Webware

Google is apparently "getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.

It's a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can't happen fast enough. But Google shouldn't stop with its own properties.

The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we've seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don't get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.

Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.

As I've argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.

This is as it should be.

Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I'm almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.

I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.

So, dominate me, Google. You've been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I'll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

YouTube RealTime, a new technology that brings an as-it-happens social aspect to Google's video-sharing site, shows promise but suffers shortcomings.

RealTime has the potential to bring some of the communal aspects of TV to the more solitary phenomenon of online video. With it, a toolbar across the bottom of a YouTube page shows you what your friends are watching and commenting on, shows them what you're up to, and pops up invitations from friends who want you to see something. It's an opt-in service, and you can temporarily go into a private mode, so you can still close the curtains if you want.

YouTube RealTime can show what your friends are watching.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

RealTime launched publicly on Wednesday through an invitation-only viral marketing campaign, with each invitee getting 25 invitations to dole out. Unfortunately for Google, that's where my first problems arrived.

People love to share amusing videos on YouTube by e-mail, Twitter, blogs, and instant messaging, so it might appear at first blush that YouTube is ripe for an injection of social activity.

The YouTube social network
The YouTube social life largely happens outside YouTube itself today, but RealTime tries to bring that activity into YouTube's domain.

YouTube has its own infrastructure for granting friend status to other YouTube members, sending messages to people, and tracking what they're up to. YouTube RealTime relies on that infrastructure.

So the first thing you're going to have to do to make it useful is figure out how to use it and build yourself a whole new social network. Perhaps you have one already on hand, but nobody I know does, and a lot of people I know already have social-network invitation fatigue.

If you do get a YouTube RealTime invitation from some Net hipster who's already a friend, you'll soon have 25 invitations of your own to extend, but before you can use them, you'll have to send out the necessary friend requests. It's unfortunate that Google couldn't take advantage of social graph information already established at Gmail, Orkut, Picasa, Google profiles, or wherever else Google users already have painstakingly built them up.

A friend's invitation to watch a video looks like this.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

However, once people are your friends, you can invite them to use RealTime; the invitation is actually more of a notification that the feature will be enabled when they next log in to the YouTube. When they do so, the RealTime toolbar will appear on the bottom of their YouTube pages.

Even after I sorted out my confusion about the differences between inviting people to be my YouTube friends vs my RealTime friends, I had some problems Wednesday with the service. At times people I knew to be online at YouTube showed to be otherwise. However, the problem passed as the day wore on.

Not revelatory
This brings me to my second letdown with the service. RealTime didn't really make using YouTube any different for me. It didn't make me realize, "Oh, so that's what I've been missing about YouTube!"

I'm as big a fan of viral videos as anyone, and I'm accustomed to sending the latest finds individually to a few select friends by e-mail or IM or broadly over Twitter or maybe even a blog post. Perhaps if I had dedicated moments of exploring videos collectively with my friends RealTime would be more relevant, but for now, those existing communication channels work fine and don't require that my friends actually be logged into YouTube or included in my social network there.

When you're first signed in, RealTime will require you to enable it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

But what's next? Google doubtless isn't done with YouTube RealTime, though, and I could see this being different and perhaps more compelling for some YouTube users.

Here's one idea: unify it with Gmail's IM and video chat technology so you could communicate in other ways besides just messages that "Stephen has shared a video with you."

Here's another: a split-screen interface that shows thumbnails of the actual videos your friends are watching. Clicking on one puts it front and center in the YouTube interface.

So despite my lukewarm reaction to the service overall, I could be persuaded to come around if Google makes something more revolutionary out of it.

Identify is a small, experimental Firefox extension that quickly analyzes a contact's user name to pull up biographical information, and grab links to their profiles on other social services. For instance, if I were to use it on Rafe Needleman's Twitter profile it would be able to tell me what other services he's using, like FriendFeed, Facebook, Last.fm, and more. The same thing would happen if I checked from his profile on one of those other sites, too.

At least that's how it's supposed to work. It did better on some of my friends than others. A lot of how well the extension can do depends on the two tools it's using to get the job done: Yahoo Query Language and Google's Social Graph API, the latter of which only discovers connections when they're both public and in its index. Creator Madgex has married the two tools together to quickly figure out where the profiles are and provide links directly to them.

The entire process only takes a few seconds, and works via a keyboard shortcut, Alt+i on PCs and Ctrl+i on Macs. This is easy to remember--unless you're going back and forth between machines.

An alternate to using services like this is to take someone's full user name and run it through a name checking service like the recently-reviewed KnowEm and Namechk. If they've got the same user name across multiple sites, this takes some of the gopher work off your plate.

Identify was able to see my friend Robert's profiles on Digg and Technorati, along with his personal information, which came from his Twitter profile.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Baseball season is almost under way. So it's time we all get online and start forming our fantasy leagues. Perennial favorite sites from ESPN, Yahoo, and MLB.com will probably top the list for most people when they decide which service to use, but more goes into fantasy baseball than simply signing up for leagues. What about stats? Did you forget about the news? Did you happen to remember scouting tools?

Hear are the rest of the sites you need.

Step 1: Form the league

There are a number of fine league-building services out there, but if you want to have the best experience, stick to these selected few:

CBS Sports Not only is CBS Sports' Fantasy Baseball league free, it provides real-time scoring, live chat so you can talk with buddies during the game, and adequate player news and stats to help you make more informed decisions. I've used it a few times over the past five years and find it to be easy to use and high-powered for a private or public league. Disclosure: CBS Sports and CNET are owned by the same parent company: CBS.

ESPN Fantasy Baseball provides an easy-to-use interface.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

ESPN Fantasy Baseball I've also used ESPN's fantasy sports services for years, and I've been impressed with how much they offer. Leagues are free, player news and stats come straight from ESPN, one of the best sources for sports news, and managing your team couldn't be easier. But ESPN's penchant for charging for extra scouting help and more in-depth player information is annoying.

MLB.com If you want the most basic offering for your fantasy baseball league, you'll probably want to use Major League Baseball's service. It's free and makes it easy to set up a league. But I'm generally unimpressed with its stat tracking, and managing a team isn't nearly as easy as it is in competing services. It's a well-known fantasy site, but it's not the best.

Yahoo Sports Yahoo was one of the first companies to start fantasy leagues. More than a decade later, it's still providing an outstanding experience. All the leagues are free, player information is always up-to-date and reliable, and the service's stat tracking is second to none. Yahoo does charge some hefty fees for access to a draft kit ($9.99) and a scouting report ($14.99), but it's still a great service.

In another expansion of its Profiles site, Google has enabled people to share their contact information with selected contacts, a move that offers modest convenience for users of the service and valuable data to Google.

The feature shows as a "Contact info" tab; clicking on it shows whatever contact information you've entered and the note, "You are not sharing your contact information with anyone. Edit your profile to add contact info, and then choose who to share it with so that they always have the most up-to-date information."

Google Profiles is hardly a Facebook crusher or a LinkedIn slayer, but it is getting gradually more elaborate, as Google builds it up. In October, user profiles became visible to search engines. In November came identity authentication and a mechanism to let people contact you without sharing your e-mail address.

Here's why this Profiles move is interesting: telling Google whom you entrust with your personal information is a good way of identifying the close members of your social circle--in other words, the strong links in your social graph.

Yahoo is beginning the transition to its new socially-enabled platform, laying the foundation for a "universal profile" Thursday.

The new profile page will allow users to make limited changes to their profiles, such as status updates, adding connections (friends in the social graph) from their Yahoo address book, and listing interests. Users can change settings, control permissions and manage notifications across various Yahoo properties.

Yahoo 360 (Yahoo's 2005 attempt to create a social network ) member profiles will be migrated to the new system, but Yahoo 360 won't be going away yet, according to Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

(Credit: Yahoo)

"There is not a lot to demo in this release. It's a foundation release that will allow other things to happen and developers to do things," Stoneham told me. "We have to make sure it works before turning on connections to big traffic properties. The big bang theory doesn't work at this scale. It like Apple rolling out a new operating system release." In September, Yahoo gave developers access to its new social APIs and Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) for writing applications that run on Yahoo Web pages.

Stoneham expects Yahoo's social graph to "light up quickly" soon, however. Over the next few months, more Yahoo property activity feeds will show up in the profile page and additional aggregation points, such as the home page and Yahoo Mail, will aggregate feeds and allow connections. In Yahoo Mail, users will see messages from contacts, connection requests and activity updates from contacts. The Yahoo.com home page will offer a module that shows the activity updates of a user's connections.

In this screen from the January 2008 CES demo, Yahoo Mail shows messages from a user's most important connections as well as their status updates.

(Credit: Yahoo)

In addition, within the next few months Yahoo is adding a new universal header on every page of the service to unify key navigation elements. Along with the usual links to the Yahoo home page, MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail, a new profile link will provide access to user profiles and contacts.

Over time, properties such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Yahoo Buzz, will be socially enabled beyond activity feeds, Stoneham said. He gave an example of requesting a review from a user's connections while perusing a product page in Yahoo Shopping. When a review is posted it shows up in the user's activity feed. In addition, miniprofiles are available to get information quickly about the reviewer. If the reviewer isn't a personal connection, the profile won't have all the contact information.

During an interview in September, Venkat Panchapakesan, head of Yahoo's Audience Technology Group, listed the three top challenges Yahoo faces in bringing its social dimension to scale: making applications such as Yahoo Mail work well on desktop and mobile devices; data privacy; and converting all profiles to a single name space (the universal profile) and lighting up the social graph. One challenge partially down, and two to go.

Correction: Previously it was reported that Yahoo Buzz activity feeds would be surfaced at this time in the new profile pages. A Yahoo spokesperson said that the Buzz feed was not yet implemented.

See also:

Yahoo Open: Finally, a real answer to Google

Inside Yahoo's social network

From L to R: Dave Morin, Josh Elman, Ruchi Sanghvi, Ben Ling, and moderator Dave McClure

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

ARLINGTON, Va.--A quartet of Facebook's platform engineers took the stage on Wednesday morning at the Graphing Social Patterns: East conference, for a discussion led by conference organizer Dave McClure about what's next for the social network's developer initiative. Speaking to the developer-heavy audience at the small conference were senior platform manager Dave Morin, program manager Josh Elman, product manager Ruchi Sanghvi, and director of platform product marketing Benjamin Ling.

Morin said that the social network has hit the milestone of 80 million active users worldwide.

As is typically the case with conference panels featuring Facebook employees, the four participants were refined and well-coached, their dialogue frequently dotted with mentions of Facebook's "trusted environment" and the desire to give users more control over their data. But their message was clear: Facebook has to rein in its platform, which now has over 24,000 applications available, to keep that madcap rush of Zombies, Vampires, and Pirates vs. Ninjas under wraps.

"The (developer) community learned a lot of viral techniques to grow, and what we found is users didn't really like that," Ling said of the social network's "app spam" problem. "We opened up the set of tools to enable developers to build great applications, expecting that they would build applications similarly to the way that Facebook had been building applications. And some of them did, some of them didn't, and I think a lot of them didn't."

Ling continued, "What we learned is that it was important to actually add a couple of controls into the system, create the right incentives by giving more allocations based on user feedback." That's where Facebook's impending profile redesign comes into the equation. It'll use a tabbed interface to keep many applications off the front page, cleaning up the experience but leaving many developers to worry that they won't be able to get the same kind of traction. Considering some developers were already concerned that Facebook had been instituting new regulations on the platform that made it tougher for them to spread the word about their applications, it could be a shaky PR move.

All four panelists said that while some developers may initially have issues with the redesign, it will eventually make it possible for Facebook to offer a "richer" and more dynamic experience and let applications tap even further into the social interactions on the site. More importantly, they stressed, users will stop hating on the platform and might be more likely to spread the word about applications they like.

"If we think about Facebook Platform six months ago or more, forced invites were something that you stumbled upon in application after application," Elman said of applications that required users to invite friends, which were banned several months ago. "We really want to reward through the system. We really want our top applications to be model citizens...for those that aren't, we'll be taking even sterner enforcement, potentially," he said.

"Allocations for our distribution channels are now based on users' feedback," Sanghvi said regarding the fact that applications will be promoted based on internal statistics on how many users are actually sticking with them. "Ever since we changed the allocations based on user feedback, we noticed that the acceptance rate for requests has gone up 30 percent."

More about Facebook Connect
Morin spoke extensively about Facebook Connect, the data portability project that he's been working on for quite some time. "The idea behind Facebook Connect is to allow users to take their Facebook data with them wherever they go on the Internet, or devices, or something like that," he said. "We all spend a lot of time in Facebook building up what we've commonly referred to as a social graph, but really what that means is when you want to go (outside the site)."

One of the launch partners for Facebook Connect when it debuts later this year will be social news site Digg; syncing a Facebook account with a Digg account will mean more than just a single log-in, Morin explained. "If you go to the Digg site today, you might see there's the 'most popular' list of Diggs in the entire system," he said. When Facebook Connect goes live on Digg, in contrast, it'll be "possible for me to see which things my friends are Digging. Just the smallest bit of social context actually enables me to have a better experience on the site, because I can see what my friends are doing."

The panelists were vague as to how exactly Facebook Connect will tie in to the social network's privacy control groupings, which it launched earlier this year.

Some more tidbits: Facebook will certainly be launching a payment system for application developers, as has been widely rumored, but Ling--a veteran of the Google Checkout technology--wouldn't provide a time frame. They've also tossed about the issue of an ad network for developers, but haven't made concrete plans.

The FBFund developer grant fund, which launched last fall, has given money to "more than two, less than 10" developers who applied, Ling said; Elman added that five to 10 more are "in the queue" and that grants of between $25,000 and $250,000 have been handed out.

The company's recent announcement that a substantial portion of the platform would be open-sourced was designed to "enable developers to have deeper insights on how the platform works," Elman explained. Developers will be able to tap into more extensive metrics on the platform, he said.

And Ling, the Google veteran, reiterated the company's common talking point regarding its blocking of Google's Friend Connect project. "We are working with Google very closely to figure out how to work together in this space," he said. "As it stands, they are violating our privacy policy."

Fulfilling a second major part of its promise to make the internal workings of its Web site more extroverted, Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use.

The move could mean that Yahoo, struggling under business pressures but still a stronghold of Web activity, could become more tightly tied to others' Web services. For example, a programmer starting up a social networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo.

"Our address book has for a long time been one of the top things developers wanted access to," said Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. That's because, over the years, Yahoo users have filled it with billions of individual records.

Yahoo users have stored more than 500 million address books, and the service is used by more than 150 million unique users each month, Yeh said. "A lot of our address books (are) constantly being updated. It's one of the biggest sources of contact information on the Web," he said.

Opening the address book API (application programming interface) is the second major step taken so far in executing the Yahoo Open Strategy that Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh announced in April. The first step, in May, was opening the SearchMonkey project so outside coders could make more creative use of Yahoo search results.

"The address book is the second proof point. This year, we'll show proof point after proof point," Yeh said.

Yahoo Open Strategy is an attempt to link the company more with other Internet activities rather than remain a sealed-off, if sprawling, Internet domain. Through its open strategy, the company envisions outside programmers building Web applications on Yahoo's site, Yahoo services being incorporated into outside applications, and social connection information within Yahoo being used more widely.

Whether Yahoo will succeed in capturing developer attention and becoming a more dynamic part of new developments remains to be seen. A lot of action--some complementary but much of it competitive--also is taking place at rivals such as Facebook, Google, and any number of small Web 2.0 start-ups.

From the outside looking in
The address book move means outside Web sites will be able to read and write address book information--if a user grants permission through a Yahoo authorization process.

A site with a gift registry could piggyback on the address book so that a person could tell contacts about a wish list of presents, for example, Yeh said. Or a site shipping packages to others could auto-complete the address fields on a Web form.

(And something I'd like to see happen: somebody please endow the address book with an interface that doesn't look like it dates from 1998. I have a lot of contacts stored away in the Yahoo address book, and I find it excruciating to update addresses, scrub out obsolete e-mail addresses, or update mailing lists.)

Explicitly opening the service is more secure than one alternative today, in which a third-party site asks a user for Yahoo log-in credentials so it can access the site and scrape the contact information.

"There's no control over what happens after a user gives that (username and password). The third party could use it to log in to mail or any other part of Yahoo," Yeh said. "It's not a real secure method."

Yahoo isn't opening up the interface for an address book creation, though, which means it won't at least for now be usable as a generic back end for a Web site's address book needs.

Social graph theft?
One interesting possibility raised by the openness is whether an outside company might use it to steal, in effect, a user's social graph--the collection of connections each user often must laboriously reproduce as he or she joins a new site. Social graphs are a key asset of Web sites with a social element, in part because it's hard to reproduce them elsewhere. So once a user constructs one, there's a strong incentive to remain loyal to a site.

Yahoo isn't concerned about that, in part because opening the interface will mean other sites will be able not only to extract contact information from Yahoo, but also to synchronize changes on their sites back with Yahoo, Yeh said.

"I don't think we're worried about losing control over our social graph. All the things we're doing now are trying to break down some of the traditional walls Yahoo has had to the outside world," he said. "Yes, absolutely some of our data will get pulled out and be used for benefit of other systems. (But) when people use our system address book APIs, there's just as much a chance somebody will load something back into our network."

One company making use of the Yahoo address book interface is Plaxo, which hosts 40 million users' address books already.

Yahoo itself maintains multiple social graphs--for example, the address book, the Yahoo Messenger buddy lists, and the Flickr lists of contacts, friends, and family.

"Not all this data is combined yet," Yeh said, though one key part of Yahoo Open Strategy is to unify these contact lists and the related user profile pages. "The goal of the next half year is to make sure we bring that together."

The Yahoo address book is the "place we like people to store all their contact information," he said, but it's not a terribly rich social graph. For example, it doesn't currently have a good way to distinguish which contacts would be appropriate to invite to a new social service or to receive gift registry notifications.

"One of the things that we have to do is give users and opportunity to activate their social graph a little bit--essentially, to make sure they can classify the people they're most interested in communicating with on a regular basis so we know how to create a social environment around them," Yeh said.

"Going forward, we'll have to have a better solution for people so we can classify inside our address book who we're closest to and who are at further distance from us," he added. "That's a function of the social work we're doing."

Yahoo Messenger 9 offers a more elaborate friend list and can display videos and photos in the chat window.

(Credit: Yahoo)

You can't take it with you, at least when it comes to your social graph.

But with a new beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9 software (download it for Windows) released Thursday, users have new options for reconstructing networks of friends and contacts they've built elsewhere.

The new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 can help user invite contacts on AOL, Google's Gmail and Orkut, Microsoft's Hotmail, MySpace, and other online services to connect through the Yahoo service. Version 9 also includes a special group of all people in your Yahoo address book, helping to connect with contacts users may have stored elsewhere within Yahoo itself.

Also tying more deeply into the rest of Yahoo, the new beta can be used to reflect some other activities within the network--for example, when somebody spotlights a Web site of interest using Yahoo Buzz.

"We'll add more types of updates in the future," said product manager Sarah Bacon in a blog posting about the new beta.

Yahoo Messenger 9 is intended for use on Windows XP, in contrast to the more obviously named Yahoo Messenger for Vista (download it for Windows Vista). The final version of the Yahoo Messenger 9 is due in the third quarter, Yahoo said. The Mac equivalent is scheduled to be released by the end of the year.

Also new in the beta is a better interface for setting status messages--even if you're away from your IM software, Yahoo said. And links to games present in Yahoo Messenger 8 has made its way to version 9, so users can play pool, checkers, and others. However, only those with version 8.1 or later can play games with those using the version 9 beta, Yahoo said.

Yahoo Messenger's icon, a frighteningly happy face, reflects the fact that people have a whole section of their brains just for processing facial information. Yahoo is tapping into that visual cortex a little more directly with the new beta, which uses larger emoticons.

For further information, check Yahoo's blog about the new beta or a Messenger 9 beta demo video.