Joesph Smarr from Plaxo reminds me a of a preacher, but not a boring one. Someone who is passionate about integrating the web into the real world a lot better. Below are some notes from his speech at Web 2.0 Expo.
News is better when it’s social, with Digg.
Bookmarks are more fun when they’re social, with Del.icio.us.
How is this all gonna shape up? Google OpenSocial against Facebook platform. What controls should users have. Who should control your data?
At the same time, there are interesting technological building blocks coming to the surface. OpenID, OpenSocial, DataPortability.org, Social Graph API…
Where are we now?
The social web today is broken…
On each site, we still have to:
- Recreate an account
- Reenter our profile info
- Re-find friends
- Re-establish our relationships
I am a real person in the real world, but I still struggle to find to connect with other real people.
Help is on the way!
New building blocks establish:
- Who I am
- Who I know
- What’s going on
Who I am – You need to be able to create an identity that is portable between sites. It also has to be durable, so it can persist across sites. When you came to Web 2.0 Expo, you didn’t have to “re-meet” me.
OpenID has come the furthest. If it works right, users don’t have to even see it, it will be baked. OpenID allows me to prove my identity.
rel=me (XFN). Consolidate your online identity with me-links. This helps link two social graphs. It says, “Hey, this website belongs to me. Connect it”.
Social Graph API. See what your users said about themselves. When you login, Google Social Graph API asks the user if they want to connect their other accounts (on Plaxo).
The cool thing about open standards is that you can mix it up in a really cool way. We are just scratching the surface.
Who I know – Building and maintaining real relationships. The Social Graph isn’t any particular company’s thing, it’s the real world. Each site that wants to do something socially, has to get a model of the real world. When you start that from scratch, everybody loses.
Digg friend list, why empty? It’s too much work to go and find all your friends on there. If a site that is that rich and powerful can’t build a real “community”, imagine a small startup trying to do it.
Contact APIs – FInd people from your current address book; leverage previously established relationships. You don’t have to give away your password out to all these sites either.
OAuth – share private data between trusted sites. You don’t have to make data public to make it portable, you just have to find a way to share data between two sites you trust.
Friends list portability – Continuous discovery across multiple sites.
What’s going on – I just want to stay in touch with John, whatever he’s doing, all the time.
How do you stay up to date in a general sense?
OpenSocial – Build social apps that can run anywhere. When you wanna write a social application like this, Google can speak about that in generic ways. As a developer, you only have to write something once. These sites will start speaking to each other in common terms, and it will be easier.
Jabber (XMPP) – Real-time updates stream between sites.
How does this all fit together? How much of this do I need to understand as a user? Developer?
I am very excited to see where social data goes in the future. How will we store it and archive it?
