Outside the Lines

The first wave of applications built on Google's OpenSocial APIs is set for liftoff in the next few weeks as MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 make the final push to release their software.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google

(Credit: Dan Farber)

I spoke with David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, who told me that it's "pizza time" for the developers, meaning they are putting in long hours to deliver the apps sooner than later.

The OpenSocial APIs allow developers to create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds without modification for compliant platforms. The OpenSocial APIs are in version .7, after starting at .5, if you can follow the versioning logic. Whatever the case, future iterations will be backward compatible with the .7 spec, Glazer said.

Google has also introduced a Social Graph API, which exposes information about the public connections between people (expressed by XFN and FOAF markup languages) and other publicly declared connections accessible to developers. Glazer said that the Social Graph API is on a slower track than the OpenSocial API. "We are expecting it to be a long, slow ramp," Glazer said.

It's difficult to set user expectations for pervasive social applications because most users have no expectations about where to give control and allow for discovery, Glazer said. The use cases have not been well defined for how social graph data should be used in a way that protects privacy and provides enough granularity and ease of use to satisfy a broad range of users. "We'll just let the savvy developers build on it and see what works," Glazer said.

The barriers to injecting the social graph into the core of the Web aren't technological. OATH, OpenID, OpenSocial APIs, and the Social Graph API can be combined to provide the underlying infrastructure for unleashing the social Web fabric, Glazer said. It's people getting comfortable with the user experience of the social Web, just as they did in a past era with the experience of Caller ID.

Ben Ling, director of product marketing for the Facebook platform, gave a brief peek of the upcoming profile page update and outlined Facebook's vision at Graphing Social Patterns conference. The new profile page will combine the Wall and Minifeed, and additional tabs have been added to showcase users' favorite apps.

(Credit: Facebook)

Ling said that Facebook has 200,000 developers and 16,000 applications so far. Of the 66 million current Facebook users, 98 percent have used at least one third-party application, and a significant number use six or seven applications, he said.

Ling described Facebook's vision as making its platform more frictionless for developers and users, as well as for Facebook itself.

He went over some of the frictionless initiatives aimed at developers, such as using Joyent, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Popfly to deliver applications, and the Facebook Platform MarketPlace. Facebook is planning to provide developers native support for accepting credit cards to help them monetize their applications. The feature will be available later this year, Ling said.

He also noted the user-driven internationalization efforts, resulting in Facebook translated into languages such as Spanish and German.

Ling noted that sports, music, religion and productivity are seed verticals that Facebook will be supporting via its investment fund.

Ling was asked about companies other than Bebo who have licensed the Facebook platform. He said Facebook was in discussions with companies ranging from the largest to the smaller players, but he had nothing to announce.

On the subject of data portability, the capability to take use the social graph outside of the Facebook, Ling said the Facebook is committed to enable users on Facebook to use the social graph in a variety of other contexts. Allowing to users to move add Facebook contact information to their cell phones is one example of data portability a reasonable scenario, but allowing a friend to suck up all your data related to your friends is an unacceptable use case, Ling noted.

"We at Facebook are thinking significantly on how to make that happen," he said.

Ling spent part of his talk explaining the basics of Facebook, such as how the social graph relates people and provides alerts, and that applications need to leverage the social graph. The Facebook troops, from CEO Mark Zuckerberg on down, have mastered the art of the structured presentation, staying on message and not giving away too much. Ling has had some previous practice in making corporate presentation--prior to Facebook he was general manager of eCommerce at Google, where he founded Google Checkout and managed Google Product Search.

Ben Ling, director of product marketing for the Facebook platform

(Credit: Dan Farber)

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.

Forrester's Charlene Li

(Credit: Dan Farber)

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.