The Social

The Run Around, an app created by Facebook to test its Facebook Connect project.

(Credit: Facebook)

LONDON--A lot of hands in the audience went up at the Future of Web Apps conference when Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin kicked off his talk at the conference with the question "How many people have built something on Facebook Platform before?"

Fewer went up when Morin then asked the crowd how many had used Facebook Connect, the company's new data-portability initiative. It's live now, he said.

Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect in May amid a flurry of other companies' data-portability announcements, like Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's Data Availability, which has partners like Yahoo and eBay. A few Facebook Connect partners have rolled out already, and others have announced concrete plans--like blog network Gawker Media, which says that commenters will soon be able to use their Facebook log-in credentials.

Though Facebook has a reputation for keeping its user data behind (virtual) closed doors, Morin said that's the opposite of Facebook Connect's aim. "We wanted to take down those walls and make you able to integrate Facebook anywhere on the Web in any way that you want," he said, explaining that Facebook Connect has a trifold aim: transporting your Facebook identity, making your friends lists portable, and seeing detailed activity feeds from what your friends do across the Web.

"If one of your friends did something on the Web, and you don't know about it, did it actually happen?" Morin asked jokingly. But on a more serious note, Facebook Connect could be a formidable threat to social aggregators like FriendFeed if it's deployed widely across the Web. But sites like FriendFeed simply rely on RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Facebook Connect requires active partnerships. That's why Morin's talk was such an important sales pitch for the company: the developer-heavy audience was full of the people whom Morin and his colleagues need to convert.

Demonstrating the integration of Facebook Connect using an internally created sample site called "The Run Around" (it logs workouts) as well as a smattering of examples from partners like Red Bull, Digg, Six Apart, and CBS (which publishes CNET News), Morin emphasized that it's an extremely simple process for developers.

As for privacy, something that has been a big topic for critics of data-portability projects, Morin said Facebook Connect will provide a benefit rather than a drawback. "What we're trying to do here," he said, "is putting the user fully in control. On Facebook, users have a robust set of privacy settings. With Facebook Connect, those privacy settings can transfer directly to your site. We think that's really powerful."

Digg founder Kevin Rose, in a photo taken at the last Future of Web Apps conference in Miami.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

LONDON--In the first part of our interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference, CNET News asked the Web start-up poster boy about everything from the company's Series C funding round to whether he's concerned about when those election stories stop rolling in.

In part 2, Rose got a little more specific: What would happen if Digg got hit with a stock-plunging news hoax? Will he be making acquisitions? And most importantly, does "digg" mean anything dirty in any foreign languages?

CNN had that big debacle with a user-submitted story, about Steve Jobs having a heart attack, which turned out to be fabricated. What's your policy for what happens if something gets "dugg" that isn't true and which could have a big impact on stock performance or elsewhere?
Rose: The good news is that we have a lot of people that are actively looking for that and who flag and bury content based on whether or not it's inaccurate. There's probably not a day that goes by that there isn't a piece of content flagged on the site as inaccurate.

Do you employ anyone to keep tabs on that?
Rose: No. This is all done by the masses. We're fortunate enough to have millions of people come to the site every day, and thousands of people vote. (They can say), "this is bad," and we can apply that tag to it. We'll display a little stamp that gives a warning that the community has flagged it as potentially inaccurate. We see that every single day.

If a company serves a takedown notice because something was dugg about them that isn't true, would you comply? In the past you've been very vocal about not interfering with the community.
Rose: We'll only take things down that we receive like DMCA cease-and-desists that come to us. Often it's something like that there's a link to a pirated copy of Photoshop. But normally that sort of thing gets buried on its own because users won't promote piracy directly...We get a few a month but it's never a big deal because it's usually just blatant piracy.

So talk about internationalization. It's coming late next year. As a bit of a hint, are there any countries where Digg is extremely popular and a language translation might make sense?
Rose: Well, London is our largest city overall. But outside of that, as far as different languages are concerned, there is demand from certain users coming in and writing to us, but we see a lot of Digg-type clone sites, and those are the ones that we kind of keep tabs on. So we say, OK, where are our competitors and how are they doing? There's a Spanish version of Digg, there's a German version of Digg that's called Yigg or something like that.

And they're unofficial, or do they use your API or anything like that?
Rose: They're unofficial. They do their own thing. And then there's also a Digg in Japan that has some traction as well. So we look at this stuff and we say, OK, what do we do? Do we open up a version of Digg out there? Do we acquire these companies? It's all stuff that we talk about and I think that where you'll see this expand first is a combination of both requests from users and where our competitors are starting to take off.

So you might acquire a smaller competitor?
Rose: Sure, potentially.

Would you look at all into "crowd-sourced" language translations that we're seeing on sites like Facebook and Hi5?
Rose: The translation, we don't have a ton of things that would need to be translated. It's not like we would be translating the U.S. submissions. It would be their own submissions and a whole separate engine running an instance of Digg outside of our own, but still connected so that you could go to the U.S. version of Digg and it would show up in your profile and everything. But yeah, I don't think we're that far along. Right now we're just looking at different areas and where we want to expand and the code that will be needed to make that happen. It's all stuff that we'll be doing over the next couple of months.

Do you have any offices outside of San Francisco now?
Rose: We have a small group of people. We have someone that's working for us in Scotland and also someone that's working for us in Amsterdam. No official Digg logo on the side of a building anywhere.

So do you have any plans to open more offices?
Rose: I'm sure, eventually.

When you expand internationally, you're not going to have to change the name of the site or anything? It doesn't mean anything offensive in any language?
Rose: Somebody told me it did in one language. I can't remember what it was.

Your talk today was about the future of news. How do you see yourself in the news industry as a whole, beyond the niche of social news?
Rose: I don't know that we do actually. I think we're just kind of that platform to level the playing field. We will never become a news publisher in any way, in that we won't produce our own content or host other peoples' articles. We'll always be kind of directing the flow of traffic.

When you expand into other countries and if you launch localized versions, are you planning to have to deal with governments that may not agree with Digg's views on freedom of information?
Rose: Absolutely. I think that we have always wanted to create a neutral, level playing field, and I would not be OK with changing that point of view when it comes to Digg. I'm not going to bend our rules when it comes to story promotion or our algorithms that look for a unique, diverse crowd of people thinking that something is interesting, and wouldn't allow anyone, any government to manipulate that. That might mean that we can't actively compete in some markets, but those are kind of our core principles, and those will never be compromised.

You were talking a lot about how you've got a ton of data that you haven't sourced out yet. Have you thought at all about adding an additional revenue stream by licensing analytics to clients?
Rose: Yeah, one of the big things that our business development team spends a lot of time working on is relationships with publishers. They're constantly coming to us and saying that (we) have a lot of data about their users--what they do, what they enjoy, where they're coming from, what other articles and other sites they're posting on--and it would be cool if we could get some of that data into a type of dashboard.

That's all things that we're looking at as far as tools for publishers, like some of the other things I mentioned today like a recommendation engine for publishers. It's definitely on the road map and it's stuff we want to develop, but it's just important that I'm not going to build a custom suite for CNN and not provide it to a blogger. I just want to make sure that when we do build a tool, it's available to everyone.

At this conference, there are a ton of young independent developers eager to learn. Given this financial climate, things are tougher when it comes to getting venture funding or getting a job. What would your advice to them be?
Rose: E-mail us at jobs dot digg dot com. (Laughs.) You're absolutely right in that I've talked to a lot of investors recently, some of our angels, a couple of VCs, that I know and communicate with, and it's definitely a weird time right now. Start-ups that don't have traction and don't have that kind of hockey-stick-like growth on Alexa or Compete or whatever are going to have a really difficult time raising an additional round of funding. I think that a lot of the advice going out there to start-ups right now is to pare back a little bit and get into a mode that you can survive in.

There's a way to, they call it, "raise an internal round" of funding just by cutting back on things that you don't absolutely need. Cut that out of the budget and it's like raising money because you're not spending it. I really unfortunately think that there's going to be a lot of start-ups that go by the wayside in the next 12 months. The advice I hear out there is that if you can raise money, now's the time to do it and then just put your head down for the next couple years. I know a lot of start-ups are trying to do that.

LONDON--On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the "open social Web," or a talk by Ben Huh, the "Chief Cheezburger" of goofy "lolcat" meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?

Recordon's talk would invariably be an insightful look into issues like OpenID and OpenSocial, which have faded from the headlines in recent months but are still a hot topic in the developer community. But the talk could prove to be code-heavy given the fact that the average FOWA attendee is a seasoned developer. As for Huh, listening to someone talk about pictures of cats would seem a little bit silly given the broader issues we're all facing. But as conference organizers reminded the FOWA attendees earlier in the day, Huh has actually built a successful business with his network of geeky entertainment sites.

So I opted for the cheezburgers. We could all use some levity these days.

Indeed, Huh, who has admitted that he is allergic to cats, provided a shortened version of the wacky story about how he arrived at the helm of I Can Has Cheezburger--because he was sick of his job, was telling a friend via instant message that he loved I Can Has Cheezburger, and the friend in question said, "So why don't you buy it?" He then convinced investors early last year to give him the money to buy the site from creators Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami.

"That investment pitch sounds like nothing you've ever heard before," he said, but later said that the company has been "profitable since day one." They pull in 4 million page views per day, totaled 105 million views in the month of September, and make up a full 10 percent of blog host WordPress.com's traffic.

Huh's role at I Can Has Cheezburger, he explained, is running it like a smart and efficient business, which he says has allowed it to stay on top of things and not bleed through cash. His philosophy, rooted in the core principles of simplicity and obviousness, stands in pretty stark contrast to Web 2.0 outlets that have been all about APIs, platform strategies, widgets, Ajax, and what-have-you. Content syndication? Huh's idea of that is sticking a small I Can Has Cheezburger logo on all images uploaded to the site, providing an HTML embed code, and letting visitors do whatever they want with them.

Most important, he said, was building up community features to keep people coming back. Instead of catering to a small pack of rabid and hardcore users, he suggested working on the second and third tiers because they're much bigger. "Focus on the casual base, which is a really large percentage of users, who maybe visit once a week, once a month," he suggested to the developers in the audience. "You want to convert them so that they become fans. They grow your community."

He had a few more helpful hints: it's a worthwhile investment to buy the misspelled versions of your Web site name (you'd be amazed at how many people can't spell), but it's not a worthwhile investment to offer to pay contributors (the infrastructure is hell). Don't waste money building something in-house if it already exists for your use--i.e. commenting systems. Instead of paying for a slick design, pay to keep those servers up and running.

Above all, Huh told the FOWA audience to keep things simple, citing the "experiential difference" of Google beating Yahoo initially by just putting a search box on a mostly-blank page. "Technology people have a tendency to make simple problems incredibly complicated," he said--and that includes goals. I Can Has Cheezburger's goal is that "we want you to be happy for 5 minutes every day," he said. "That's a pretty low bar."

And I Can Has Cheezburger sister site FailBlog, he said, is really catching on in the face of financial turmoil.

LONDON--Perhaps it's fitting that Digg founder Kevin Rose chose the Future of Web Apps conference here as the place to elaborate on his company's international expansion strategy. London, after all, has become the San Francisco-based Digg's biggest hub of user activity. But with headlines dominated by financial disasters, life gets a little more complicated for a company determined to build up and keep hiring.

CNET News caught up with Rose shortly after his presentation on Thursday morning. Here's the first part of our two-part interview.

You're a geek hero. You've got a huge following. How much do you want to be "the Digg guy," especially as Digg is expanding and moving beyond its roots?
Rose: Well, I absolutely love my job. It doesn't feel like I'm working, ever, so that's a nice place to be in when you've spent the last four years feeling like you don't have a job and it's just something you enjoy doing every day. So I don't think that's going to get old for quite some time. I'll be at Digg for a while.

Digg founder Kevin Rose, who has since gotten a much shorter haircut.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

So what about being such a cult figure (as host of the Diggnation podcast)?
Rose: There's a lot of people that watch our podcast, and enjoy our podcast and say, hey, you know, you guys are funny because we get there and drink beers and comment on our favorite technology and geek-culture stories, so there's that group of people who enjoy what we do as far as making the podcast. I don't know, I'm just happy that people watch and that people enjoy what we're doing. Alex (Albrecht, Diggnation's co-host) and I, when we started the podcast, we really didn't have any idea how many people were going to be into it. We were just, like, "Hey, we used to work together at TechTV, why not just do something fun and hit record?" Even if nobody watches we'll still continue to do it because we like hanging out.

You said earlier this morning that Digg's going to focus on expanding its appeal, that right now only a tenth of Digg's visitors have registered for user accounts. Is Diggnation going to change, too?
Rose: No, Diggnation will always stay the same. It's just kind of a fun show. Only a small percentage of the people who watch Diggnation actually go to Digg, there's only about 250,000 people per week that watch Diggnation, and Digg has millions and millions of people. So it's not like they're really closely tied together.

You said you're going to stay at Digg for a while. You just raised a big Series C round. Does this mean the company's going to stay independent (i.e. not get bought) for longer than originally planned?
Rose: The nice thing about the last raise is that it wasn't, like "oh, we're out of money, we need to raise more," it was more based on the fact that we knew we wanted to expand into different languages and we knew we had to buy racks of servers over in Europe, and all that takes capital to make happen.

We sat down and said, okay, where do we want to be a few years from now and what are the resources that we need to make that happen? We would've ran out of cash had we executed on that plan to expand internationally. That raise was really, okay, let's build the team that we need in San Francisco to continue to evolve the product, and invest in R&D and continue to scale the site, but at the same time let's talk about international next year. So that's what this is for.

What about other social news sites? Are any of them doing things that Digg isn't that you're hoping to emulate in one way or another?
Rose: That's a good question. I really don't use anybody else's product. I've never used their services at all, I think I've maybe "buzzed" one article when (Yahoo Buzz) first came out. We don't really base our product decisions on what anybody else is doing.

But there's been no instance where you saw something really cool and wished you'd thought of it first?
Rose: I've seen some really interesting mashups of other peoples' data that are really fun to play around with, and I've thought it would be really cool to see what Digg data looks like with that, but I can't think of any one feature. I think some of the stuff that StumbleUpon is doing with their toolbar and providing recommendations in the toolbar is really interesting to us, but not right now. We have a very basic toolbar right now today.

How has the current financial situation changed things at Digg? That stuff really started to unfold right after you raised your Series C round.
Rose: Nothing's changed. One of the nice things about Digg is we've always run fairly lean. We have a small team and we're a very text-heavy site, so as far as bandwidth is concerned it's not like we're YouTube spending a million dollars a week on bandwidth. For us it's just always being conscious of who we're hiring and why we're hiring them, and do we need that person or not. We won't be a 400-person company in a year or two years. It's just picking the spots where we need some help and growing slowly, and staging that growth so it mirrors our own Web traffic growth...it's always been out of necessity.

Are you anticipating a traffic drop after the election?
Rose: We don't anticipate that, no. That's a good question though...we've always seen traffic grow month over month. We're fortunate enough to be in that position, and we've seen the different bumps as little things that come along. When the Olympics was going on we saw a little bump ther. When there's big tech news or Apple events you always see bumps there. We'll have to see. We haven't really done any estimates on that.

LONDON--Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It's time to grow up.

"We have to do better," he said in his talk, called "The Future of News," and said that it's time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. "Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?"

Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts--those are the people actually "Digging." That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics hve been saying all along: that it's reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.

As a result, Rose explained, Digg's strategy going forward--one of the reasons why it raised $28.7 million in a Series C round last month--is to make the service more relevant to the average user. Digg has started to experiment with personalization and recommendation, something that Rose frequently discusses in his town hall Webcasts with the company's CEO, Jay Adelson. Introducing a "similar users" feature on the "upcoming" page of Digg increased friend adding fourfold and Digging by 40 percent.

Rose, who has ditched his trademark shaggy coif for a more mature buzz cut, didn't actually talk much about the future of news beyond Digg, but implied that he hopes Digg will be an industry example for the ongoing evolution of something much broader. He also didn't say anything about the pressures of an unfriendly economic climate, but his down-to-business attitude suggested that he realizes things aren't just fun-and-games for Web 2.0 anymore.

The impetus right now, he kept stressing, is to make a social news site personally relevant.

Digg has a lot of data that it hasn't opened up yet, and that it will start rolling out to the public to make the site more relevant for average people. Pooling users into "dynamic" groups by interest is paramount, as is customizing the site for people who might not want all those stories about iPhones and Barack Obama. Beyond that, there's more: Digg has used internal algorithms to identify what Rose calls "prescient users," or tastemakers who have a high probability of Digging something early on that will eventually become very popular.

One person in the audience asked Rose whether catering to uber-niche interests will actually be a negative force for Digg's young users, narrowing their worldview. Again, Rose said that the expansion of the site will provide all kinds of opportunities: filtering Diggs by regions of the world, for example. Internationalizing the site, on that note, is also a big goal, and should start to roll out late next year. And though the site now relies on its display ad contract with Microsoft, "Diggable ads" in some form will eventually help Rose's company make a few extra bucks.

But Rose, a bona fide geek hero, assured the audience--a crowd of developers mostly from the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, many of whom looked like they were young enough to be skipping school for the conference--that Digg won't lose its wacky-news cachet as it matures and expands.

"We truly believe the front page of Digg will always be that random (and) crazy," Rose said. "We don't want to get rid of that."

MIAMI--When the Future of Web Apps conference wound down Friday night, a few things were clear, not the least of which is the fact that open standards are a big deal.

Google engineer Kevin Marks gave a talk at FOWA about application program interfaces (APIs) and Google's role in the developer community. Marks, a veteran of blog search start-up Technorati, now works on the search giant's OpenSocial initiative, which is working toward a universal standard for social-networking standards and is slated to launch on MySpace.com and Hi5 as well as Google's own Orkut soon. He also works on the Social Graph API, which aims to consolidate data across disparate social networks.

On Friday, amid a frenzy of chatter about open this and open that at FOWA, Marks took some time to chat with CNET News.com about OpenSocial on MySpace, that wacky Silicon Valley exuberance, and his view that a tough economy won't hurt innovation--because the cost of innovation has gone down.

P.S.: No, I wasn't given any restrictions on what to ask, and we didn't touch upon the subject of health care, in case you were wondering.

You've been speaking to a lot of developers at this conference. What has your most consistent advice for them been?
Kevin Marks: I say, "OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?"

Would you encourage them to use OpenID?
Marks: OpenID is closer to the Social Graph API, because OpenID is like, "I own this URL."

Do you think there's any kind of conflict between the Social Graph API and OpenID? Will they be able to co-exist?
Marks: No, OpenID and the Social Graph API are perfectly complementary. OpenID is one of the things that we index as a connection, and if you use OpenID to say, "Yes, I own this URL," that means that you can call the Social Graph API and see what assertions spread out from that URL. So it'll give you more confidence that the person is who they say they are. It's not me giving the site your URL and impersonating you, because you verified that URL.

There's obviously a lot of excitement about openness, but with all this talk about it, do you think there's too much exuberance? Do you think people are overlooking anything that's going to make it a tougher process?
Marks: No, I think it's a healthy trend. The point is that open standards are better than closed standards, and open-source software is better than closed-sourced software in lots of ways. There's a lot of good to doing stuff in public and doing it in the open and getting community feedback, and that's a big part of OpenSocial particularly. We started that out, we announced it in November, and basically said, "OK, this is out in public now, we want to have a public debate about what we're doing, this isn't some secret thing we're going to hide for a couple years and then ship. This is out there."

We've been iterating with different developers, going around and finding what we need to change and updating that for the last few months, and now we're at a point where we've got some code that we're ready to release on three very large social networks over the next month. So that process has been out there, and it's been getting more open over time.

Have you been addressing a lot of questions about why the Orkut launch was delayed?
Marks: There's delayed and there's delayed. That team was making the decision "can we support this now?" and "is this ready to do?" I haven't seen a lot of complaints about that. What I have noticed a bit is they were waiting for a big launch to come back and look at this again to write their apps. I'm expecting that will change once we have Orkut, MySpace, and Hi5 within the next month. Those are three very active "sandboxes" and there are a whole lot of developers in there.

The MySpace platform launch is coming in a matter of days. Can you give any hints as to what we might see, what might surprise us?
Marks: I think the surprises will be how users interact with it, because that's the stuff you can't know until you do a big launch. I can't give you any code surprises, but what we'll find is that users will start using it and developers will start realizing that it fits in different places and there are different things you can do.

One of the things that MySpace has that is interesting is that you can install applications both on your profile page and on your user page. So you can have applications that are sort of performing to others, and applications that are shown only to yourself so that you can analyze things. If you think about the social networks, there is this split between public performance and private interaction. Some sites are all public performance and everything happens on the profile, and some sites there's much more of a reflective view of showing the user what's going on. MySpace has both those pages.

And OpenSocial has these abstractions that will tell you where your app's running and what the context is. So you can write the same app but it will give you different things in both contexts. It'll do one thing when it's on your profile showing to the world, and another thing when it's on your page just showing things to you. One will be outward facing, one will be inward facing.

Do you think that Facebook is gravitating toward a more open model?
Marks: From our point of view, we think it would be great if they all did OpenSocial. From their point of view, they've got an API that fits their site very, very well, because they designed it around that. OpenSocial we designed to be this abstract generalization that fits a lot of sites, and that's a lot of the value it brings developers...For Facebook, that may not be as attractive to them, but I suspect it will be attractive to developers. We've already seen somebody build a "run OpenSocial inside Facebook" thing as an experiment, and I expect we'll see more of that...Bebo's running both APIs so I expect that will be an interesting place for people to experiment as well.

Do you get a lot of requests about interoperability, so that for example an application on a MySpace profile could communicate with the same application on a Bebo profile?
Marks: It's one of those things that people talk about, bringing the users between sites. But that's one of the things that actually quite hard to do, because there are two boundaries to overcome. One is that there are differences between the sites, and the other is the users' privacy concerns, which is why they've got different accounts on different sites anyway. The Social Graph API works with the publicly articulated things that are out there and connect them between sites, but that's there to work. Doing that between the private ones is a harder problem because you've got a permission barrier in each case.

It's something that we could potentially do, and the part of the Social Graph API that does the profile ID mapping stuff and canonicalization could be used to do that, but you've still got to ask the user and connect them and things like that. And if the stuff's not public, you've got to not just ask the user, you've got to ask the user's friends about bridging the stuff. Sometimes people blur the difference between open and public. You want your code to be open, but you don't necessarily want all the data to be public because people have explicitly given it to the social network with the trust that they'll treat it in a certain way.

What's it like working with an OpenSocial partner that is very concerned about maintaining a very uniform look, feel, and attitude on its site--like LinkedIn, which is very focused on keeping things strictly professional?
Marks: Each container obviously has the ability to police which apps run on their site, and we expect to see some variations there, with some being wide open and some having "white lists" and some having "blacklists."

Have you turned down any requests from particular sites that want to be OpenSocial partners, either something that's controversial or something that just doesn't fit?
Marks: No. Would we do that? I can't even think of how we would do that, or why. It's an open standard, an API. They can check the code out and build it themselves. I expect we will see all kinds of different sites doing it. One of the interesting things has been seeing that Oracle was interested, and Salesforce.com was interested, which you don't think of in the same breath as Facebook or MySpace, but they have a large collection of information about people that's correlated together and it makes sense for them to have an API to do that.

You gained a bit of blog buzz for saying, "Before you think about your business model, think about your pleasure model." Where I'm from, in New York, that sort of thing makes us roll our eyes and call it Silicon Valley bubble-speak. Do you ever get criticized for that view?
Marks: I first said that when I was talking to a bunch of nonprofits. I was at a conference before I joined Google, and these (nonprofits) were talking about how they can work on the Web and work on their business models. And I was like, "What? Where did that come from? You're charities! You're not supposed to be 'businesses.'" A lot of it is that people think they have to put a business in it, and show revenue, and put something out...(but) you have to work out what it is you're doing that will make people want to use your site and come back to it, and why that's useful and interesting. And then, later on, you can say, "If I've got a lot of interest in this, I can probably make some money from it."

Now it does sound fantastic, because you've got to invest a lot of time and money to do something, so why would you start a business that way? Part of the point of this Web stuff is it's lowering the barriers to entry. You can build an application much more easily. You can put something up and see if people like it or not, and tweak it. One of the points of OpenSocial is to make that stuff even easier because you can build an application without having your own server, you can run it inside the social network itself, you can let it store data in the social network's site, and later on you can decide, "OK, this is interesting, I've got a bunch of users in this app, I should connect them to an external server, I should work out ways of serving advertising or something."

That's a lot of where this comes from. It's not that in the Bay Area you have loads of money all the time. It's actually that the threshold for launching some of these things has gone down a lot, so it's no longer "I have to go and get myself a hundred million dollars" and spend two months, two years, three years doing product development and then launch the stuff...You can start stuff and play with it. And that's a lot of the message of this (Future of Web Apps) conference, is that that is a way of thinking and working.

And you think that's still going to hold true if the economy continues to be so volatile? Obviously a lot of people are talking about Google's numbers in January and Web 2.0 in general when it comes to this.
Marks: A lot of these sites were built after the dot-com crash. If you look at the history of Flickr, it was built in a firm in Vancouver where their consulting business was a bit quiet and they could build stuff on the side. That's part of this. The disruptive stuff is always at the edges and the margins and being done by people on the outside, and Google and other companies will try to do that internally.

Google has a very strong culture of internal innovation and will see that stuff, but there will always be people with a bright idea, and if they've got the ability to execute on that, and we can provide open-source software that helps them do that, that improves the whole thing. A lot of this stuff is the "improving the Web" thing, and that sounds like hippie West Coast nonsense or whatever you want to call it, but the point for Google is, if we can improve the Web and make the Web better, more people will use the Web, and anyone who uses the Web uses Google.

And there are still no plans to profit off of OpenSocial?
Marks: It's not a "Google open social Web," it's an open social Web, and this is part of our help to catalyze the standardization and help it converge in the same way that we're working on HTML 5, we're working on TCP-IP standards and a whole bunch of other standards and open source projects in Google, because they're complementary to our core business. By making the Web and the Net better, there's this nice feedback, and Google is far-sighted enough to do that and has enough money that it can keep that cycle going.

We're investing in solar energy. If you look at that, and ask why we'd be doing that, well, we use a lot of energy. If we can make energy cheaper, that's good for us, and if it makes us good for everyone else in the world, that's also a nice side benefit.

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

Marks wasn't the only one expounding upon e-mail's suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.

That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up's architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site's server administrators. Twitter's unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.

The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.

MIAMI--Joseph Smarr, chief systems architect at Plaxo, has become somewhat of an icon of social media's future. An ardent supporter of open standards, Smarr is arguably one of the biggest proponents of Google's OpenSocial who can't officially claim to be a Googler. So it's fitting that Smarr has played a prominent role at the Future of Web Apps conference; CNET News.com had a chance to catch up with him on Thursday and find out some more about what "open" really means and what's next at Plaxo.

Plaxo was the first major social site to implement Google's OpenSocial. How has that been going?
Smarr: OpenSocial itself is still kind of a work in progress... (Critics) said OpenSocial was announced and then, "There's nothing there, what happened?" But I think it's important to remember that the timing had more to do with the fact that they (Google) saw all these companies saying, "Oh, we need our own platform" and there was all this fragmentation. That message of saying, "Wait a minute, guys, you don't all have to do your own thing, why don't we get together and do something together?" You sort of had to say that soon enough that it wasn't too late.

When you talk to developers, what are the most frequent questions you get about OpenSocial?
Smarr: I think a lot of them are very interested in the sort of viral aspect of it because a lot of developers are doing this stuff because they really want to get in front of a lot of eyeballs...Facebook imposes all these limitations about how many invitations you can send out, who you can invite, who can see the stuff. They're obviously doing that to prevent abusive use of the stuff, but it also potentially curtails legitimate use of it as well.

For example, a site like LinkedIn or Plaxo, which caters in general to a more professional demographic, less kids, that sort of thing, there might be less of everyone wanting to throw sheep at each other and that kind of thing. You might be able to give people a little more rope to broadcast things, to show each other. I think everyone hopes through OpenSocial that they can encourage the right kind of sharing.

So would you let people throw sheep at each other on Plaxo?
Smarr: It's unclear. But we do want Plaxo to be genuinely useful and about staying in touch between real people. I think there's lots of things we could've done.

How has Plaxo evolved since you've been there?
Smarr: Well, I was their first employee. I've been there six years. When I joined, we were still being incubated out of Sequoia (Capital)'s offices while they were trying to close the first round of funding...it's been a fascinating ride.

So what's the transition been like from focusing on straight-up contact management to growing and evolving as the Web has become more social?
Smarr: The world really changed around us. If you think back to 2002, when we conceived of and launched Plaxo, there was no social networking, there was no Friendster, there was no Flickr. This notion of living your life online didn't really exist. So I think in a way the business plan was oddly prescient. It was like, there needs to be this software that lives in a cloud that helps you stay in touch with people even though you're all changing jobs and using different tools. It wasn't called social networking, but it was (the same) pinpoint.

Joseph Smarr, Plaxo chief platform architect

(Credit: Plaxo)

Facebook's obviously having some issues these days with the "app spam" controversy. That's sort of parallel to what Plaxo had some problems with early on. Would you say that they could learn a lesson from what you guys experienced?
Smarr: I wouldn't say that that's the case. I think the high-level lesson is there's always this tension in start-ups between making everything very one-at-a-time opt-in but then having a hard time to actually get growth going, and trying to get things accelerated and do the right thing for your users but in a way that actually helps things take off. We've certainly learned over time about when it's okay to go a little faster and when you have to sort of pull back.

Do you think that people would have the same "acquaintance spam" problems with Plaxo if it had emerged now rather than circa 2003?
Smarr: The stuff that has happened since is so much more egregious than anything we ever did. We were one of these victims of being one of the first people to do it right, and people weren't used to it. So many of the social networks now will like, pull in your address book and just e-mail everybody without telling you, and use these very misleading tactics, and we never were trying to be shifty. I sort of marvel at what's gone on since then...how many e-mail notifications have you gotten from Facebook or Twitter? If you actually look at the volume, just because of how many people use these things, it's just huge amounts of e-mail.

Bacn!
Smarr: Exactly, right, bacn. And that's what we think is one of the real opportunities with the stuff we're doing now with trying to make an open social Web where everyone can communicate. Why does everyone ask me to confirm that I'm your friend as though I've never used any other site in my life? It's only because they don't talk to each other, the users aren't empowered to take the connections they made in one place and use them in another place.

We've got all these initiatives and coalitions and standards that are starting to emerge. There's OpenID, DataPortability, OpenSocial, and the like. You're getting all these different standards. Are they going to run into compatibility problems?
Smarr: I think the good news there is that because most of these are these community-driven efforts, there are all these people who are talking to each other all the time. All these people who started OpenID and OAuth and OpenSocial and DataPortability, they all started for different reasons, and yet they're all converging into this shared vision of a user-centric online identity kind of thing, and that's one of the proof points in my mind why this is really the right way to go, why we can tell it's going to win. The pieces just fit together, not because they were designed to, but because they all sort of have got the same vision...(it's) just like a perfect storm. They're all happening at the same time, and they're all filling in the right pieces. It's really cool.

How often are you faced with privacy concerns? Silicon Valley might be thrilled about having a single identity online, but some people might find that a bit daunting, frightening even.
Smarr: Privacy is at the center of everything we talk about. It's not just about people seeing stuff you didn't want them to see, it's also about maintaining the right level of professionalism and signal-to-noise ratio. So it's kind of like, people that I'm doing technical stuff with here and then they're putting up photos of their kids. It's not that they don't mind me seeing a picture of their kids, but that's not the relationship I have with them.

But if people have to curate their online identities like that, couldn't that lead to more fragmentation because people are seeing different faces of each other?
Smarr: The problem is, right now, you can't have it either way. Right now it's fragmented whether you want it to be or not. A lot of these technologies are going to let you sort of consolidate your online identity. Now it's either public or it's private, but this is going to allow you to share different things with different people. I think it's going to work really well. It's certainly something users are going to have to learn how to deal with, but users have to learn how to deal with a lot of stuff online. But it's fundamentally what users want.

Has there been any fallout over the whole controversy that took over blog chatter earlier this year when Robert Scoble was testing a Plaxo script on Facebook and got his Facebook account banned?
Smarr: The main takeaway from that was that as much as people want control over their data and the ability to make it portable, there still are some legitimate debates to be had about, say, if I'm sharing info with you in one context. How much should I be in the loop when you take it into another context? We thought it was a more cut-and-dry issue. I think ultimately you still want to be able to take people you've met in one place and put them in another place, so I don't think there's anything too crazy going on there, and we're trying to do the same thing. But it's still interesting how that all works. In the physical world, if you give me your business card, you wouldn't tell me "Oh, you can put it in Outlook, but don't you dare put it in Lotus Notes."

The meta-goal of a lot of what we were doing was to raise awareness and get people talking about these sorts of issues. That, I'd say, was a resounding success.

Wait, so did you know that Scoble would get banned from Facebook?
Smarr: No, that didn't play out at all the way we had originally intended. Scoble was being an early alpha tester of this feature since he's got 5,000 friends on Facebook and that's sort of a good "stress tester."

Yup, and everyone knows he's got 5,000 friends.
Smarr: And he's obviously been very much a vocal supporter of the kind of stuff we're working on. But then it triggered some rate limit on Facebook and got his account shut down, and then he blogged about it...when we woke up (the next day) we were kind of in damage control mode all day. I think if we'd gotten a chance to tell the story the way we wanted to, people would've seen that there's sort of less than meets the eye here, that this is a useful and genuinely good and not privacy-scary sort of thing. But we certainly did intend it to be a conversation starter, but we were also actually trying to build a useful feature for our users. It's one of our most-requested features.

Speaking of people with a lot of contacts, there's been a lot of press about how Bill Gates has stopped using Facebook and now he's signed on to LinkedIn. Does he use Plaxo?
Smarr: I actually don't know. We don't spy on our users. It's not like Facebook where anybody can access anybody's user records. We do have, I think, a lot of prominent people who use Plaxo, because we get anonymous statistical samples within Plaxo (about job title). "CEO" and "president" and "executive" and that kind of thing are at the top. So you might think of contact management as something that people at high levels would delegate to admins or something like that, but it's clearly like, being successful has a lot to do with really staying in touch and knowing people, right, so it's something that these people all sort of do themselves.

So how could Bill Gates use it?
Smarr: Bill Gates is such a special example it's hard to know exactly, but I think he, just like anybody else, meets all these people and wants to see what they're doing, it's a really hard problem to stay in touch with all of the online content in particular that people are doing. In particular, if he had friends or colleagues or family he wanted to stay in touch with, I'm sure even he has aggregation problems. People are putting up photos on Flickr or Picasa or Microsoft or whatever it is, and just being able to say, you know, "Ray Ozzie posted vacation photos" would be really useful.

Recently there were some rumors that you guys had gotten bought. Where did that all come from?
Smarr: It's Silicon Valley, I don't know, it's a very gossipy town and especially whenever they smell money in the water, everybody kind of goes crazy.

Invent a theoretical company who would be your dream buyer.
Smarr: I don't think we need to be bought by anybody. I take it as a testament to the fact that what we're doing is useful and relevant that all these people were talking about, "oh, these guys should be buying Plaxo." Nobody was saying "That's stupid, they're not doing anything useful." It's kind of like reading your own obituary in a way.

What are we going to see coming up? Is the focus now going to be on getting OpenSocial in there, getting the developers on board?
Smarr: That's one piece of it. Actually, the DataPortability piece is really what I think the future is for us. Pulse is doing great in its own right, but we really see the evolution of that. We really think Plaxo's going to become a kind of dashboard for the social Web where you sort of help manage and maintain relationships across all these different sites, see all the activity there. There's just so much to do there. It's so fragmented right now and most users aren't just using any of it right now because it's so hard to have to create your profile and do everything from scratch and stay in touch and all that. The fact that we can live inside the tools that you use every day, on your phone, on Outlook, all these Web sites, means that I think we can take all these people who are using that daily pattern and show them this whole world of content. That's got such legs...It feels like we're on the cusp of a whole new era of the Web.

If you had to give one piece of advice to Mark Zuckerberg, what would it be?
Smarr: Open is good for business. I don't think Facebook has anything to fear from being closed down to user control of data. I think they get that. A lot of them really do believe in openness and transparency, they just have to get there in stages. Ultimately I think they'll be a great beneficiary of this.

This post was updated at 4:49 PM PT with a clarification from Matt Mullenweg.

MIAMI--"I'm Matt Mullenweg, and I'm famous for eating 108 Chicken McNuggets and surviving," the eccentric 24-year-old WordPress founder said in his talk at the Future of Web Apps conference, explaining that he's no longer continually the No. 1 "Matt" in a Google search because the dancing viral-video star "Where The Hell Is Matt?" gives him a run for his money.

At FOWA, Mullenweg was slated to talk about both the physical and psychological "architecture" of WordPress, which has gained both positive buzz and popularity for being simply constructed, easy to use, and remarkably efficient.

"Scale is what separates us from the other industries of the world," he explained, saying that it's only in the technology business that a tiny entrepreneurial team can create something used by millions of people. WordPress, Mullenweg said, powers 2,523,000 blogs, gets 135 million global unique visitors, and has only 19 full-time employees.

Matt Mullenweg

(Credit: Wordpress)

"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one).

Mullenweg added later in a conversation that he didn't intend "unfortunately" to sound the way it did and that he meant no offense to WordPress' major media clients.

He had quite a bit of advice for the audience. "Be the person in the support forums who's answering everybody's questions," Mullenweg advised start-up entrepreneurs in the room. If you don't look like you're hard-core about your company and its users, he said, you won't build up a following.

It was a pretty geek speak-intensive talk, with Mullenweg explaining to the developer-filled concert hall how WordPress handles server and bandwidth demands, and how to take advantage of systems like Memcached, which was originally developed for social-media pioneer LiveJournal. But he also expounded a bit on the Web 2.0 landscape and some of the issues it faces--like spam, the ugly side of the open-social Web. WordPress has deleted more than 800,000 "splogs," or spam blogs, for example.

Spammers are "the terrorists of Web 2.0," Mullenweg said. "They come into our communities and take advantage of our openness." He suggested that people may have moved away from e-mail and toward messaging systems like Facebook messaging and Twitter to get away from spam. But with all those "zombie bites" showing up in his Facebook in-box, he explained, the spammers are pouncing on openness once again.

He also has a pretty nontraditional view of ad revenues, the supposed cash coffer of new-media sites. "Most of you have never, and will never, seen an ad on WordPress.com," Mullenweg said, referring to WordPress.org's free blog-hosting arm. "We decided to show ads only on certain pages, only to the people who were sort of random drive-by visitors...if you use Firefox, you'll never see an ad, no matter what, mostly because I like Firefox."