seeing which languages that we’ve not yet localized in have a lot of chatter about our offering can influence localization priorities going forward.

Two other nice features of Summize: RSS feeds for any search term, and the ability to tweet any search result. My hunch, though, is that there is more to come. I plan to use this tool daily, and suggest you do, too!

The last year has been an amazing time for building momentum for the emergence of the Social Web. We’ve seen the “open” and “data portability” memes move from the periphery to the core, picked up by Plaxo, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook, among many others. We’ve seen major advances in the embrace of open standards, including OpenID, OAuth, and microformats. And we’re also beginning to see a swell of public awareness and the stirrings of demand for users to have ownership and control of their data, and the freedom to take it with them, wherever they go.

So where do we go from here? And how can you jump in an help turn the vision into reality? My recommendation would be to add one, two, or even all three of the following events to your calendar:

Data Sharing Workshop, April 18 - 19 at the SFSU, Downtown Campus

Internet Identity Workshop 2008, May 12-14, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View

Data Sharing Summit, May 15, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View

Here’s a link for registration for Data Sharing Workshop and Data Sharing Summit.

Great things have happened at previous versions of these influential grass-roots events. Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authored the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web for debut at the Data Sharing Summit, where the document generated vibrant discussion, conceptual buy-in from some of the biggest companies on the Internet, and a ton of signatures from the people who are working on the building blocks of data portability and the Social Web.

And to be clear, these are not stiff, formal, traditional conferences. They are all highly collaborative events, with no one setting the agenda except the interesting people who show up. I advise you to become a part of them if you are passionate about bringing about the open Social Web!

I wrote last night a bit about Google’s just-launched App Engine. Quite frankly, I sensed it was something big, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I needed a night to reflect and a chance to hear how folks who were at the announcement thought about it. So far, I think the best analysis is from David Recordon. I highly recommend his post on the subject, which includes:

“During the presentation, I tweeted, “Thinking App Engine with Google Accounts integration is a threat to both Facebook Platform and OpenSocial. Metaphor shift.” I thought a decent amount, well at least a few seconds, before I SMS’d that, since I knew it would be lacking quite a bit of context.”

Similar thoughts from Silicon Valley Insider, sealed the deal for me. Something big is going on here. With App Engine, Google is changing the rules of the the platform wars, in a way that is consistent with the vision behind Open Social. I do think the relevent competing platform is not Amazon or Microsoft, but rather Facebook. App Engine is infrastructure for accelerating the emergence of the next generation of applications for the Social Web. Smart move, me thinks.

Not everyone sees the startegic threat to Facebook, though.

As to whether this move is in line with the vision of “open,” it’s worth hearing a strong voice of dissent from a company that may feel the competitive threat of App Engine more directly than anyone else, Joyent.

The platform space is heating up again, which I think is a good sign for Silicon Valley. Back in the day, it was often a question of the Microsoft monopoly vs. any-and-all alternatives. Netscape made the suicidal strategic decision to pick a platform battle with Microsoft, poking a stick in the sleeping bear’s eye, when, instead, they should have simply risen on the Web wave and leveraged their default-homepage-advantage for as long as possible, without creating any enemies. In parallel, Sun hyped Java as an alternative the OS juggernaut, but we can now see in hindsight that the browser and Java were distractions to a more significant platform war: proprietary vs. open source.

With last night’s “campfire” behind us, it’s time to reflect a bit on what “platform” is relevent these days. From an opening-the-Social-Web perspective, we often think about Facebook’s platform vs. the Google-led collective effort of OpenSocial. In this domain, it is about whether one writes a social application to a single platform, to many platforms, or just once, and sees it run everywhere. (It’s the promise of Java revived for the Social Web.)

But what to make of the latest move? Google App Engine is a whole new kind of creature. It will take us all a while to digest exactly what has just happened here. Rather than tell you my early opinion, let me suggest that the real question for us all is, “Given what is happening overall, which platform war is most important?”

And a second, equally important question, is: “What is the relevant competitive set for this new platform?” That is taken up by Silicon Valley Insider’s Nate Westheimer here:

“If the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook’s F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of App Engine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.”

What do you think? Is Google going after Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, or all three?

Also, don’t get distracted by the little tempest in the teapot…

If you are a marketer and have not figured out the fast-changing landscape of social media, bone up! If you are a seasoned PR person, brand manager, or CMO and think that Twitter and other new media tools are fringe fads, wake up!

Ignoring the “memestream” is something you cannot afford to do. As the world of “old media” (a.k.a. print newspapers and magazines) is in a death spiral, the “buzz” is increasingly determined by the community of the blogosphere and the microblogosphere.

What are people saying about your brand on Twitter? If your answer is, “I don’t know,” you are lazy. If your answer is “What is Twitter?” you are incompetent and should think about career alternatives.

As the head of marketing for Plaxo, I feel it is essential that I stay on top of tools like Tweetscan to monitor what people are saying about our brand. That often leads to customer service escalations — and to reversals of opinion. A frustrated Twitterer who gets rapid remedy after tweeting a complaint can become a brand ally.

Don’t believe that this stuff matters to real companies? Check out this weekend’s drama with Michael Arrington and Comcast.

Update: A nice post over at CNET by Charles Cooper on the relationship between Twitter, breaking news, and “old media.”

How can we get the most out of the revolutionary “microblogging” platform Twitter?

Influential Forrester analyst and veteran blogger, Jeremiah Owyang, recently posted on the topic of “essential Twitter tools.” I can certainly relate, as an increasingly heavy (a.k.a, addicted) Twitter user. Twitter is, in my opinion, a first-class citizen of the Social Web. Very open. Very social.

I have tried all the tools Jeremiah mentions, and for me, the key is search. I mourn the loss to Terraminds, but have happily replaced it with Tweetscan. (Although, when it was down for hours today, I had serious withdrawal.) Why? Because it really matters to me what people are tweeting about my company (Plaxo). When someone has a problem, complaint, question, or suggestion for Plaxo and voices it via Twitter, I want to know. Many a new conversation or relationship has been struck as a result of this facility.

My only addition to Jeremiah’s list is Plaxo Pulse (the first social aggregator). There, by virtue of the foundation of my unified address book, I am “following” a bunch of Twitterers that I am not following directly in Twitter (or indirectly via FriendFeed). And, because Pulse allows for status sync with Twitter, many of those messages show up simply as status updates.

Here’s an excellent resource for getting a sense of what’s currently possible with OpenID. It’s a post from Sara Perez on ReadWriteWeb, with a breathtaking list of OpenID providers and “relying parties” (sites where you can use your OpenID).

While the skeptics remain, it is clear that there has been growing momentum for this critical building block of the Social Web, especially in the past few months.

I’d also recommend tapping into the wisdom of Joseph Smarr, who is both a passionate advocate of OpenID and an early implementer, as Plaxo’s chief platform architect. Plaxo rolled out support for OpenID late last year, becoming one of the first large-scale consumer sites to accept OpenID. And most recently, Joseph worked with Yahoo! on their implmentation, allowing users to log in to Plaxo with their Yahoo! credentials (using OpenID behind the scenes). Here’s an interview I did with him on the day of that announcement. It’s a good intro to the topic:

For developers with an interest in implementing OpenID, I recommend Joseph’s “A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site.” 

Okay. This post is decidedly off-topic for this blog, so hardcore readers interested only in updates on the opening of the Social Web feel free to skip over…

I’m writing to comment on a story emerging not in the blogosphere, but in the world of traditional media. It is the story of changing attitudes toward — and business practices around — that necessary evil of businesses, “meetings.”

It got started with a piece in the L.A. Times by Jessica Guynn, entitled “Silicon Valley meetings go ‘topless’.” (Meaning that some companies are banning laptops and other devices from meetings.) In it, she also references a more radical innovation started by Joseph Smarr and Mark Jen at Plaxo, which seeks to banish meetings on all days, except Tuesdays:

“That frustration is so widespread that some start-ups cut meetings short or do away with them. Mountain View, Calif., Internet company Plaxo Inc. took a “meat ax” to meetings, moving them all to Tuesdays with the goal of making other days more productive. (They called it “Meataxo.”) “

The story then spread “across the pond” to the UK, in a piece by Dan Glaister of the Guardian:

That frustration has led to yet another innovation: meeting-free companies. That too has a snappy moniker: “meataxo”, as in take a meat axe to meetings. “No-laptop meetings make sense,” Zawodny blogged. “No meetings makes more sense.”

And now, the story has jumped over from newspapers to television, in a piece by ABC News, entitled “Going Topless in the Office”.

My hat is off to Jessica Guynn for a truly viral meme!

Posts this weekend by Loic Le Meur and Michael Arrington have stirred up discussion about the emerging ecosystem of the Social Web that is the central topic of TheRealMcCrea blog. Indeed, we, too, believe that the landscape is shifting rapidly, and that the walls are coming down.

What will happen next?

For one, aggregators like FriendFeed and others, will emerge all over the place, as the barrier to creating one falls to nothing. Indeed, each week we hear of a new one.

Next, the building blocks for the Social Web will be completely assembled. Most are now already out there: OpenID, Oauth, microformats, OpenSocial, and the Social Graph API. Together, these enable the “centralized me” discussed by Loic and Michael, as well as application portability, and to some extent, data portability (microformats allowing machine readability). But the last block or two missing is that which liberates the social graph data and makes it portable (under the control of the user). Keep you eyes on that space…and prepare for an exciting 2008.

And to see a real live example of a “centralized me” brought to life via aggregration, see my public profile page on Plaxo. How was it created? Plaxo implemented support for Google’s Social Graph API, which traverses the publicly asserted linkages people make out on the web about themselves. This “rel=me” allows an application, like Pulse, to present to a user a menu of items discovered about that person out on the public web. The user, me in this case, can pick and choose which pieces to associate with my Plaxo account, and whether and how to share each feed through the Pulse aggregation and sharing system. Some feed I choose to share only with family or only with friends — or even only with a specific group of people. Others, I wish to project publicly, and these form the living foundation of my public profile.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, but you’re interested in more depth, I would suggest diving inside the heads of folks like Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and Marc Canter (who needs no introduction). They are the primary co-authors of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.

According to TechCrunch, one of my preferred online news sources, in a piece by Duncan Riley:

“Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006, the biggest drop in revenue since 1950, the year they started tracking annual revenue.”

We are witnessing a major upheaval in the media landscape, as the Internet makes the print news model increasingly untenable. Printed news is expensive to produce, arrives so slowly that it can hardly be called “news” upon arrival, and is an absurd waste of trees and energy.

What does that mean? The race is on to figure out the winning model for online news. Somewhat ironically, the New York Times wades in on the topic, with a piece by Saul Hansel, entitled “PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future.” It might have been better titled, “Two Visions of the Future of the New York Times.”

My previous post here.

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