The Real McCrea

Had a fun time last night in SF at Meebo’s second-birthday-and-platform-launch party. Got a cool, “I want to ______ with you” t-shirt. Saw Cameron Ring, one of Plaxo’s co-founders, mixing with Megan McCarthy from Valleywag. Talked”open social” with Joseph Smarr and lots of folks, including David Recordon of SixApart. Meebo’s really making great strides.

If you can get a lot of people using your product many hours a day for real-time interaction, as they have, you can begin to do some interesting things.

Here are a few of my pics from the event.

I had the pleasure today of participating in my first audio podcast. Thom Singer, author of “Some Assembly Required” interviewed me for his blog. Thom’s a guy down in Austin who is a thought leader in the world of networking, and he’s helping a lot of folks who aren’t spending all day and night in Silicon Valley make sense of the new tools for social networking.

You can listen to the podcast here. 

Thom and I had a lot of fun recording it. I hope we make this something we do from time-to-time.

Note to Thom and other bloggers and journalists: I’m eager to do more of these sorts of things. What I’d like to talk about next is how Twitter is making a difference in my life, and what Twitter means to those of us in the marketing profession.

The past few months have been an amazing ride. Ever since Facebook highjacked the term “open” to refer to their proprietary “OS for the social web” (complete with embracing and extending HTML to become “FBML”), there’s been a slowly building momentum of resistance. The chorus of voices in support of an open social web has been growing.

And it all seemed to come together in recent weeks, reaching a crescendo at the Web 2.0 Summit, where Google declared that the platform is the web, and Facebook admitted that their walled garden approach was flawed and needed to be corrected.

I’m also looking forward to a bunch of things coming that will turn the rhetoric into reality. Stay tuned. 2007 will go out in style, and mark a real turning point in the effort to keep the social web as open as the web itself.

Video is now up from the OpenFaced unconference at Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Description:

Panel discussion on social networking data portability, access & distribution of social graph data. Moderator Tantek Celik; panelists David Recordon / SixApart, Joseph Smarr / Plaxo, Ted Grubb / Satisfaction Unlimited, & Chamath Palihapitiya / Facebook.

Opening up the social networks has suddenly become a mainstream topic. At the Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg finally admitted that Facebook’s current “walled garden” approach is neither sustainable nor right.  From ZDnet: 

Marc Canter asked Zuckerberg about allowing users to export their Facebook data. “It’s a flaw in the system right now,” Zuckerberg said. He didn’t offer any time frame for fixing the “flaw.” 

I like how Marc defines “open.” From Wired blogs: 

quoth Canter, “This is a two way street. We have to both suck and spit. 

With that out of the way, I am pleased to report that Plaxo has taken its openness to the next level, adding a new “lifestreaming widget” to its Pulse service, that lets users take the aggregated stream of their feeds and “spit” it out to any web page that allows javascript. (Alas, I just discovered a few hours ago that WordPress-hosted blogs, such as this one, do not allow javascript. Okay, that is lame.) 

This is a second way Pulse “spits.” It joins another option that has been live for several weeks; Pulse offers it users RSS feeds of the streams they receive and the stream they create, co-mingled or separate, for consumption via any RSS reader. 

What’s in my lifestream? The content I create via del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, and Twitter. And this blog. What could be in your lifestream? The content you create on those services and dozens of others, including Facebook (Notes and Posted Items), MySpace, Jaiku, Last.fm, and Amazon (your Wish List). 

How hard is it to set up? Super easy. You just cut-and-paste one javascript snippet into any web page, and you’re good to go.

Check out Michael Arrington’s coverage over at TechCrunch.

Plaxo’s press release is here.

Facebook’s upgrade to its Flyers offering has been generating a lot of buzz this morning, with coverage on Valleywag and TechCrunch. Will be interesting to see where they go with this.

Whether it becomes a big revenue driver or not, it certainly is fun to play with. Facebook Flyers is also an interesting window into the walled garden.

Here are a few results from my experimenting:

3,716,960 women who are single in the United States

548,240 liberal women who are single in the United States

329,180 moderate women who are single in the United States

356,320 conservative women who are single in the United States

Or:

1,400 men older than 45 in Turkey

220 people in Israel who like Scuba Diving

Okay. I gotta stop. This could be addictive.

Alright. One last one:

100 people in the Netherlands who like Honey.

The folks at Plaxo have found the pathway that connects “networked address books” and social networks. It’s the guiding vision behind their strategy for Pulse, their next-generation social network, which “brings your address book to life.”

Interesting to see such concepts picking up steam now across the industry. Articles published today in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist address the notion of address books as potential social networks.

In “Social graph-iti,” the Economist says:

Silicon Valley’s craze for the “social graph”, however, is overdone. The term has been around in computer science for decades, says Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, so it is puzzling that Mr Zuckerberg should get any special credit for using it. “We have address books, and the sum of the address books is the social graph,” he says. Companies such as Plaxo, which help to synchronise address books, and Google itself, which has a primitive address book in its web-mail service, plan to turn these books into fully fledged social graphs that can do useful and productive things, perhaps including new variants of mini-feeds.

In an article entitled, “Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?” the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney and Vauhini Vara write:

The biggest Web email services — including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit — are adding features that allow users to perform such sociable functions as tracking friends and creating personal-profile pages for others to see. At the same time, social networks like Facebook and News Corp.‘s MySpace have upgraded their messaging services, enabling individuals to send emails to the outside world from their accounts, transmit video greetings to friends and make voice calls from their computers.