The Open Road

O'Reilly Radar's Ben Lorica writes that Facebook has been growing steadily on a global basis, and suggests through the data that Facebook adoption is deep and widespread. Most intriguingly, he finds that in North America working-age users is the fastest growing demographic, while the teen segment is growing much more slowly.

I could have saved him some time. Yesterday I got my haircut, and Valerie, the lady that has cut my hair for the past 20-plus years, started talking to me about how she uses Facebook. Valerie is one of the least technically-adept people I have ever met. If she's using Facebook, the entire planet is.

Take my mother, for instance. I wrote before that my mother has started IM'ing me through Facebook, which was a pretty good indicator of mainstream adoption of the social-networking service. Between Valerie and my angel mother, I have enough proof without reading a shred of statistical evidence that if I wanted to find my fourth-grade crush, I'd almost certainly find her on Facebook. (In fact, I did.).

The big question for Facebook now is how it will monetize that widespread adoption. I still find Facebook tedious and time-wasting. Things like its Facebook Connect service may make Facebook relevant to me without me having to "go to" Facebook.com, and is a step in the right direction.

But Facebook needs to figure out how to make "friends" on Facebook meaningful, both in commercial and other contexts. Once it has done so--once it has effectively mapped my social graph--it wlll have data that it can turn into dollars. At that point, Valerie and Mom will be able to enjoy Facebook while it enjoys dramatic revenue growth, which will be good for all involved.

Ringside Networks was a very cool company - one of the best new open-source companies, as I wrote earlier this year. The company had a dream similar to Ning's - to make social networking-type applications an integral part of a wide array of websites and enterprises.

This past month, however, even as Ning neared 500,000 social networks (at least one of which is not used for porn! Go figure!!), Ringside went down for the count.

Why? How could a company flush with some of the best venture money in the business - Matrix Partners - go under even before it really had a chance to sell into a welcoming market? Bob Bickel, Ringside's co-founder, explains:

We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact.

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I've stopped accepting requests to join new social networks. I can barely keep up with one, much less 10. More to the point, I don't want to have silo'd data repositories. It's this last point that keeps me grounded in e-mail.

Sure, we now have OpenID to provide a central clearing house for identity online, but what I really want is to be able to send a Facebook message and have it show up in my e-mail, or somewhere central that I routinely use. I've come to accept that my IM client will be separate from my e-mail client, but I'm not prepared to add a Facebook "client," LinkedIn "client," etc.

Is there something out there to collect and coalesce my social communication? Is anyone providing a central repository for my online communications? If so, sign me up. I'd actually use Facebook if the things I did there were portable to my e-mail client, which was portable to my Flickr activity, which was...you get the idea.

Because each of these social applications forces me to live inside it, rather than connecting to other applications and storing the resulting communication data between them all, I use them sparingly or not at all. This is, I think, what Tim O'Reilly is getting at when he describes the social network as infrastructure rather than applications.

Will someone fix this, please? I think there's a lot of money in being that social network data repository. Heck, if Exchange weren't so creaky, Microsoft should be doing this.

I was surprised to read today that Sun just released SocialSite, an open-source social network server similar to Ringside Networks. Per Patrick Chanezon's blog: "Socialsite is an open source (CDDL/GPL) social network server based on Apache Shindig (Java) that implements the database and User Interface for a full fledge social network. Since it is based on Shindig, it implements OpenSocial."

Sounds great, right? My question? Why does Sun have a social network server. Sun makes great technology - lots of it. Does it make too much?

I don't mean to be critical but I have a hard time wrapping my wee brain around how this fits into the larger Sun story of cloud, storage, identity management, etc. If Sun had a stated policy - as Google does - of allowing employees to tinker on projects that interest them for 20 percent of the time, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But I'm not aware of such a policy at Sun.

Thought?

This week I had two people contact me to ask separate but related questions. One was a developer in search of a business person to help raise money and exploit his technology. The other was a business person with an idea but no one to build it for him. I had no idea where to send them.

It's actually similar to a problem that I've long had. I've wanted to start a company for a long time, but I don't know many developers that I could go to in order to build out the ideas that I've had. Venture capitalists will fund the idea of an established entrepreneur with a track record of success, but most need to have something to demonstrate before getting the ear (and cash) of a VC.

Anyone know of a good place to connect "PhDs" and "MBAs"? In Silicon Valley, they're often one and the same, but most people aren't gifted with equal talents in business savvy and development prowess. How to connect the two worlds?

One of the problems with social networking sites is that they tend to be ugly. Not just a little bit ugly. Seriously ugly.

MySpace has upgraded its UI, but it's still noisy, long (you have to scroll way down on some pages to get where you want to go), and cluttered. Facebook? It looks like a dingy and, like MySpace, is overly noisy (It's also shockingly slow. I've been trying to change my account settings and it keeps hanging on me). Not only that, but my home page on Facebook doesn't seem to want to let me cut out all the noise - no matter how much I tell it that I don't want to hear about so-and-so "friend"ing so-and-so, it keeps telling me.

Only LinkedIn seems to respect me as a grown-up. It lets me filter out noise and presents everything in an inviting UI.

The other thing I like about LinkedIn is that it doesn't try to be my one-stop shop for social activities. I use it for one thing: Professional networking (and recruiting as a fortunate off-shoot of that). I would never dream of paying Facebook or MySpace to blare fake friend activities to me, but I gladly paid LinkedIn $500 to help me recruit a few people to my company each year.

I suspect the noisy design of Facebook and MySpace has more to do with wild attempts to be relevant to more and more people (so that they'll visit the site and get hit by advertising). I prefer LinkedIn's more direct, conservative approach. I visit it when I need it, and I pay for that "need." Form follows function.

(Credit: Ringside Networks)

I guess it was just a matter of time before Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman, and other former JBoss employees started another application server company. Who knew, however, that they'd launch the world's first open-source "social-application server"?

What the heck is that? Well, for one thing, Ringside Networks is certainly an innovative use of open source. For those who think that open source can't compete and innovate new markets, Ringside is about to put that theory to the test.

According to a data sheet the company provided me, to be distributed at Ringside's formal launch at next week's Open Source Business Conference, this is what the product does and is:

Ringside Social Application Server is the first open-source platform that enables Web site owners to build and deploy social applications that operate with existing Web site content and business applications while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.

This provides three primary advantages:

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IBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not "free" as in open source, but rather as in "Please take since people won't pay for it," as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.

The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft's territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM's collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn't first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won't.

A much better route would be to a) extend from Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn't own, as Google has.

If I were a betting man, I'd lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don't mean it's widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla's new email push.

When I first heard that Bob Bickel was considering jumping back into the technology fray, I was deeply intrigued. Here's a guy who made a lot of cash with JBoss and promptly let absolutely none of it go to his head. Instead it went to his feet.

But then I talked with Bob and was even more excited to see what, exactly, he was up to, and with whom: David Skok of Matrix Partners, Rich Friedman, Jason Kinner, Rich Frisbie, and Mark Lugert of JBoss and/or Bluestone.

As for the what, think social networking meets open source. It all started with Bob trying to build "social" into a running store Web site, as Bob explains: