Christopher Herot's Weblog

More on OpenSocial

Kevin Cawley points out a few potential flies in the ointment of the soon-to-be-announced OpenSocial API.  In a particularly apt analogy he reminds us of the early promise of Java:  write once and run anywhere.  The reality was that while Java turned out to be a perfectly fine programming language, there was no way to abstract out all the differences among platforms while still taking maximum advantage of the unique capabilities of each.  The same thing is likely to happen as developers attempt to adapt their applications to the multiple social networks that will be behind the OpenSocial API.

Cawley's prediction is that Orkut will enjoy a momentary increase in usage as developers use it as a sandbox but then those same developers will get bogged down in trying to expand their app to the other platforms.  I am less concerned about that - any developers who sanely wanted to diversify across multiple platforms would have to write their own abstraction layer if they didn't use OpenSocial - it will be interesting to see how closely these competing SNS companies will adhere to the emerging standard.

OpenSocial details leaking out

The New York Times and TechCrunch both reported more details today on the OpenSocial set of APIs that will unify All Social Networks (except Facebook and MySpace).  What's especially interesting is the list of SNSs that have signed on.   In addition to the usual suspects (Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning) the alliance includes Oracle and Salesforce.com.  While as a developer I look forward to leveraging all these sites through one convenient API I do wonder how Open Social will deal with the varying policies of the member sites.  For instance, LinkedIn has said they will require applications and/or developers to be certified before admitting them to the system.  How will these differences, and the different underlying features be exposed to the end users?

Predictions

My favorite quotes about the future:

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
     -Yogi Berra

"The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed."
     -William Gibson

Thanks to Stowe Boyd for reminding me about Gibson.
There are lots more quotes here and here.

What ever happened to those exciting VoIP applications?

I was catching up on my blog reading and came across a post by Tom Evslin that's especially appropriate on the eve of the VON conference here in Boston.  He recalls that at an earlier VON he opined how VoIP would occur in three stages: (1) Cheap long distance; (2) Converged networks; (3) really cool new services.  The first two came about, but we're pretty much still using the phone the same way we always did.  Sure, we can launch calls from our mobile contact list instead of punching in numbers, but otherwise the need for compatibility with POTS and the need to pay termination charges to POTS carriers has meant change has come at the speed of the slowest component.

Evslin concludes that the next stage will not be incremental improvement over traditional telephony, but wholesale replacement, with live voice and voice mail becoming just two choices in a continuum of communications modes.  I agree with him that these will be based on social networks, which are the phone books of the future.  This approach will allow a more natural form of communication  Instead of starting with a phone number and the hope that the associated device is near the intended recipient, conversations in the future will start from the identity of the recipient and the nature of the task to be performed.  From that point, one can initiate a communication in the mode most suited to the problem at hand and the needs of both parties, whether that be an synchronous email, and almost-synchronous SMS or Instant Message, or a real-time voice or video conversation.

Will Facebook Move Beyond Throwing Sheep?

Kara Swisher has waded into the debate about whether Facebook will be useful for something more than throwing sheep, vampire biting, and giving virtual drinks.  While it's true that the most popular applications are silly games, my research indicates there is a latent demand for more serious applications that take advantage of Facebook's built-in social graph and messaging platform.    Lee Lorenzen points out in a comment on the Kara's post that Facebook needs just one "killer app" to make the leap to a respected tool, just as VisiCalc led business people to sneak the Apple II into their offices behind the backs of their IT departments.

Of course, while building the application is easy, making it into a successful business takes more work.  According to Tim O'Reilly, only 84 of the 5,000 Facebook applications have 87% of the usage.   Getting into that top tier is harder now that Facebook has restricted sending messages to users.  On the other hand, there are a lot of people who use Facebook every day and keep it open on their screen the way other people use Outlook.  Anyone that finds a way to provide continuing utility to that population has a good chance of building a sustainable business.

In the 60's R. Crumb predicted Twitter

I found this in my archives.  It's from Robert Crumb's Zap Comix from the 1960's.   How did he know?

Charline Li on Facebook

At Graphing Social Patterns Charline Li of Forrester Research gave a talk on Big Brands & Facebook that had useful information for brands of all sizes.  One of the more startling data points she presented was that according to Facebook's data, only 6% of it's US users are 35+ years old, but Nielsen's stats say the number is 45%.   WHen asked later, Charlene said one plausible explanation for the discrepancy was the sampling method used.  In any case, her advice was that things were changing rapidly and that whatever works this year would almost certainly require adjustment to work in the future.

In addition to presenting a load of interesting statistics, she offered some examples of brands that we successfully leveraging Facebook as a platform to communicate with customers and not merely advertise to them.  One of the best was Ernst & Young, who in order to further their program of hiring 5,000 college graduates every year has one of their recruiting executives answer questions from students.  In contrast Wal-Mart keeps trying but may just not be the type of business that college students want to brag about being associated with.

Some other advice:

• Create useful apps than model what friends do naturally
• Plan out how to make the app viral (a recurring theme at the conference)
• Get feedback once you launch

 

Facebook Video

Graphing Social Patterns

I'm here in San Jose along with 300 other Facebook fans and followers at Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook, organized by Dave McClure.  Dave teaches  Creating Engaging Facebook Apps at Stanford and is most recently known for a post on TechCrunch that I thought was a pretty good overview of how to build a Facebook strategy, but was also a lightning rod for those who think the Facebook phenomenon is overblown.

Reid Hoffman gave the keynote, starting with a history of Social Networking, starting with Friendster and covering such milestones as MySpace's (almost accidental) ability to hack in widgets and the launch of the F8 platform.  He pointed out that unlike MySpace, Facebook gave the widgets access to the social graph and unlike Ning, it gave application developers a way to leverage the existing customers and a communications scheme for reaching them.  He also dealt with the difference between social (Facebook) and professional (e.g. LinkedIn) networking sites, pointing out that Facebook shows information on member's social connections, such as pictures of friends, while LinkeIn has more data on business skills and relationships.  As an example he said to try searching for "open source" or company affiliation.  Both applications do overlap in areas such as providing a public presence for profiles and both can potentially support business applications.

Is there One Graph to Rule Them All?  Reid thinks not, given the different sorts of relationships (friend, familly, acquaintance, and professional).  While it would be technically possible for one system to contain all of this, most non-technical people would probably prefer to use different systems that were optimized around specific types of networks.

What type of applications should we expect will come after today's communications, games, and media?  Probably improvements of the same, plus new "friending" apps like TopFriends.  To date, there haven't been successful applications in Business, Politics, and Money, but Facebook's challenge now is the "second act" which exploits the current wave of interest.

Reid observed the parallels between the Facebook boom and the last Internet gold rush.  Most installations are financed by future hope rather than revenue today.  The future may bring targeted ads and currency, virtual or real.  Some challenges to any developer:

• someone else will try to give away anything you charge for
• competition will come from individuals as well as companies

Some new opportunities:

• New forms of communication, most based on sharing
• Discovery - search that leverages one's friends
• Applications that take advantage of the social graph

In summary, many entrepreneurs coming out of college will write Facebook applications as their first effort.  There will be an interesting ecosystem between Facebook and the Web, with some acquisitions to come.  For now, Reid recommended keeping costs low until the economics get figured out.  As it's not clear that building a Facebook app is a route to a billion dollar business, most app development will be financed by angels and entrepreneurs, not VC's except for a few of the more adventurous.

Continuous Partial Friendship

As I was contemplating whether to return to the reception at the conference or go out with friends, I came across David Weinberger's musings on Twitter in which, with apologies to Linda Stone, he coined the term Continuous Partial Friendship.  It seems a good way to describe what happens when one acquires hundred if not thousands of connections in the social graph that thanks to technology can be maintained far longer and more widely online than in the offline world where they started.

Thanks to Stowe Boyd for pointing me to Stephanie Booth who discussed this phenomenon in detail and credited David Weinberger.