The Social

As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.'s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.

The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of "Data Availability" in favor of the new sobriquet "MySpaceID" for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app platform and the Post To MySpace sharing feature.

Right now, with MySpaceID, members can log in to partner sites with their MySpace usernames and find which of their MySpace friends use those partner sites. In the future, it'll also synchronize feed activity much like the rival Facebook Connect and allow MySpace members to register for third-party site accounts with their MySpace URLs.

Along with Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID was built with open standards OAuth, OpenSocial, and OpenID. MySpace, as well as Google, is one of the founding partners of the OpenSocial Foundation.

MySpace also announced the first two partners for MySpaceID: European mobile giant Vodafone and personalized home page service Netvibes. It still hasn't yet rolled out log-in credentials for the original Data Availability launch partners--Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo--but product manager Max Engel says those are still in the works.

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both launched last week, spurring a return to the social-networking turf wars and power struggle for control of the almighty "social graph."

With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, it's worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?

The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama's Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool.

But it wasn't until Facebook Connect started making headlines that the concept of data portability--a single log-in across multiple sites--made the jump from the tech press to the mainstream media. OpenID, some speculated, had been left behind in the dust.

Hardly. But Wired's Michael Calore hit the nail on the head on Monday: "Presenting a dialog that asks a user to log in to one Web site using a name and password from another Web site is jarring, but Facebook has managed to keep Facebook Connect simple enough for everyday users to understand. Such ease of use virtually guarantees it will win support quickly."

The truth is, the future of the "social Web" is in expansion. And expansion invariably involves dealing with a crowd beyond the Twittering, FriendFeeding, WordPressing geeks who actually understand the concept behind data portability.

And that's not made any easier by the fact that OpenID calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." Try bringing that up in the boardroom of a non-tech company looking to ride the social-networking wave. Then tell them that the most buzzed-about social network on the planet will power your site's social features. The decision will probably fall in the Facebook camp, unfortunately for the open-standards crowd and its admirable dedication to all things balanced and democratic.

"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this," Fitzpatrick has said about OpenID. "The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community."

But your average company is probably going to care more about profit margins than OpenID's decentralized ideal, and the possibility of having its user activity broadcast across Facebook members' news feeds is tantalizing. Especially during tough financial times, strategy will likely trump idealism.

That said, there are some good signs for OpenID. It has a ton of support in the tech world, and if Facebook Connect's impending expansion goes awry for any reason--think Beacon--it could open up a whole new set of doors for OpenID. What it (and other open Web standards) needs either way is some image repair.

"Facebook is trying to replace all log-ins with their own, and control the creation, distribution, and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform," Chris Saad, whose DataPortability Workgroup has put its support behind OpenID and other open Web standards, wrote in a blog post. "The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative."

OpenID and its brethren could use a good, simplified marketing pitch, not to mention some announcements and partnerships that are more prominent than an extension for a niche Web browser. They need to use the resources that the likes of MySpace and Yahoo can provide to get more deals going and start making headlines outside of ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

And most importantly, in a recession, "it's good for the Web, so it's good for everyone" just isn't concrete enough. One last tip for OpenID: Start talking business benefits.

There's a new OpenID extension for "social browser" Flock, and it was created with the help of password management service Vidoop and News Corp.-owned social network MySpace.

It's now available for download for all Flock users who have upgraded to Flock 2.0. For MySpace, which initially announced its support for OpenID back in July, this is also a push for Data Availability, a universal-login project that the social network announced in May but has since only rolled out with a few partners.

Yahoo, one of MySpace's launch partners for Data Availability, has also thrown its weight behind OpenID.

"As three companies dedicated to empowering users to easily share content and experiences, this was a very rewarding--and relatively fast--collaboration," Max Engel, MySpace's Data Availability product manager, said in a release. "Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web so that people can focus on their connections and the incredible content that's out there. This Flock extension will give millions of people an easier way to expand their experiences and expression without boundaries."

The OpenID Flock extension allows for easier credential management within the browser and makes it more apparent when a site will accept an OpenID login. A handful of OpenID extensions already exist for the open-source Flock, but this one's got the seal of approval from some big names.

There are deeper reasons for MySpace being so vocal about OpenID support, though. The standard has seen its toughest rival yet in the form of Facebook Connect, a data-portability project which enjoyed a high-profile New York Times writeup this week and will reportedly be ready for a full debut very soon. (It's already been implemented on a number of sites.)

Flock, unfortunately, isn't an enormous player in the browser space. It has tons of bells and whistles, but is still well behind the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of downloads, and has newfound competition from Google's Chrome.

Regardless, MySpace has been paying a lot of lip service to open standards recently, and it's always good to see real developments.

MIAMI--The Knight Concert Hall in Miami's Carnival Center complex was filled with a whole lot of Mac laptops on Friday morning for a day of panels and lectures at the Future of Web Apps conference.

Ryan Carson, co-founder of conference organizer Carsonified, had selected freelance Web consultants Brian Oberkirch and Tantek Celik to "emcee" the event and give the audience an idea of what the day's major themes would be.

So what is the future of Web apps? There are a few concrete trends, Oberkirch and Celik told the audience.

First, they said, there's simplicity--the sort of thing evidenced in wildly popular start-ups like WordPress, which has one-upped bigger rivals by being easy to use and adaptable, and geek favorite Twitter, which famously does only one thing (lets members broadcast messages of 140 characters or fewer).

It's often evidenced in the fact that many of the most talked-about Web products these days got their start as side projects. Twitter, Flickr, and even Facebook, with its origins in a Harvard dorm room, had remarkably casual beginnings.

There's also speed. Celik and Oberkirch pointed to Pownce, whose co-founder Leah Culver is speaking at the conference later, and how quickly it's been rolling out new features in an interactive manner rather than launching periodic major updates.

Another important pillar of the future of Web apps community collaboration, they said, is facilitated by the rise of social-media tools to make group work a whole lot easier and allow collaborators to get more done. Celik and Oberkirch called Google's OpenSocial project "a great example of little guys and big guys working together." It's also become much more possible to organize real-life events with the help of wikis and social networks; on Thursday, FOWA was preceded by a Miami iteration of the BarCamp "unconferences," which are famously organized by the attendees.

Then there's happiness--yes, happiness. Celik and Oberkirch mentioned one of the day's featured speakers, Google engineer Kevin Marks, and an idea he asserted on his blog that a "pleasure plan" is just as important to new start-ups as a business plan. OK, that sounds a bit dotcom-hippie for me; we'll see how that fares in a less bubbly economic climate.

And then there's the hottest trend of the future of Web apps: openness. These days it's hard to keep all the "open standards" projects straight: Open Authorization, OpenSocial, OpenID, DataPortability, and the like.

"Openness is the buzzword right now," Celik said. "It's kind of the new black."

"We're in Miami, so I guess it's the new pink?" Oberkirch suggested.