In this week’s episode of The Social Web TV, Joseph Smarr and I are joined by special guests, Dirk Balfanz and Breno de Medeiros of Google to discuss this week’s rollout of Hybrid OpenID/OAuth and a “Two-Click Signup” experiment between Google and Plaxo. Check it out:
The Real McCrea
John McCrea on the emerging Social Web
Tagged with Plaxo …
New Episode of The Social Web TV: “On Feeds and OpenID Momentum”
The acceleration in the emergence of the Social Web continues, confronting David Recordon and me with the challenge of trying to cover six different news items in one less-than-15-minute video podcast. We found a way to weave them together in a narrative arc that starts with some things relating to activity streams (or “feeds”) then segues into OpenID momentum. Topic discussed include: Yahoo adds 20 external feeds; iLike integrates with Google Friend Connect; Plaxo integrates with Amazon; Google adjusts resourcing for Dodgeball and Jauiku; Six Apart enhances support for OpenID in TypePad Connect; and OpenID reaches more than 30,000 sites and more than half a billion accounts. Check it out:
On OpenID Gaining Momentum: 30,000 Sites, Half a Billion Accounts
Two nice pieces yesterday on how OpenID picked up steam in 2008. David Recordon’s post at OpenID.net is simply entitled 2008:Momentum. It offers a great review of the progress made last year:
2008 was an awesome year for OpenID where the community created significant momentum moving toward mainstream adoption. No, not every site on the web is using OpenID nor does every consumer know what OpenID does, but last year alone the number of sites that accept OpenID for sign in more than tripled1. Today, there are over thirty-thousand publicly accessible sites supporting OpenID for sign in and well over half a billion OpenID enabled accounts.
He supports the claim of momentum with no fewer than 11 proof points!
The other post is from Wired.com’s Michael Calore, entitled Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down. David Recorodon and I are both quoted in the piece. Michael focused on the traction OpenID is showing in the area of blog commenting, which led to this great quote from David:
“Blog commenting is not a niche,” he says. “Social activity on blogs in total dwarfs social activity on any particular social network.”
“If anything, the success of OpenID and Facebook Connect in situations such as commenting on blogs, coupled with a number of high-profile sites, will continue pushing this idea toward a mainstream audience that cares about being able to easily sign in, find people they know, and share what they’re doing on the web.”
Let’s hope that the incredible gains OpenID made in 2008 will be matched and exceeded in 2009. With strong support from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Six Apart, Plaxo and more than 30,000 other sites, I think that’s fairly likely.
Also worth checking out is David’s other recent post, this one at Six Apart’s blog, detailing enhancements to Typepad Connect, with expanded support for OpenID, including user-friendly click-the-logo sign-in via Google and Yahoo accounts!
FriendFeed and Plaxo: Latest Traffic Trends for the “Webwide Lifestream Aggregator” Pioneers
The concept of an “open social network,” one that gets its news feed not from within its own walls, but rather by aggregating lifestreams from all over the open Web, first appeared with the launch of Plaxo Pulse in August 2007. [Reminder/disclosure: I head up marketing at Plaxo. 
]
While Plaxo stayed heads-down focused on serving its traditional 30- to 50-year-old professional demographic with private sharing and conversations based on a family/friend/business connection model, FriendFeed came roaring into the space with a service as public and extensible as Twitter, and quickly became a darling of the early-adopter and blogger/influencer crowd.
The two services have continued to innovate down different pathways and to help map out a blueprint that we are now seeing adopted by some of the largest social networks (Facebook and MySpace) and largest of mainstream Internet companies (Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL). So, let’s take a look at the traffic trend for these two pioneers, through the lens of the latest data from Compete.com. [Note: Compete.com only looks at U.S. traffic, and like all other tracking services, provides an approximate tally.]
While each service experienced a month here or there of sideways drift or month-over-month declines in monthly unique visitors, the clear overall trend for 2008 is one of strong growth. Plaxo in particular is showing encouraging signs of vibrancy at the end of 2008.
The key question now: with much larger players putting all their chips on the webwide lifestream aggregation model, can either of both of the two pioneers grow fast enough in their respective niches to carve out a great longterm position in the marketplace?
My belief is that the answer is “yes,” as the Web itself goes social, and the Social Web goes open, creating a wave of innovation that will favor the most agile of aggregators. And as a passionate user of both services, I sure hope I’m right!
Live Blogging from the Activity Streams Meetup
Up in San Francisco for another open spec community gathering, this one focused on working toward standardization of “activity streams,” the flow of user-generated content which is the lifeblood of the emerging Social Web. This Activity Streams Meetup is being hosted at Six Apart, with David Recordon guiding the event. As Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr tweeted, we hope this all leads to “more structured metadata in feeds”.
As usual, I’ll sprinkle in a mix of photos and observations, but not attempt to take anything approaching full notes. In addition to Six Apart, there are folks here or from Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, among others. That means there’s representation for projects that span DiSo, OpenSocial, Open Stack, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, MySpaceID, among others. Sweet!
Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo has a nice post describing the problem we need to solve, entitled, Representing Rich Media and Social Network Activities in RSS/Atom Feeds. Also recommend this post from Chris Messina, Where we’re going with Activity Streams. And for more background, here’s Chris Messina’s talk on Activity Streams at the pre-holiday Open Stack Meetup:
And now, some photos of the Activity Stream Meetup:
Lots of good discussion, trying to get everyone on the same page about the problem we’re trying to solve and what we can hope to accomplish today. As people are sharing all sorts of stuff from a rapidly growing list of services (examples just for photos: Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, etc.). Every social network is either a webwide lifestream aggregator today (early examples: Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed), or are becoming one quickly (examples: Facebook and MySpace). And every aggregator faces the same set of challenges that arise from the chaos of there being no standard for how to format the feed of user-shared content. No common convention for naming of objects or verbs. This is the classic problem space for the Open Stack of OpenID, OAuth, XRD, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial.
Great to see the active participation from Luke Shepard from Facebook, who just shared some of the problems of complexity they experienced by having too much flexibility in the verb space. I think he just said “combinatorial explosion” to describe it.
Cool, just noticed that Ian Kennedy is live streaming the event via his mobile phone and Kyte. So now you can watch it so you don’t miss anything!
Chris Messina takes to the white board:
David Recordon of SixApart, who is running the Meetup, with Joseph Smarr:
Okay, now we’re about to go over a draft spec… Martin Atkins of Six Apart is now going over at high-level a review of a draft spec.
Now, Monica Keller of MySpace is jumping in, showing an alternative proposal and getting lots of feedback.
Discussion of reviving Media RSS vs. starting with Atom Media.
David Recordon is showing a demo of a Six Apart implementation done against the current draft spec in answer to a question from Joseph Smarr about how firm the draft feels, and whether we have any good insights from early implementations. It’s a demo of an API which transforms existing Atom and RSS feeds from sites like Flickr, Twitter, Digg, and blogs into new feeds (which can also be aggregated together) that include markup from the draft Activity Streams specifications being discussed. Along with the work from MySpace, this constitutes one of the first two implementations of the draft specification.
What a great working session! We’re two-and-a-half hours in an still going strong. Good discussion now about the importance (and complexities) of handing “friending” events, whether those are bi-directional or “follows”. Some differing thoughts here from the DiSo folks vs. the big social networks. Good sharing of insights from Facebook and Plaxo.
It’s after 6:00, and we’re wrapping up. Great session. Great participation from sites large and small and from folks just looking out for the open Social Web at large.
UPDATE: Check out Marshall Kirkpatrick’s excellent piece on the event on ReadWriteWeb (which also was syndicated to the New York Times) and Marc Canter’s thoughtful post, DiSo Activity Stream Standard.
Optimism for 2009: Joseph Smarr Demos the Near-Future of the Social Web on the Open Stack
It is kind of fashionable at the moment to point out the real or imagined shortcomings of OpenID, in light of the elegance of Facebook Connect. But the reality is that together with the other elements of the Open Stack (OAuth, XRD, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), OpenID is entering 2009 with incredible momentum, and tantalizing possibilities. And no one is more capable of demonstrating the possibilities than Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr, who “kicked ass” at the recent Open Stack meetup. Video of his killer presentation with demos has just been posted online. Yes, it’s geeky, and the demos are not pretty to look at, but the new capabilities shown will be turned into product early in 2009 at Plaxo, Google, Yahoo, and MySpace, among others. If you want a glimpse into the near-future of the Social Web, built on the Open Stack, this is 17 minutes of must-see TV:
Also, check out Joseph’s new post reviewing six months of progress on Portable Contacts.
Birth of the Social Web: Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect Now Available to All
December 4, 2008. Today may be remembered as the birth of the Social Web, as two major projects aimed at turning the Web social emerged from their restricted beta periods for general availability, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. Together, these two major events sound the death knell for the walled garden phase of social networking. Early reactions to the news are quick to frame this as a head-to-head battle between Google and Facebook, but the truth requires a look at the details, and I think something much more profound is happening…
First, the similarities. Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect share the same basic vision of the Social Web. Any site can become social, without having to build up its own social network. Users should be able to access those social features without having to experience the pain of usernames, passwords, uploading a photo, filling out a profile, importing an address book, and re-friending the people they’ve already connected with elsewhere. And, activity streams out to web-wide lifestream aggregators should become important engines of social discovery and growth for the site.
Now to the differences. One major difference between these two offerings is the technology under the hood. Google Friend Connect is built on the “open stack,” leveraging building blocks like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, whereas Facebook Connect is built on Facebook’s proprietary stack. A second difference is target market. Facebook has clearly focused on major sites, like Digg, Hulu, and CitySearch, and while simple implementations can be done with very little coding, most will involve a bit more complex development. Google, in contrast, has explicitly targeted the “long tail” of the web, sites that would never dream of writing their own social code; the focus of Google Friend Connect is to help these sites become social by cutting-and-pasting a few lines of javascript. The third major difference is one of strategy. Facebook Connect is all about making Facebook more useful to its users all over the Web. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand, is all about making the Web more social, with an approach that incorporates other social networks. For example, the current release integrates not only Orkut, but also Plaxo. (And recall that the earliest version also included Facebook, until Facebook shut that down.)
I’ve been playing around with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect all along the way while these services were being carefully tested and refined prior to today’s formal rollout. I like them both, but see lots of room for improvement. But that’s to be expected; this is a major shift in how the Web will work, and there’s a lot of complexity under the covers. Today marks the birth of the Social Web, and we should expect to see lots of rapid progress for this newborn.
For those who haven’t checked out Google Friend Connect yet, I’m including a few screenshots…
Activity shows up in Plaxo!
Oh, and you can check out the “Dive Bomber” site I used for these screenshots here.
Update: I just realized that I can now declare victory on the prediction I made for 2008, a prediction I made on December 6, 2007!
Update: The new episode of The Social Web TV is now up, with Joseph Smarr and I addressing the question, “Facebook Connect vs. OpenID?”:
Yahoo and AOL Enhancing OpenID with Data Portability via the “Simple Registration” Extension
As many of my readers know, the user experience (UX) for OpenID has been a source of confusion and an impediment to broader adoption. That gave rise to an OpenID UX Summit a few weeks ago, hosted by Yahoo and attended by Google, Microsoft, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, Facebook and many others. It also was a major focus of sessions and late-night discussion at last week’s Internet Identity Workshop. Today, we get to see some of the fruits of those efforts, as Yahoo rolls out (in a limited test) a new implementation of OpenID, currently live with just two test sites, Plaxo and Jyte; and AOL releases preview support for data portability via SREG.
Yahoo’s post describes the details:
Today, we are announcing the start of a limited test of the Simple Registration extension for the Yahoo! OpenID service. The Simple Registration extension allows OpenID RPs to request user profile data from the OpenID provider. Yahoo! will be providing Yahoo! OpenID users the ability to share the following Simple Registration fields for this initial test: Full Name, Nick Name, Email Address, Gender, Language and Timezone. The Yahoo! OpenID user will have full control on whether to share their profile data with the OpenID relying party. We will use the Yahoo! Profiles API to populate the user card which will be presented on the Yahoo! OpenID Review and Confirm page.
Joseph Smarr of Plaxo also has a post on the matter, including screenshots of the improved onboarding flow. As Joseph points out, this is really something bigger than single sign-on; the key is that the identity can bring with it, at the user’s option, some of their social data. This is an important step forward for data portability:
I think we can continue to expect more and more data to flow across the OpenID link, which will make it increasingly valuable for Relying Parties like Plaxo, and should incentivize many more sites to become RPs themselves. It’s great to see this virtuous cycle in motion, and Plaxo is eager to work with any and all OpenID Providers who want to improve their UX and empower their users to use more of their data across the web!
So, if you don’t have a Plaxo account yet, you can sign up for one with your Yahoo OpenID. If you choose to share your basic account info, you’ll land on a registration form that is pre-populated with with almost every field you need to activate your account. You only need to add your birthday and your country. (In a future release, we hope to get those last two fields as well, so we can do away with the form entirely.) Oh, and the user’s language choice will come along, too, so we can drop them into the appropriate localized version of Plaxo. Sweet!
George Fletcher of AOL also has a post on the AOL and SREG, entitled “OAuth and SREG and MapQuest! Oh My!” I’m still trying to figure out where I can go see the AOL OpenID w/ SREG live. Any pointers, anyone?
It’s great to see the pace of innovation on the Open Stack begin to accelerate.
For more on Yahoo’s test release, we made it the primary topic of this week’s episode of The Social Web TV, complete with a “magical” demo. (We didn’t know about the AOL news when we shot!):
Facebook, Microsoft and Data Portability
Michael Arrington has a great piece up on TechCrunch entitled “The Very Curious Microsoft-Facebook User Data Relationship“. In it, he shines a spotlight on a most curious thing — that Facebook has given Microsoft access to data on Facebook users that they have said they would not give to anyone, as it would violate users’ privacy. Specifically, he shows screenshots of an import of a Facebook friends list into Microsoft’s IM client, Messenger, in which the user ends up with the email addresses of all of the their friends (and can then connect with them or invite them to Messenger).
As you may recall, this was at the heart of the controversy now know as “Scoblegate,” in which Plaxo had created a Facebook importer that brought a user’s friends list, including email address over into the Plaxo address book. Aside from the interesting questions Michael Arrington raises, I would add this observation: It is great to see this functionality out there, live since March, without a single bit of controversy. That speaks to the utility of data portability. If social networking really is about real people and real relationships, it would be great if sharing information were real sharing of information, not tethered-sharing , which is essentially “social DRM”.
Also, really funny how the official blogpost from Microsoft directly references the Scoblegate incident! That is a head-scratcher!
Updates:
One, I’d love to hear Dare Obasanjo’s perspective on this. A refresher on his position on this issue as of last January.
Two, check out the comment on TechCrunch from Facebook’s privacy officer, Chris Kelly. While he corrects a few things, he does not deny that they are sharing email addresses with Microsoft.
