[Caption: Dave Morin of Facebook at Google's CampFire One event, to the right of David Recordon of OpenID fame]

The biggest surprise in Google’s announcement of Friend Connect was Facebook’s participation as a “social graph provider.”

As a participant in and survivor of “Scoblegate,” I know all too well what a big deal it would be for Facebook to allow portability of their social graph to Google’s visionary project to socially-enable the long-tail of the Web.

At Monday’s CampFire One event on the Google campus, I was excited to see Dave Morin, who heads up the Platform at Facebook. Were they really participating in Google Friend Connect? Man, I knew this was big, but that would make it something HUGE!

Today, we all learned from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, that Facebook has decided to *not* participate in this exciting opportunity, in an official Facebook blogpost citing heartburn over privacy issues and violation of various Facebook terms and conditions. So, they blocked Google’s Friend Connect application. Wow!

Could it really be true? At Plaxo (disclaimer/reminder: I head up marketing there), we believe that Google’s Friend Connect represents an enormous opportunity for the social networks participating as Social Graph Providers. As they light up the long tail of the Social Web, we want our users to be able to fully leverage their investment in creating a truly useful, fully-articulated social graph within Plaxo Pulse, categorizing their real-world relationships as family, friend, or business. We want our users ti be able to take their local piece of the social graph with them, wherever they go across the Social Web. And we are confident that Google’s Friend Connect is a great vehicle for making that a reality.

Is it really possible that Facebook will cede this market opportunity to us? As a business person, I sure hope so!

But as a citizen of the Web, I hope not. Openess and competition leads to innovation and more choices.

I can hardly wait to see how this all plays out! Here’s the latest on the drama, again from TechCrunch.

And Dave, I’m not really trying to harsh on you or Facebook here. I do believe you guys are working on opening up, and am keen to hear the details when you’re ready. (And I hope you’re not reading all this from your vacation in Hawaii. Aloha.)

And if you’re thirsting for more, here’s a link to a video Robert Scoble shot at the Google CampFire One event. He interviews me before it all gets going, but if you make it to the end, you can see Dave Morin arrive and give his props to Scoble.

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”)