Will you add me as a friend?
HUGE sent me to the O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego to get the industry perspective on social networking from representatives of Facebook, MySpace, Google, Netvibes, Friendster and a slew of start-ups with ridiculous made-up names like Meebo, Bebo, Jabber and more.
It's a little funny that I was sent to this conference, as I've almost made a point of ignoring invitations to join the various social networks, or at least being a very late adopter. I may have been the very last person to finally get a MySpace account, and I only did it for the record label. Now I find myself in a room full of people who actually think Twitter is fun and useful... and a lot of them are making money off this stuff. So, sitting alone in my boxers and socks in my dark hotel room last night, I took a long swig of bourbon, swallowed it along with my dignity and signed up for a Facebook account.
Getting back to the point of the conference, the majority of the attendees build Facebook apps. That's the hot new sexy thing that's making college students into millionaires, and everyone wants in. But beyond that, the main recurring issue was defining and supporting open standards for social web applications and portable data.
Like it or not, social networking is quickly becoming one of the major ways people spend time online, and Charlene Li of Forrester Research projects that social networking will be ubiquitous by 2013. But with the proliferation of all the new social networks and applications requiring registration, managing personal data becomes more and more of a problem and barrier to entry.
When I sign up for a new social network or web service, why should I have to re-enter all my personal data and re-add you as a friend? MySpace knows we're friends, my phone knows we call each other frequently, Gmail knows we correspond regulary, AIM knows we're connected... with universal standards and APIs for transporting and accessing data, users would be more invested in their own data, knowing they could take it with them from site to site, and it would benefit everyone.
This requires a big shift in thinking, especially for the large, established corporations, who would ostensibly have to start giving away their vast collections of data, grown over years and years. They have to stop thinking of the data as theirs and realize that it belongs to the user, and allow users to take it with them wherever they choose to go. Similarly, they should stop thinking of their website as the only place they want users to spend time and allow their apps to be taken where the user does want to spend time. One speaker suggested a strategy of taking the top one or two things that people come to your site for and allowing users to take those away in a widget.
Fortunately, some of those major players are already leading the way. The DiSo Project is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of distributed social networking concepts, using technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, Microformats and others. Facebook and MySpace have both announced support of Google's OpenSocial standard, and Netvibes has taken initiative in developing the Universal Widget API specification.
At HUGE, we are not only building social applications for Disney, we're building an entire social networking platform, so we have the unique opportunity to both support and apply open standards to this project from its inception to insure future compliance.
1000 bonus points for anyone who read this far.
It's a little funny that I was sent to this conference, as I've almost made a point of ignoring invitations to join the various social networks, or at least being a very late adopter. I may have been the very last person to finally get a MySpace account, and I only did it for the record label. Now I find myself in a room full of people who actually think Twitter is fun and useful... and a lot of them are making money off this stuff. So, sitting alone in my boxers and socks in my dark hotel room last night, I took a long swig of bourbon, swallowed it along with my dignity and signed up for a Facebook account.
Getting back to the point of the conference, the majority of the attendees build Facebook apps. That's the hot new sexy thing that's making college students into millionaires, and everyone wants in. But beyond that, the main recurring issue was defining and supporting open standards for social web applications and portable data.
Like it or not, social networking is quickly becoming one of the major ways people spend time online, and Charlene Li of Forrester Research projects that social networking will be ubiquitous by 2013. But with the proliferation of all the new social networks and applications requiring registration, managing personal data becomes more and more of a problem and barrier to entry.
When I sign up for a new social network or web service, why should I have to re-enter all my personal data and re-add you as a friend? MySpace knows we're friends, my phone knows we call each other frequently, Gmail knows we correspond regulary, AIM knows we're connected... with universal standards and APIs for transporting and accessing data, users would be more invested in their own data, knowing they could take it with them from site to site, and it would benefit everyone.
This requires a big shift in thinking, especially for the large, established corporations, who would ostensibly have to start giving away their vast collections of data, grown over years and years. They have to stop thinking of the data as theirs and realize that it belongs to the user, and allow users to take it with them wherever they choose to go. Similarly, they should stop thinking of their website as the only place they want users to spend time and allow their apps to be taken where the user does want to spend time. One speaker suggested a strategy of taking the top one or two things that people come to your site for and allowing users to take those away in a widget.
Fortunately, some of those major players are already leading the way. The DiSo Project is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of distributed social networking concepts, using technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, Microformats and others. Facebook and MySpace have both announced support of Google's OpenSocial standard, and Netvibes has taken initiative in developing the Universal Widget API specification.
At HUGE, we are not only building social applications for Disney, we're building an entire social networking platform, so we have the unique opportunity to both support and apply open standards to this project from its inception to insure future compliance.
1000 bonus points for anyone who read this far.
posted by travis at
4:41 PM
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