Tag Archives: Google

May 16 2008
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Facebook Bows Out of Google Friend Connect Market Opportunity

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[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 Facebook reveals their 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 to 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.

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May 12 2008
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Google Launching “Friend Connect;” Plaxo to Become Social Graph Provider

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:

Social Web Ecosystem

For a more detailed explanation, I refer you to my post on the Plaxo blog.

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Apr 25 2008
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State of the Web 2.0 Union

Joseph Smarr and Pete Cashmore
Caption: Joseph Smarr and Pete Cashmore “Partying Like it’s 1999”

I’m back in the office after two action-packed days and evenings in San Francisco for the annual Web 2.0 Expo. It was a huge gathering at an historic point. Are we on the cusp of the open Social Web or the brink of a “nuclear winter” — or both?

I loved this quip in a piece by CNET’s Caroline McCarthy regarding a pre-launch startup, Chi.mp, co-hosting an open bar party with Mashable:

“Amid the drunken revelry and pulsing electronic music, one prominent tech-industry veteran at the party was asked exactly what Chi.mp is. ‘I’ll tell you what Chi.mp is. It’s venture money getting set on fire,’ the jaded observer replied. Surveying the buoyant crowd, he added, ‘This feels a little like 1999.'”

But over-the-top partying aside, the vibe for me was tectonic. I could feel the strain of enormous tension built up along the traditional intersections of the industry’s continents. Microsoft introduces and demonstrated their bold “Mesh” initiative, which pits their cloud computing against Google’s. Yahoo! announced a sweeping makeover as on open platform, but is fighting for its independence from an unsolicited takeover bid by Microsoft. Will Yahoo! have the time to see its open efforts blossom. And if they become a part of Microsoft, how will such efforts “mesh”?

Tim O’Reilly reminded us all that there is something really big going on, and that we should not get distracted by the business headlines. I found his talk inspirational, and I agree with his thesis that the Web, especially the Social Web, is a driver of change in human capability that will have as dramatic an impact as the development of writing or the creation of cities. “Are we done yet?” he asked the crowd, with the fervor of a preacher or Presidential candidate. “No!” came the response.

And in what was one of the most well-received talks of the Expo, here Joseph Smarr of Plaxo articulates with great clarity one area in which we clearly are not “done yet,” deploying a new service layer that will remove the friction of the Social Web:

Here’s one of the key slides from Joseph’s talk that shows the Social Web services layer that we believe is about to emerge:

Emerging service layer for the Social Web

I also had the privilege of having meetings with most of the big companies, and I heard things that would have seemed impossible even a year ago. The commitment to opening up, to open standards, like OpenID, and to interoperability, is really quite amazing. 2008 is going to be an historic year, for sure.

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Apr 18 2008
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(Almost) Live from the Data Sharing Workshop

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The Data Sharing Workshop is getting into gear this morning at SFSU. About 50 people in the room, representing a wide variety of companies and technolgies. Kickoff speakers have included folks from Google, Microsoft, Plaxo, and SixApart.

Here’s a video of Joseph Smarr of Plaxo trying to frame the key problems that might be worked on:

And here’s a picture including three “share bears” (Chris Saad, David Recordon, and Joseph Smarr, plus Kevin Marks of Google):

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UPDATE:

Here’s a nice shot from Marc Canter’s fiery kickoff talk:

"Free the data!"

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Apr 18 2008
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The Social Web is Broken

BarCamp, social graph

I, along with many of you, am fighting hard to keep my head above the surface, as I tread the rising waters of the nascent Social Web. New sites are popping up every day. Join one, and you’re likely to go through a drill that’s become all too familiar: Generate another username/password pair. Recreate your profile. Slurp in your GMail or other address books. Build up your friends list all over again. In the process, generate a ton of connection request emails (also called “bac’n” — not quite spam, but not good for you).

Robert Scoble highlights these problems in the upcoming May issue of Fast Company magazine in an article entitled, “How to Fix the Web.” Those of us working on the problem, appreciate the continued advocacy from Robert, who became a poster child for the issue of “data portability” in early January. Sharing the controversy with Robert, I did feel some intense heat from a very polarized debate at the time, but in hindsight, the pain was worth it. Within days, the DataPortability.org workgroup managed to sign up Google, Plaxo, and Facebook, in a move widely credited with setting the stage for 2008 to be the year of data portability.

For those interested in helping move the ball forward, I encourage you to attend the Data Sharing Workshop in San Francisco in the next two days. It kicks off at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

In my view, we are really on the cusp of the opening up of the true Social Web. Making it all possible is a collection of building block technologies (OpenID, Oauth, microformats, OpenSocial, the Social Graph API, and one or two still-missing pieces). But none of those technologies is anything a user needs to know about or understand. These enabling technologies need to get wrapped up into three or more critical services of the Social Web: Identity Providers (examples Clickpass and Yahoo!), Social Graph Providers (stay tuned: Plaxo? Facebook? Others?), and Content Aggregators (Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, Facebook, and a new one every week!).

Want more detail on this vision and how it snaps together? Be sure to see Joseph Smarr’s talk next Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Or see the great post by Kaliya (a.k.a “Identity Woman”), who is facilitating the unconference aspect of the Data Sharing Summit.

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Apr 17 2008
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Toward Data Portability: SixApart’s BlogIt

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Caption: David Recordon (left) and Joseph Smarr (right) at the Social Graph Foo Camp

Recently, Joseph Smarr and I were invited by David Recordon of SixApart to take a look at something they were about to launch, called BlogIt. We got very excited and had lots of ideas about where they and we (Plaxo) could go together with this. It just launched, so I can now talk openly about it.

BlogIt is a very cool tool that embraces one of the foundational notions of the open Social Web: that once someone gets into using one social application, they will quite naturally begin to use multiple social applications, whether that’s social networks, blogs, microblogs, content aggregators, or whatever. The natural consequence of that is fragmentation, which, in the current “walled garden” phase of the Web, creates all sorts of hassles, inconvenience, and missed opportunity for richer interaction.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is right, I think, to say that BlogIt “could be the start of something big.” At the core, BlogIt makes it easy to quickly create and publish a blogpost from within a social network or application, and have the post go to multiple destinations and get promoted from multiple sources (for example, Twitter). The first implemenation targets the Facebook platform, but obviously this can go to other networks, such as MySpace, Orkut, Plaxo Pulse, etc. via the Google-led OpenSocial platform.

What I like about it, is that we are still in the early phases of social media, social networking, and the opening up of the social web. Social networks and content aggregators can be a great way to mainstream the social media experience, and help millions of voices that are not currently heard jump into the world of blogging. How? By making it really easy to post — and to have a pre-existing audience — in the form of the local social graph(s) of the user.

David’s done a nice post, helping explain where this all fits in and where SixApart might go with this. Brad King, of TechWorldNews, also has a nice piece that puts this into a broader perspective. (I enjoyed my interview with him earlier today greatly!)

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Apr 11 2008
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Three “Data Portability” Related Events for Your Calendar

IIW 2008

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The last year has been an amazing time for building momentum for the emergence of the Social Web. We’ve seen the “open” and “data portability” memes move from the periphery to the core, picked up by Plaxo, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook, among many others. We’ve seen major advances in the embrace of open standards, including OpenID, OAuth, and microformats. And we’re also beginning to see a swell of public awareness and the stirrings of demand for users to have ownership and control of their data, and the freedom to take it with them, wherever they go.

So where do we go from here? And how can you jump in an help turn the vision into reality? My recommendation would be to add one, two, or even all three of the following events to your calendar:

Data Sharing Workshop, April 18 – 19 at the SFSU, Downtown Campus

Internet Identity Workshop 2008, May 12-14, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View

Data Sharing Summit, May 15, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View

Here’s a link for registration for Data Sharing Workshop and Data Sharing Summit.

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Great things have happened at previous versions of these influential grass-roots events. Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authored the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web for debut at the Data Sharing Summit, where the document generated vibrant discussion, conceptual buy-in from some of the biggest companies on the Internet, and a ton of signatures from the people who are working on the building blocks of data portability and the Social Web.

Bill of Rights

And to be clear, these are not stiff, formal, traditional conferences. They are all highly collaborative events, with no one setting the agenda except the interesting people who show up. I advise you to become a part of them if you are passionate about bringing about the open Social Web!

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Jan 25 2008
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Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr on Google OpenSocial

At the recent OpenSocial Hackathon, hosted by SixApart, Google’s Patrick Chanezon interviewed Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr. Among his questions, “You saw a spike in growth when you announced support for OpenSocial. Has the strong growth continued?”

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Nov 12 2007
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While Interviewing Marc Canter, Kara Swisher Calls Facebook a “New Version of AOL”

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The video was posted a few days ago, but I just stumbled onto it. Kara Swisher interviews Marc Canter (pictured above at the legendary Data Sharing Summit that paved the way) on his reactions to the Google OpenSocial announcement. Not sure what I enjoyed more — Kara declaring Facebook and MySpace to be a “new version of AOL” — or Marc phrasing Facebook’s strategic dilemma as whether they should “eat the blue pill or the red pill”. Must see TV!

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Nov 05 2007
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Joseph Smarr on OpenSocial

As part of the launch of their OpenSocial initiative, Google interviewed key partners to help explain the technology and why they are supporting it. Here’s a great interview with Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr. If you’re still trying to figure out this space, and why Plaxo and other leading players, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster are jumping on board the “open” initiative, this is a must-see interview.

And this just in…

Joseph shares lots of details of the story leading up to last week’s Googlequake on his blog. Way cool. Especially toasting marshmallows with Larry, Sergey, and Eric!

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