The Real McCrea

So much is happening, so fast. So much more to come. Sorry to my readers; I am clearly more of a participant than an objective reporter or commenter on the topic.

It cetainly seems that the team at TechCrunch  has the inside track.

I’ve been taking a really great holiday break, so sorry for not posting much recently! I think 2008 is going to be a great year for the emergence of the Social Web. There’s a lot coming that I can’t tell you about just yet, but if you want to get a sense of what is driving things, you might want to sit through this great interview Robert Scoble did in August, just weeks after Plaxo launched Pulse.

Don’t get hung up on the details of the Consolidator, but listen carefully to what Joseph Smarr and I are talking about, in terms of problems to be solved, and the vision for enabling a truly open Social Web.

As my frequent readers know, I can be harsh in my criticism of the “walled garden” model and its shining star, Facebook. But lately I’ve come to believe I may have it wrong about Facebook, and that we are about to see them open up like a flower. (I certainly seem to have it wrong about them launching an alternative to OpenID, for which I hereby formally apologize to my readers and to Mark and team.)

What are the clues?

1) Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t blog very often, but many of us were drawn to his post on the recent privacy flap. Even more interesting to me was what was there, two posts down: “About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. ” (I joined the group, and you should, too!)

2) Jim Breyer, a venture backer of Facebook, says they will not be “out opened”: “We’re not afraid of Google/MySpace/Ning/etc, and we’re not going to be ‘out-opened’ by them.”

3) According to ZDnet, Mark said that being “closed” is a flaw in the system: “Marc Canter asked Zuckerberg about allowing users to export their Facebook data. ‘It’s a flaw in the system right now,’ Zuckerberg said.”

4) And now, in talking about their recent response to OpenSocial, Facebook’s senior platform manager, Ami Vora, said, “This is just another step toward the vision of easy, open sharing of information.”

So, I’m turning over a new leaf. I’m going to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt. They really do want their users to have ownership and control of their info, including their friends-list/address book. And they support giving users the freedom to take it with them wherever they go, just like LinkedIn and Plaxo do (as do titans like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!).

I hope my optimism is not misplaced. It would be really cool to be able to import my friends on Facebook into Plaxo and see who is using both services. (And then to be able to sync that data with Outlook at work and my Mac at home!)

The reports from last week’s Internet Identity Workshop were generally quite encouraging. My colleague from Plaxo, Joseph Smarr, reports, “We now have the tools we need as a community to really make friends-list portability work.” Joseph was really encouraged by the maturation of key open standards, such as OpenID and OAuth, and by how so many of the big players made sure to be well represented at the event, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.

Conspicuously absent?  Facebook. Not a single employee could find the time to head down from Palo Alto to Mountain View to engage in a dialogue about open industry standards for identity on the Internet. That’s curious. Hmmmm.

Given that this fit with a pattern I has seen before at BarCampBlock and the Data Sharing Summit, I didn’t waste much thought on the topic. That is, until a source who-shall-go-un-named shared with me that Facebook has just quietly launched a “single sign on” initiative designed to put them in position of de facto cross-site identity monopolist.

What I’m told is that Facebook is out recruiting lighthouse accounts to embrace Facebook ID as their methodology of site sign on. There was no press release or marketing launch, because the company is fighting enough privacy-related fires at the moment.

Anyone else heard of this? Let’s work together to uncover the truth.

And for an update on OpenID see Chris Messina’s recent post.

To understand why I love Facebook, I need to take you back to an earlier time. It was the Fall of 1993, and I was trying hard to find my entry point into Silicon Valley, straight out of business school and with only a summer job at Tandem as relevant experience. I managed to get a consulting gig that involved doing some competitive analysis for Apple, who was at the time considering entering into the “online service” market that was led by America Online. I got paid to spend a bunch of time comparing the feature sets, strengths, and weaknesses of the then market leader versus Compuserve and Prodigy, with hopes that I could help Apple figure out the right way to jump in*.

What I discovered was a new world (or perhaps several new worlds), in which regular people bought modems, installed proprietary software, and then dialed-up into a large and growing network in which they could send and receive electronic mail, socialize in chat rooms, discover and consume digital content, play online games, and even participate in electronic commerce. (I’ll never forget my first online purchase — a case of Walla Walla onions! I was taking notes on the shopping experience and accidentally completed the transaction.)

Less than a year later, in the summer of 1994, working at what was then the hottest company in the Valley, Silicon Graphics, I found myself in the perfect position to spot the Web as the most significant market opportunity and change agent since the personal computer. I was the product manager for the Indy workstation, the platform on which Marc Andreessen and the team at NCSA wrote the original Mosaic browser. Indy was also the server used to launch the first Web-native publication, HotWired (giving rise to the first website sponsorship deal). Indy was also the primary development platform at the company that Marc and Jim Clark (the then recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics) had just formed, which would get renamed “Netscape”. And it was the platform that they used to build out the original server farm that changed the world of software by making the browser available for download — for free! So I became an “intrapreneur” and launched the WebFORCE business in January 1995, introducing the industry’s first turnkey web server and the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

How was I able to spot the huge market opporunity represented by the emergence of an open Web? One simple reason; I had seen the future behind the walls of the first online services. And I could spot the trendline early of the virtuous cycle of growth enabled by a free web browser built around the open standards of the Internet and the Web. A rapidly growing user base inspired a new crop of entrepreneurs to launch new sites, which attracted publicity and excitement, and got more people to come check out the Web. And what sort of sites emerged? Everything that existed within America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy. Jeff Bezos, for example, chose not to make a bookstore for any one of the online services. He created instead a bookstore for the Web, and watched it take off faster than any e-commerce experiment that preceded it.

And that’s exactly what’s happening all over again today, and why I truly love Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and team have built a really great experimental testbed that shows us what can happen when you mash up applications and the “social graph.” When you bring who-you-know to a web application, it gets turbocharged and transformed. It’s so exciting to watch Facebook’s innovation, from the News Feed, to the F8 platform play, and now to the bold (albeit controversial) Beacon initiative.

But what happens as these ideas get turned into capabilities of the web itself, thanks to a combination of community efforts and commercial efforts like Google’s OpenSocial? Here’s my prediction: in 2008, we will see the true beginnings of the “Social Web,” as open and vibrant as when the first incarnation of the Web that emerged in 1994 and 1995.

And, let me go out further. When we look back 15 years from now, the term “social network” will be as unfamiliar and difficult to explain as “online service” is today.

Now, I don’t really expect you to believe me. (It’s so fashionable right now to declare that we are now in a Bubble, and than the coming year will be characterized by collapse.) I just wanted to put my prediction on the record. Let’s check back in at the end of 2008 and see whether I was right.

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Footnote:

*Apple did not figure out the right strategy. Just as the web was really taking off, they launched the ill-fated “Apple eWorld” proprietary online service, which was a miserable failure.

If you haven’t heard, an influential voice in the Web and blog world is (temporarily) silent. March Orchant of Blognation suffered a massive coronary on Sunday. My thoughts are with him and his family, with hope for a full and fast recovery.

I found this piece by Lawrence Coburn to be a very interesting take on Facebook’s latest controversial feature, Beacon. I don’t think I fully agree, but it is true that Beacon gives sites on the web and interesting way to be included in the stream of content inside Facebook — without having to write an app for Facebook’s proprietary F8 platform.

F8, Beacon, OpenSocial, and some interesting things to come early next year should have all of our heads spinning…

As more and more people joined the conversation this summer about the opening of the social web, a very common question was, “Will the walled gardens really open up? Isn’t “open” bad for business?”

Well, today, Plaxo tackles that question by sharing some early results from Pulse, a “open social network” they beta launched in August. Looks like their timing was good:

Nice to finally see discussion of a social graph supported by data and visuals about the social graph (instead of other indirect measures)!

Valleywag pointed me to Fred Wilson’s commentary on Saul Hansell’s recent NYT piece, entitled, “Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network“. As readers of this blog know, I am a strong proponent of the notion that address books are on a collision course with social networking. (See my previous piece on Address Book 2.0.)

So, it is great to see the attention on this topic. But I have to say, the analysis so far has been very shallow. Web traffic is a lousy measure of a “social graph”. The question of who has the largest social graph should certainly include Plaxo, who, though new to social networking (and therefore not high on Comscore), is the custodian of an enormous social graph. Plaxo built up its social graph over the last five years, while operating the largest and fastest growing network of “networked address books.”

Plaxo hosts address books for roughly 20 million members and has a partnership with Comcast that will more than double the reach of their network. And Plaxo has managed to “sync” together the treasure trove of social graph data buried deep within a wide variety of tools and services, including Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, GMail, AIM, and Mac Address Book. What all this means is that Plaxo is very well postioned to take advantage of the market opportunity created by Google’s OpenSocial initiative, which essentially levels the social network playing field.

So, while Comscore or Alexa let you see the tip of the iceberg, the massive untapped potential is currently below the waterline, hidden from view.

Fred also uses number of members as a proxy for size of social graph, but this, too, is an improper measure. By definition, the social graph is not a count of all the people in the crowd; it is the map of who is connected to whom. What’s the difference? The roughly 20 million members of Plaxo are connected to over half a billion unique individuals (based on who is in who’s address book). Such ties are not as strong as the one-to-one connections typical of social networks and business networks, but I think of them as a strong skeleton on which a true social network can be grown. Now, as Plaxo Pulse is starting to take off, I keep a close watch on the rate at which people are establishing connections (as friends, family, or business network). It will be interesting to watch as the worlds of address books and social networks do, indeed, collide.

[Disclosure: As my regular readers know, I head up marketing for Plaxo.]