The Real McCrea

Just saw this video from the “Campfire 1” event Google hosted for launch of the OpenSocial APIs. The interesting question, did the camera never capture the Facebook people who were there, or did they end up on the cutting room floor?

What is going on over at the Googleplex? Those guys are on fire! One bold strategic move after another. Today: donating to the world an open source software stack to enable a new generation of mobile phones. Smart move. In less than a week, Google has now moved against two Balkanization threats: social network “walled gardens” and Carrier-controlled mobile network devices. I continue to assert that it feels like 1995 or 1996.

A micro-post. Wow. I can hardly believe what I am seeing in Plaxo Pulse. It’s like watching the social graph get wired up in some elapsed-time film. Even on a Saturday night, people are establishing connections. Ever since the day the Google OpenSocial news leaked, we’ve been struggling to keep up with demand for Pulse services. Is it a one-time surge, driven by lots of press coverage, or the beginnings of hyper-viral growth for Plaxo’s next-generation, open social network?

Update: I guess I’m not the only one!

Update 2: Another blogpost on the subject. And another, The Re-Birth of Plaxo.

What a week! Well, the folks at Plaxo were so busy getting the first OpenSocial live implementation, with several nights of coding until 3:00 AM, that a beer bust seemed the logical way to close out the week.

Joseph Smarr and I gave demos of Plaxo Pulse and its new “Dynamic Profiles” which do two things: 1) allow you to present different aspects of you to your professional and personal profiles (and set sharing policies per profile); and 2) add OpenSocial apps as well, and have those apps honor the sharing policy of the profile they’re embedded into.

There was a spirited discussion with Marc Canter and Chris Heuer, among others. Chris captured a fair bit of the demo and discussion, so if you want to see it, check out this video!

And there was another round of demos later with Tantek and Chris Messina. All in all, it was a great way to wind down from one of the most historic weeks in Internet history.  

We stowed the kegs in the fridge, since they weren’t completely empty. So, in the spirit of the open social web, please come on by any time this week and have a pint with us!

I just got word from Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr that they’ve got the first OpenSocial app live on the new Dynamic Profile pages of their next-generation social network, Pulse. It’s still early, and there are many things still to be worked out, but great to see the pace of innovation in the open social web starting to outstrip what is possible inside the walled gardens.

Joseph’s post here. 

Suddenly the view from behind Facebook’s wall is not so rosy. In fact, the outside world suddenly feels downright hostile to the company that just weeks ago could do no wrong.

There is now a faster beating of the drums, as more and more sites pile on the “open” bandwagon. And with today’s entry of MySpace and Bebo, suddenly Facebook finds itself in a really awkward position. Instead of being able to gracefully fix the “flaw” in their system that Mark Zuckerberg confessed to at the Web 2.0 summit on their own sweet time, suddenly Facebook is backed into a corner. If they cave now and join the OpenSocial movement, they look really weak. If they “stay the course,” with each new announcement (and trust me, there are more on the way), they will look more and more like America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy.

What do you think Zuckerberg should do?

In an aftershock to the Google OpenSocial earthquake, TechCrunch confirms that MySpace is joining the OpenSocial initiative and abandoning their proprietary platform. Wow!

How much longer will Facebook hold out? I predict no more than six months. 

This is really phenomenal news. In related matters, now the rush is on to actually implement the new APIs. Apparently the teams at Plaxo and RockYou are making great strides. Plaxo is hosting an “OpenSocial Open Social” tomorrow afternoon, and they’re claiming they’ll be able to show OpenSocial apps running live in Pulse (not just demo, but on shipping pages)!

Wanna go? No invitation required. (It’s about the open social web, after all.) Here are the details.

Tonight there were two earthquakes in Silicon Valley. One was physical, with the ground shaking enough to have my family calling and e-mailing to see if we were alright. The other a bold strategic move in the social networking space that was indeed seismic in nature.

The New York Times and TechCrunch managed to get the scoop on a big announcement Google was carefully planning, and forced a mad scramble for bloggers, journalists, and marketers all over the Valley and around the world.

What is now public knowledge is that Google is leading an effort to provide an alternative model for social applications, one not captive to various walled gardens, like Facebook and MySpace. Rather, their new OpenSocial APIs allow for the development of social apps that will work on any open site. Companies on board at the time of launch include Plaxo, LinkedIn, Friendster, Hi5, Ning, and, of course, Orkut, among others.

As readers of this blog know, the momentum for the open social web has been slowly building, ever since Facebook hijacked the term “open” to describe its proprietary web OS platform, F8. Unlike the Facebook platform, apps written to the new site-neutral OpenSocial APIs use open web technologies, not proprietary extensions like Facebook’s FBML.

This is a really important announcement and team effort. Plaxo is apparently ready to ship full support for the new APIs in their spin on social network profiles, called Dynamic Profiles, which they are launching this week.

Also cool that this is not the last earthquake to come. The open social web has now come to life, and there more volleys coming, such as friends list portability. The months ahead will be truly exciting!