Outside the Lines

On Friday's Gillmor Gang podcast, Google's point person on Friend Connect, David Glazer, took questions from the gang, which included Steve, Marc Canter, Robert Anderson, Mike Arrington, Dana Gardner, and myself.

Much of the conversation centered on Facebook's suspended participation in Google Friend Connect. Glazer said he expects Facebook and Google to make peace but didn't want to give a time frame for a resolution.

Regarding efforts by Google, Facebook, and MySpace to provide some element of data portability, Glazer said they are complementary, based on what is known about the APIs so far, which isn't much.

Glazer maintained that Friend Connect is in line with Google's goal of enabling a more open Web, which also has the potential to improve Google's bottom line. Sites and applications that use Friend Connect could also serve Google ads. "It's just an example of how when more people have more reasons to do things online, it can be good for Google," he said.

Listen to the show.

The social Web is going through some birthing pains (see Techmeme). In the name of data portability, Facebook, MySpace.com, and Google made announcements last week about creating a more open social Web. For the most part, they are press releases and not yet fully released into the wild.

On Thursday, Facebook suspended involvement with Google's Friend Connect, claiming that it redistributes user information from Facebook to developers without users' knowledge, violating the company's terms of service.

Google responded that Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. "Users choose what social networks to link their Friend Connect account to. (They can just as easily unlink it.) We never handle passwords from other sites; we never store social graph data from other sites; and we never pass users' social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications," a Google representative said.

Full openness in the colonization of the social Web is counter to the instincts of companies funded by venture capitalists and with quarterly earnings to report. The companies are conflicted. On one hand, they want to maintain walled or semi-permeable gardens and find ways to keep users from defecting and the money from evaporating.

On the other hand, Facebook, Google, and MySpace are part of the Web generation, fueled by young people who value openness and advocate users having control of their data.

At this juncture, all the major social-networking players recognize that the walls separating them are crumbling, but they haven't agreed on how to implement global openness.

Taking a historical perspective, the social-networking community hasn't formed its Continental Congress to unite the colonies with a common vision and approach for openness. It's a political and economic, not a technical, issue. The technical building blocks, such as OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial APIs, for an open social Web are taking shape.

The complexities of an open social Web, allowing for granular control by users over their online identities and information, will require a lot of new thinking about user scenarios and experimentation.

The Data Portability Project is developing guidelines and has the endorsement of the big social-networking players. But endorsement doesn't mean they are gathered together to create a common social layer for the Web. It's time for the social networks, like the 13 colonies in 1774 banding together to be free of British authority, to unite and manifest that the Web is by and for the users.

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.

"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.

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 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."

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

Yahoo rewiring itself from the inside out

Pizza time for OpenSocial applications

Our CNET News team put together a visual guide to the Yahoo mating dance. It might come in handy when the Yahoo board of directors meets tomorrow to consider the various options. Most bets are still on Microsoft upping its bid to capture Yahoo.

I never thought that Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo could get so interesting. It's taking on Shakespearian dimensions, with various factions lobbying, forming alliances, and establishing dowries for Yahoo's favor. In addition, News Corp. may be lending aid to Microsoft in its quest to acquire Yahoo.

Over the weekend, Steve Ballmer gave Jerry Yang three weeks to capitulate, or Microsoft would take its case directly to Yahoo shareholders. Today, 69 days into the negotiations and posturing, with Microsoft seemingly in the driver's seat, prognosticators are scratching their heads.

Yahoo and AOL are reportedly in deep talks to join forces. Also note that the Time Warner unit recently acquired the social-networking site Bebo.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

Under the terms being discussed between Yahoo and Time Warner, the latter would fold its AOL unit into Yahoo and make a cash investment in return for about 20 percent of the combined entity, people familiar with the situation said.

The deal, which wouldn't include AOL's dial-up access business, would value AOL at about $10 billion. As part of the deal, Yahoo would use the Time Warner cash and additional funds to buy back several billion dollars worth of its own stock at a price somewhere in the middle of the range, between $30 and $40 a share, the people said.

Yahoo is also testing the use of Google ads on a small percentage of its search pages. This could lead Yahoo to outsource its core ad search business to Google. As you might recall, Google and AOL have a connection. Google invested $1 billion in AOL in 2005 for a 5 percent stake, and it powers AOL search.

Rafat Ali of PaidContent said AOL and Google working together could help Yahoo stay independent:

If Yahoo can logically show that it gets a 30 percent to 40 percent revenue lift on the test, then they have a story to tell--that, if combined with AOL, they have enough scale, cut down costs by outsourcing search and search ads to Google, and add to that a possible share buyback with Time Warner supplying the extra cash, the combination has earned the right to stay independent.

At the same time, The New York Times is reporting that News Corp. (and its MySpace.com) may be considering throwing in with Microsoft to help acquire Yahoo.

The question for Yahoo shareholders will be which deal is best. AOL needs to find a home, and the combined AOL-Yahoo user base would be large. Getting leverage from the two audiences presents similar problems and overlapping to that of an MSN-Yahoo combination.

Google would benefit by the Microsoft block, its AOL relationship, and potentially a partnership with Yahoo, which would mean that Google is the big winner. Microsoft would be the big loser, if it doesn't succeed in acquiring Yahoo. Of course, the antitrust regulators might have a say in the matter.

In some ways, Yahoo could be a loser as well, in that Microsoft would technically and financially be a stronger mate than AOL, especially in battling Google over the long-term.

Given all the recent activity, Yahoo's fate is less clear than when Microsoft was the only option. Perhaps, Yahoo has created an elaborate illusion to convince Microsoft to increase its bid.

We may find out soon whether AOL is really an alternative to Microsoft for Yahoo, and salvation for Time Warner, and whether Rupert Murdoch wants to get in bed with Microsoft. What we know, at this point, is that Jerry Yang is not saying, "Alas, poor Yorick."

Now that Yahoo has finally and officially signed on to the OpenSocial API bandwagon (see Techmeme), the company that Microsoft might buy has joined with MySpace.com and Google to create the OpenSocial Foundation. Facebook is still missing in action, considering whether joining the OpenSocial Foundation is in the best interests of its membership--or its own platform.

OpenSocial provides a useful piece of functionality, solving a developer problem by allowing applications developed with the APIs to run on different services without modification--write once, play many. A photo-sharing application could tap into the social graphs of Orkut, Bebo, MySpace, Ning, or other services without any code changes.

Google is making Facebook's choice regarding OpenSocial more difficult by granting the OpenSocial code to the nonprofit foundation, which will be "independent of any undue influence by any one party," according to the opensocial.org Web site. In fact, Google is giving up its trademark to "OpenSocial" and its ownership in the Web site in the name of community-driven specifications, according to Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google.

In other words, it's more difficult now to categorize OpenSocial as a Google-inspired approach created in part to break the growing dominance of the Facebook platform.

On another front in the search for data portability, Facebook has signed up to partner with Microsoft on address book portability. Along with LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, and Bebo, Facebook is endorsing the Windows Live Contacts API, which allows contact info portability.

For example, Facebook or Bebo users can find friends on Windows Live and vice versa. The API also includes provisions for privacy management. The relationship data is not automatically stored, and must be reestablished with permission from the contact on each interaction.

However, adoption of the Windows Live Contacts API won't let you exchange contact info between Facebook and Bebo or Bebo and Hi5. It's only two-way with Windows Live as a node.

"At this point our agreements are between Microsoft and the individual social networks. We have nothing else to announce at this time," John Richards, director of the Windows Live Platform, said in an email response to my query about going further with the API. At least it's a start at breaking down data portability barriers.

I asked Marc Canter, who has been an evangelist for data portability, about Microsoft's API. Here's his e-mail response:

They're sure saying the right things

and they appear to be putting resources behind it - and putting (in) writing what needs to be said. And exerting leadership I may add. You don't see Google saying those sorts of thing. Apparently Yahoo made some open announcements today - too. Haven't seen them yet.

The MS machine is gearing up to "crush" the competition - only problem is that this time - the competition is Google. And we're (the users) all pawns in this game. Who can be more open is the sort of battle we want fought!

So despite MS's best efforts - the tactics of old will not work.

And we (the people) shouldn't care - as long as they continue to open up - that's a good thing.

I predicted that this would happen. Old agenda gets corrupted with the mesh.

There is only one way to go - once Pandora's box is open = and that's more open.

The only variables that remain are:

- how can small guys benefit from an open environment

- how do the big guys protect their family jewels while starting to monetize openness

The social Web is spawning more than millions of widgets, applications, and people connections. It is also has its own themed conference. Graphing Social Patterns got under way today in San Diego with a keynote by Charlene Li of Forrester Research on the future of social networks.

In the future social networks will be like air, Lee said. "No matter what you do, your social networks will be there. The social graph and your identity will be at your fingertips."

She predicted that by 2013 social networks will be open and ubiquitous. Reaching that plateau won't be a technology issue, she noted, but developing a level of trust among users, platforms, and marketers will be the major challenge.

Li broke down social "air" into four components: A user profile; the expressed relationships in a single social graph; the shared activities in a social context; and a business model in which social influence defines marketing value.

Universal identity will be based on your e-mail addresses or mobile phone number, and identity will be federated by a few large identity banks, like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, she predicted.

One key issue today is that social graphs--the set of relationships in the digital the mimic those in the analog world--are walled off from each other. The walled garden approach is a source of competitive advantage for their owners, but some efforts are underway, such as Google's Open Social and Social Graph APIs and DataPortability.org, to break the lock-in. (I am moderating a panel on the topic later today at the event on privacy and data portability.)

With a more open social graph, new kinds of applications will be enabled. Li gave an example of being able to see what friends have written reviews on Amazon by keying off her e-mail address. Search engines could deliver query results based on what friends find relevant. Users could compare the performance of stock portfolios.

On the business model, Li said that each person will have their own personal CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions), which will be highly influenced by their social network. For example, an individual who is authoritative on a specific topic provides an "endorsed" value, which is enhanced by the quality of their social network, which is relative to the trust conferred by the social network to the individual. We already seen a first take on the personal CPM with Facebook's aborted Beacon service.

Li offer a few recommendations to the Graphing Social Patterns audience of developers, investors and industry watchers:

• Create linkages between services based on individually controlled identity federation.
• Compete on the most compelling social experience, not on lock-in.
• Develop social apps that have meaning, that are more utilitarian. "If you have to explain why Facebook is interesting, it's not going to become more mainstream," Lee said.
• Integrate social graphs into existing activities.
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people's social networks.

I wouldn't argue against social networking becoming deeply embedded at the core of the Web within five years, with more open social graphs meandering through the network looking for connections and dynamically modifying behaviors. Whether the Web gets better at understanding the calculus of trust than in the real world remains to be seen.