The meaning of openness in the realm of social networks continues to be difficult to pin down. At a panel discussion Tuesday at Supernova 2008 in San Francisco, representatives from Facebook, Google, and Plaxo discussed their various interpretations of openness and got into the ongoing controversy between Google and Facebook over their friend-connecting APIs.
Kevin Marks, Joseph Smarr, and Dave Morin prepare to go onstage.
(Credit: Dan Farber)"The point is that the individuals have shared custodianship of it because they have overlapping knowledge of each other's connections," said Kevin Marks of Google regarding who owns the social graph data. Users understand that if they violate the implicit social contract, it will upset fellow users. "The goal of OpenSocial (Google's set of application programming interfaces for allowing applications to access a social graph) is to have an abstraction so the social contract can be enforced by the containers," Marks said.
"Open is when users are mashing up things and in control. It's driven by what is valuable to the user," said Plaxo's Joseph Smarr.
Facebook's Dave Morin defined openness as giving people control over the information they share and providing developers with the capability to build on top of the Facebook platform. Social data breaks down into three categories, Morin said: identity data, social graph data, and feeds and social actions. With 80 million users, Facebook has a responsibility to make sure that users understand what and how they are sharing information, he added.
"You should be able to take your identity wherever you go and keep social graph in sync," Morin said. The notion of "dynamic privacy" is at the core of Facebook's openness efforts. Users set up privacy controls inside Facebook to share more information and to be more open, and have it always in sync, Morin explained.
It's on the point of being able to take your identity across social networks that has put Google and Facebook at odds.
Last month Facebook blocked Google's Friend Connect service, claiming that it violated its terms of service. According to Facebook, Google Friend Connect's violation was redistributing user information from Facebook to other developers without the users' knowledge.
"When Facebook Connect initially launched and Google Friend Connect launched, both implemented different technology. We found Google to be in violation of our terms of service, so we asked to talk about it with them," Morin said. "We are in direct contact with Google representatives to find ways to work together. It's important that on this panel we are talking about this...It's important that we figure out how to make it work together.
Marks asked Morin what Google would need to change in Friend Connect to make it work for Facebook.
Morin answered, "We would like to work together on how to make dynamic privacy happen for everyone, so every privacy setting on our site works on other sites."
Marks was unclear as to what Google was copying from Facebook in its Friend Connect implementation, using OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial, that would cause a violation in Facebook's terms of service.
Morin said he preferred not to talk about legal matters. "Our representatives are talking so a fight on the panel doesn't need to happen."
It wasn't a fight but Morin's answer that representatives are talking makes it seem that lawyers instead of engineers, who are at the core of the two companies, are running the show.
Smarr chimed in, "We see each other all the time, and we are all in Silicon Valley, so there are overlapping back channels."
"What Facebook is doing (with dynamic privacy) is very laudable--if you choose to share something in one place, it should appear in another. It's just not clear on how this dynamic privacy will work. If Facebook tries to do it by themselves and not with other people, it will be hard to make it really scale," said David Recordon of Six Apart, who has been involved in data portability efforts.
Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen's analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.
Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.
"...I think a lot of companies have what I call 'strategitis.' Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a 'strategy,'" he says. "There's a strong temptation for companies that don't have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking 'features' instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products."
Marc Andreessen
(Credit: Dan Farber)Andreessen is referring to the launch of Google's Friend Connect, as reported by Betsy Schiffman of Wired.
Friend Connect glues together some emerging Web standards to make it easy for any Web site to add social features. Andreessen is co-founder and chairman of Ning, which allows people to easily and freely create their own social networks. Ning's platform currently hosts more than 260,000 social networks of varying sizes.
Andreessen is accurate in his categorization of Ning and Friend Connect. Ning is a finished product for end users, and Friend Connect is code that Web masters can apply to add a social dimension to their sites. It's also a way for Google to extend its reach into the social Web without having a leading social network.
They are complementary approaches, but Google's strategy appears to rankle Andreessen, even though he said that he would "support anything that creates interactivity or feeds" in the social space.
Instead of using Ning or an alternative service to create a companion social network for a Web site, savvy users could roll their own with Friend Connect. It might not be as full featured as what Ning delivers today, but if Friend Connect gains traction, it will gain features and thousands of applications.
Ning announced support for Google's OpenSocial APIs, and could support Friend Connect, which would allow users of Ning sites to connect with friends on other social networks.
Ning was founded in 2004 and has raised $104 million so far, including $60 million last month, giving the start-up a market value of about $500 million. Andreessen said he raised the large amount of money to support the accelerating growth of the company and to have the funding to survive what he called the "oncoming nuclear winter." In addition to a skittish economy that could go nuclear, Andreessen now has to worry about Friend Connect slowing his growth.
Update: In a blog post published on May 14, titled "Friend Connect, Open Social, Ning, and the Web," Andreessen offered his opinion of Friend Connect. He doesn't address his strategy-vs.-product remarks quoted in the Wired story.
In the following excerpt, Andreessen explains how Ning will support Google Friend Connect:
For Ning, Friend Connect is simply a new and better way to do the same thing with Open Social gadgets -- in both directions: out and in.
We will support Friend Connect in two ways:
Every network on Ning will be able to be an Open Social origin social network -- pushing out Open Social gadgets to anywhere else on the web that carry with them the social context and friends data from their origin Ning network. So, for example, the members of a backpacking social network on Ning can still interact as friends on any third-party backpacking web site, by publishing an Open Social gadget out from their Ning network onto that third-party web site. In short, people will be able to flow more easily from Ning to many other web sites without losing the social context of their Ning networks.
Every network on Ning will of course be able to contain Open Social gadgets published out from other social networks on the Internet via Friend Connect. So, for example, a group of friends on MySpace who all enjoy cooking will be able to travel from MySpace to a cooking-specific social network on Ning, via any Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget published from MySpace into that Ning network. In short, people will be able to flow more easily from other social networks and walled gardens into Ning social networks without losing the social context from those other networks.
Google's third Campfire One event Monday night featured the debut of Friend Connect. David Glazer, Google director of engineering, has described Friend Connect as a "salt shaker full of social to sprinkle social features on a site in a matter of hours."
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Friend Connect Campfire event.
(Credit: TechCrunch)At this juncture, the salt is in short supply, but Google plans to make it broadly available to developers over the next few months. More on Friend Connect here.
Web masters and developers can sign up to get on the Friend Connect waiting list here.
The Friend Connect administration site presents a catalog of social gadgets, such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing, provided by Google and other developers. Users copy gadget code snippets and paste them into their sites. The member gadget allows for sign-in with Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID accounts; invites and display of activities from existing friends on social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5 and Plaxo; browsing member profiles across social networks; and connecting with new friends on a site.
(Credit: Google)Check out the Google video on Friend Connect below.
See also:
Updated 3:15 PST May 12
As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.
"The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app."
I asked Glazer if Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com's Data Availability. "People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn't create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements)."
Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Google lacks a dominant, centralized social-networking hub. Friend Connect works the edges of the Internet, applying an open and distributed approach, and bringing a social dimension to the 99-plus percent of sites that aren't socially enabled.
Guacamole is a sample site created by Google for demonstrating Friend Connect features.
(Credit: Google)"The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does--many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information," Glazer told me. "Now it is working to connect people to other people."
Friend Connect-compliant sites will be able to view, invite, and interact with newfound friends, or with existing friends, from established social-networking sites, including Facebook, Google Talk, Hi5, Orkut, and Plaxo via secure authorization application-programming interfaces.
Currently only a few sample sites, including Google's Guacamole site, are available to end users. "We are looking to get feedback from Web site owners about what kinds of sites and apps they want," Glazer said. Ingrid Michaelson, an independent musician, integrates iLike's OpenSocial application with Friend Connect to connect friends without having to leave the site.
David Glazer, director of engineering, Google
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, said Google's Friend Connect is "flipping the model" from walled gardens (such as Facebook) 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 Web site or Web page?
That's a big, bold vision that Plaxo is 100 percent 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. It 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.
Friend Connect provides a set of wizards for adding social features to Web sites without programming.
(Credit: Google)"Friend Connect provides wizardlike pages. Webmasters just fill in the information, select social apps, copy code, paste, and save. No coding is required. It passes the 'easy' test, and it does something useful," Glazer said. It provides features such as user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.
At the core of Friend Connect are three emerging social standards--OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial.
"Today is the right time to connect all emerging standards to give users the ability to go anywhere on Web and interact with any set of friends on any application," Glazer said.
Google's Social Graph API is not part of the Friend Connect preview, Glazer said. "The Social Graph API is part of the same conversation, but we didn't need to connect those two dots."
Friend Connect applies existing and emerging standards to provide plumbing for the social Web.
(Credit: Google)Glazer emphasized that Google is focused on keeping users in control of their information. "The Webmaster has no business knowing who my friends are, but I can choose to link my login to my Facebook account and invite friends," he said. "It's up to each site to publish APIs, with appropriate terms of use," Glazer told me. "I would expect as Friend Connect matures in the market, we will see more people connecting to it and more standard interfaces to turn on and register for it. It's not fully standard now.
Friend Connect covers many of the use cases for the social Web, but a single, standard "friend" API is still lacking.
"There are a few good candidates, such as the OpenSocial RESTful APIs, which are at a rough consensus stage but not running code," Glazer said. "We don't know enough to call a winner, but there will be a standard."
Update: During a call with the press, Glazer called Friend Connect a "salt shaker full of social to sprinkle social features on a site in a matter of hours." However, the salt shaker is not getting passed around much. Google is being very cautious about approving sites to use the new code, with concerns about applications or sites that might violate user privacy. "We have to make sure we get it right," Glazer said, "especially when user data is involved." It also sounds like Google rushed this announcement to be in step with recent Facebook and MySpace data portability efforts.
Google is creating a wait list for requests to use Friend Connect, and expects to green light a few dozen sites in the next few days. Unleashing Friend Connect will be staged over the coming months, according to Joe Kraus, Google director of product management. "It's on the order of months, and certainly not six months, probably a couple," he said.
See also: Techmeme
Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."
Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.
Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy.
TechCrunch's Mike Arrington reasons:
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don't have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).
With 70 million users, more than 20,000 Facebook applications, and about 350,000 developers, Facebook has a major scale advantage over Google's Orkut. MySpace has the advantage of an even larger user base, but lags Facebook on the developer and application fronts.
However, Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.
I spoke with David Glazer, Google director of engineering, in March about injecting the social graph and data portability into the core fabric of the Web. He said the big challenge isn't the technology but applying existing and emerging standards, such as OAuth(secure API authentication), OpenID (identity management) and OpenSocial APIs (application integration).
The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet. Stay tuned for more details on Google's Friend Connect and the next chapter of "The Making of the Social Web."
See also:Facebook to open the gates with 'Facebook Connect'
MySpace announces 'Data Availability' project with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, Twitter
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