Webware

YouTube RealTime, a new technology that brings an as-it-happens social aspect to Google's video-sharing site, shows promise but suffers shortcomings.

RealTime has the potential to bring some of the communal aspects of TV to the more solitary phenomenon of online video. With it, a toolbar across the bottom of a YouTube page shows you what your friends are watching and commenting on, shows them what you're up to, and pops up invitations from friends who want you to see something. It's an opt-in service, and you can temporarily go into a private mode, so you can still close the curtains if you want.

YouTube RealTime can show what your friends are watching.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

RealTime launched publicly on Wednesday through an invitation-only viral marketing campaign, with each invitee getting 25 invitations to dole out. Unfortunately for Google, that's where my first problems arrived.

People love to share amusing videos on YouTube by e-mail, Twitter, blogs, and instant messaging, so it might appear at first blush that YouTube is ripe for an injection of social activity.

The YouTube social network
The YouTube social life largely happens outside YouTube itself today, but RealTime tries to bring that activity into YouTube's domain.

YouTube has its own infrastructure for granting friend status to other YouTube members, sending messages to people, and tracking what they're up to. YouTube RealTime relies on that infrastructure.

So the first thing you're going to have to do to make it useful is figure out how to use it and build yourself a whole new social network. Perhaps you have one already on hand, but nobody I know does, and a lot of people I know already have social-network invitation fatigue.

If you do get a YouTube RealTime invitation from some Net hipster who's already a friend, you'll soon have 25 invitations of your own to extend, but before you can use them, you'll have to send out the necessary friend requests. It's unfortunate that Google couldn't take advantage of social graph information already established at Gmail, Orkut, Picasa, Google profiles, or wherever else Google users already have painstakingly built them up.

A friend's invitation to watch a video looks like this.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

However, once people are your friends, you can invite them to use RealTime; the invitation is actually more of a notification that the feature will be enabled when they next log in to the YouTube. When they do so, the RealTime toolbar will appear on the bottom of their YouTube pages.

Even after I sorted out my confusion about the differences between inviting people to be my YouTube friends vs my RealTime friends, I had some problems Wednesday with the service. At times people I knew to be online at YouTube showed to be otherwise. However, the problem passed as the day wore on.

Not revelatory
This brings me to my second letdown with the service. RealTime didn't really make using YouTube any different for me. It didn't make me realize, "Oh, so that's what I've been missing about YouTube!"

I'm as big a fan of viral videos as anyone, and I'm accustomed to sending the latest finds individually to a few select friends by e-mail or IM or broadly over Twitter or maybe even a blog post. Perhaps if I had dedicated moments of exploring videos collectively with my friends RealTime would be more relevant, but for now, those existing communication channels work fine and don't require that my friends actually be logged into YouTube or included in my social network there.

When you're first signed in, RealTime will require you to enable it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

But what's next? Google doubtless isn't done with YouTube RealTime, though, and I could see this being different and perhaps more compelling for some YouTube users.

Here's one idea: unify it with Gmail's IM and video chat technology so you could communicate in other ways besides just messages that "Stephen has shared a video with you."

Here's another: a split-screen interface that shows thumbnails of the actual videos your friends are watching. Clicking on one puts it front and center in the YouTube interface.

So despite my lukewarm reaction to the service overall, I could be persuaded to come around if Google makes something more revolutionary out of it.

Identify is a small, experimental Firefox extension that quickly analyzes a contact's user name to pull up biographical information, and grab links to their profiles on other social services. For instance, if I were to use it on Rafe Needleman's Twitter profile it would be able to tell me what other services he's using, like FriendFeed, Facebook, Last.fm, and more. The same thing would happen if I checked from his profile on one of those other sites, too.

At least that's how it's supposed to work. It did better on some of my friends than others. A lot of how well the extension can do depends on the two tools it's using to get the job done: Yahoo Query Language and Google's Social Graph API, the latter of which only discovers connections when they're both public and in its index. Creator Madgex has married the two tools together to quickly figure out where the profiles are and provide links directly to them.

The entire process only takes a few seconds, and works via a keyboard shortcut, Alt+i on PCs and Ctrl+i on Macs. This is easy to remember--unless you're going back and forth between machines.

An alternate to using services like this is to take someone's full user name and run it through a name checking service like the recently-reviewed KnowEm and Namechk. If they've got the same user name across multiple sites, this takes some of the gopher work off your plate.

Identify was able to see my friend Robert's profiles on Digg and Technorati, along with his personal information, which came from his Twitter profile.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In another expansion of its Profiles site, Google has enabled people to share their contact information with selected contacts, a move that offers modest convenience for users of the service and valuable data to Google.

The feature shows as a "Contact info" tab; clicking on it shows whatever contact information you've entered and the note, "You are not sharing your contact information with anyone. Edit your profile to add contact info, and then choose who to share it with so that they always have the most up-to-date information."

Google Profiles is hardly a Facebook crusher or a LinkedIn slayer, but it is getting gradually more elaborate, as Google builds it up. In October, user profiles became visible to search engines. In November came identity authentication and a mechanism to let people contact you without sharing your e-mail address.

Here's why this Profiles move is interesting: telling Google whom you entrust with your personal information is a good way of identifying the close members of your social circle--in other words, the strong links in your social graph.

Yahoo is beginning the transition to its new socially-enabled platform, laying the foundation for a "universal profile" Thursday.

The new profile page will allow users to make limited changes to their profiles, such as status updates, adding connections (friends in the social graph) from their Yahoo address book, and listing interests. Users can change settings, control permissions and manage notifications across various Yahoo properties.

Yahoo 360 (Yahoo's 2005 attempt to create a social network ) member profiles will be migrated to the new system, but Yahoo 360 won't be going away yet, according to Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

(Credit: Yahoo)

"There is not a lot to demo in this release. It's a foundation release that will allow other things to happen and developers to do things," Stoneham told me. "We have to make sure it works before turning on connections to big traffic properties. The big bang theory doesn't work at this scale. It like Apple rolling out a new operating system release." In September, Yahoo gave developers access to its new social APIs and Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) for writing applications that run on Yahoo Web pages.

Stoneham expects Yahoo's social graph to "light up quickly" soon, however. Over the next few months, more Yahoo property activity feeds will show up in the profile page and additional aggregation points, such as the home page and Yahoo Mail, will aggregate feeds and allow connections. In Yahoo Mail, users will see messages from contacts, connection requests and activity updates from contacts. The Yahoo.com home page will offer a module that shows the activity updates of a user's connections.

In this screen from the January 2008 CES demo, Yahoo Mail shows messages from a user's most important connections as well as their status updates.

(Credit: Yahoo)

In addition, within the next few months Yahoo is adding a new universal header on every page of the service to unify key navigation elements. Along with the usual links to the Yahoo home page, MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail, a new profile link will provide access to user profiles and contacts.

Over time, properties such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Yahoo Buzz, will be socially enabled beyond activity feeds, Stoneham said. He gave an example of requesting a review from a user's connections while perusing a product page in Yahoo Shopping. When a review is posted it shows up in the user's activity feed. In addition, miniprofiles are available to get information quickly about the reviewer. If the reviewer isn't a personal connection, the profile won't have all the contact information.

During an interview in September, Venkat Panchapakesan, head of Yahoo's Audience Technology Group, listed the three top challenges Yahoo faces in bringing its social dimension to scale: making applications such as Yahoo Mail work well on desktop and mobile devices; data privacy; and converting all profiles to a single name space (the universal profile) and lighting up the social graph. One challenge partially down, and two to go.

Correction: Previously it was reported that Yahoo Buzz activity feeds would be surfaced at this time in the new profile pages. A Yahoo spokesperson said that the Buzz feed was not yet implemented.

See also:

Yahoo Open: Finally, a real answer to Google

Inside Yahoo's social network

Fulfilling a second major part of its promise to make the internal workings of its Web site more extroverted, Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use.

The move could mean that Yahoo, struggling under business pressures but still a stronghold of Web activity, could become more tightly tied to others' Web services. For example, a programmer starting up a social networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo.

"Our address book has for a long time been one of the top things developers wanted access to," said Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. That's because, over the years, Yahoo users have filled it with billions of individual records.

Yahoo users have stored more than 500 million address books, and the service is used by more than 150 million unique users each month, Yeh said. "A lot of our address books (are) constantly being updated. It's one of the biggest sources of contact information on the Web," he said.

Opening the address book API (application programming interface) is the second major step taken so far in executing the Yahoo Open Strategy that Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh announced in April. The first step, in May, was opening the SearchMonkey project so outside coders could make more creative use of Yahoo search results.

"The address book is the second proof point. This year, we'll show proof point after proof point," Yeh said.

Yahoo Open Strategy is an attempt to link the company more with other Internet activities rather than remain a sealed-off, if sprawling, Internet domain. Through its open strategy, the company envisions outside programmers building Web applications on Yahoo's site, Yahoo services being incorporated into outside applications, and social connection information within Yahoo being used more widely.

Whether Yahoo will succeed in capturing developer attention and becoming a more dynamic part of new developments remains to be seen. A lot of action--some complementary but much of it competitive--also is taking place at rivals such as Facebook, Google, and any number of small Web 2.0 start-ups.

From the outside looking in
The address book move means outside Web sites will be able to read and write address book information--if a user grants permission through a Yahoo authorization process.

A site with a gift registry could piggyback on the address book so that a person could tell contacts about a wish list of presents, for example, Yeh said. Or a site shipping packages to others could auto-complete the address fields on a Web form.

(And something I'd like to see happen: somebody please endow the address book with an interface that doesn't look like it dates from 1998. I have a lot of contacts stored away in the Yahoo address book, and I find it excruciating to update addresses, scrub out obsolete e-mail addresses, or update mailing lists.)

Explicitly opening the service is more secure than one alternative today, in which a third-party site asks a user for Yahoo log-in credentials so it can access the site and scrape the contact information.

"There's no control over what happens after a user gives that (username and password). The third party could use it to log in to mail or any other part of Yahoo," Yeh said. "It's not a real secure method."

Yahoo isn't opening up the interface for an address book creation, though, which means it won't at least for now be usable as a generic back end for a Web site's address book needs.

Social graph theft?
One interesting possibility raised by the openness is whether an outside company might use it to steal, in effect, a user's social graph--the collection of connections each user often must laboriously reproduce as he or she joins a new site. Social graphs are a key asset of Web sites with a social element, in part because it's hard to reproduce them elsewhere. So once a user constructs one, there's a strong incentive to remain loyal to a site.

Yahoo isn't concerned about that, in part because opening the interface will mean other sites will be able not only to extract contact information from Yahoo, but also to synchronize changes on their sites back with Yahoo, Yeh said.

"I don't think we're worried about losing control over our social graph. All the things we're doing now are trying to break down some of the traditional walls Yahoo has had to the outside world," he said. "Yes, absolutely some of our data will get pulled out and be used for benefit of other systems. (But) when people use our system address book APIs, there's just as much a chance somebody will load something back into our network."

One company making use of the Yahoo address book interface is Plaxo, which hosts 40 million users' address books already.

Yahoo itself maintains multiple social graphs--for example, the address book, the Yahoo Messenger buddy lists, and the Flickr lists of contacts, friends, and family.

"Not all this data is combined yet," Yeh said, though one key part of Yahoo Open Strategy is to unify these contact lists and the related user profile pages. "The goal of the next half year is to make sure we bring that together."

The Yahoo address book is the "place we like people to store all their contact information," he said, but it's not a terribly rich social graph. For example, it doesn't currently have a good way to distinguish which contacts would be appropriate to invite to a new social service or to receive gift registry notifications.

"One of the things that we have to do is give users and opportunity to activate their social graph a little bit--essentially, to make sure they can classify the people they're most interested in communicating with on a regular basis so we know how to create a social environment around them," Yeh said.

"Going forward, we'll have to have a better solution for people so we can classify inside our address book who we're closest to and who are at further distance from us," he added. "That's a function of the social work we're doing."

Yahoo Messenger 9 offers a more elaborate friend list and can display videos and photos in the chat window.

(Credit: Yahoo)

You can't take it with you, at least when it comes to your social graph.

But with a new beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9 software (download it for Windows) released Thursday, users have new options for reconstructing networks of friends and contacts they've built elsewhere.

The new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 can help user invite contacts on AOL, Google's Gmail and Orkut, Microsoft's Hotmail, MySpace, and other online services to connect through the Yahoo service. Version 9 also includes a special group of all people in your Yahoo address book, helping to connect with contacts users may have stored elsewhere within Yahoo itself.

Also tying more deeply into the rest of Yahoo, the new beta can be used to reflect some other activities within the network--for example, when somebody spotlights a Web site of interest using Yahoo Buzz.

"We'll add more types of updates in the future," said product manager Sarah Bacon in a blog posting about the new beta.

Yahoo Messenger 9 is intended for use on Windows XP, in contrast to the more obviously named Yahoo Messenger for Vista (download it for Windows Vista). The final version of the Yahoo Messenger 9 is due in the third quarter, Yahoo said. The Mac equivalent is scheduled to be released by the end of the year.

Also new in the beta is a better interface for setting status messages--even if you're away from your IM software, Yahoo said. And links to games present in Yahoo Messenger 8 has made its way to version 9, so users can play pool, checkers, and others. However, only those with version 8.1 or later can play games with those using the version 9 beta, Yahoo said.

Yahoo Messenger's icon, a frighteningly happy face, reflects the fact that people have a whole section of their brains just for processing facial information. Yahoo is tapping into that visual cortex a little more directly with the new beta, which uses larger emoticons.

For further information, check Yahoo's blog about the new beta or a Messenger 9 beta demo video.

Mobile app maker Frengo is now making apps for popular social networks (Facebook, Hi5, etc.) that allow connections between networks. The Flirtable app, for example, allows users on one social network to flirt with users on another. The Lolz app, likewise, lets users share LOLcat images (sadly, not very funny ones) across networks.

Frengo is using OpenSocial as a standard for building the apps, but OpenSocial doesn't address friend portability or cross-network messaging. Frengo is building that capability into its widgets so that a user on a smaller network who adds one of its apps will join the ad-hoc group of users from other networks that are using the same app elsewhere.

I'm on Facebook, but Mia may not be. (Image has been edited.)

For example, when you use the Flirtable dating app, you're accessing all the app's users no matter what network they're on. In a very cool twist, if you use the Flirtable app to send a message or a gift to another user, that communication can reach their social profile page (usually, their "wall") even if they're on another network from you.

CEO Mahi de Silva admits that "What we do may not appear to be aligned with the business goals of social networks." Frengo loosens up the lock-in of social networks. De Silva believes that what Frengo does is still within the terms of service of the social networks, if only just. And users would probably agree with de Silva that connecting social networks together raises the value of all of them -- even the big networks that would appear to have the most to lose.

I'm happy to see efforts like this, since they make social apps more about people, less about the companies running their networks. And I think many execs at social networks actually get this. The power of joining connected groups together is called the network effect, after all.

See also: The Social Graph API, as explained by David Glazer at Google.

I had a chance to sit down with David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, and talk with him about OpenSocial and related projects. From this man on the inside of the project, I wanted to get a picture of what OpenSocial will mean to Web users, and find out when.

What it is, what it isn't

OpenSocial is an application platform that big Web sites and social networks can choose to support. If a developer writes a product for OpenSocial, then users on any network that supports OpenSocial will be able to run it on their profile pages. For example, the TripWiser application I saw last night is an OpenSocial product. It should run on sites, such as Orkut, Bebo, MySpace, and Hi5, which support OpenSocial. Running the application on each of those platforms will let users connect with their friends on that platform to plan trips.

David Glazer

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

What OpenSocial does not do is interconnect the social networks themselves. For that, there's a slightly newer emerging standard called the Social Graph API. Products written to this platform will be able to read and write friend data between social networks.

OpenSocial is a big deal because it makes it easier for developers to leverage their work across multiple social-networking sites. This makes the economics of developing social applications better and should lead to better applications for all of us. But the Social Graph API is a much more important project, because it lets users combine their personal networks in the ways they want, unfettered (theoretically at least) by the artificial walls that the social network sites put up around their audiences.

Glazer gave me a good example of why users will learn to love the Social Graph API: Say you're a big user on a general social site such as MySpace. Then you head over to the specialized pet-focused site, Catster. "Who's there that you know?" Glazer asks. The Social Graph API will let you find out--it will tell you which of your MySpace pals are also on Catster, helping you get up to speed very fast on the new network.

Saying it doesn't make it so

There are many tough problems to solve before everyone, and every social platform, will support OpenSocial and Social Graph. Technically, each social site is different, so writing an Open Social application doesn't guarantee a successful release of the application onto all sites. But it makes it much easier.

From a business perspective, the Social Graph API turns the world on its head. Why build a social network audience if your users can take their friends anywhere? There are reasons, of course, but opening up the walls of the gardens do change the business dynamics substantially, and the companies that want to let users move their friends in and out of networks need to rethink what it is they have that makes them valuable. As Glazer said, the answer to this problem is unknown, but it's certainly not, "hold the users hostage."

Then there's the privacy issue. Do you want your friends taking your information from one site you're on and pulling it to other services? Glazer's initial take on this is, "It's just like search." Meaning that the Social Graph API should only have access to public profile information. That's too limited, we agreed, although the other extreme is too scary for most users. It's an unresolved problem.

What we'll see

The first OpenSocial applications (not necessarily Social Graph-enabled) will start rolling out the early adopter sites such as MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 this year. Users will just start seeing more cool applications on their favorite platforms.

But things won't get really interesting until these applications start to communicate across networks. Then a contribution that a person makes on your page on Bebo might also show up on a mutual friend's installation of the same widget on Hi5 (but not Facebook; it's still its own island). I saw how that might look last night during the demo of ReadingSocial, a reviews service that could collect reviews on topics across networks. Think of it as a decentralized Yelp. It's a powerful idea and it indicates how cross-site social networking could give power in social networking to users, by removing it from the current major platforms.

See also: Pizza time for OpenSocial applications, by Dan Farber.