Opening up the Social Web

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Opening up the Social Web Joseph Smarr Chief
Platform Architect, Plaxo 11/28/2007
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Something very exciting is happening

• The social web is opening upand fast!
• Whats going on?
• How did we get here?
• How is Plaxo involved?
• Who else is working on this?
• Whats next?
• How can I get involved?

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A (very) brief history of the social web

• Initial wave (Friendster, Orkut, Tribe, etc.)
• Early attempts at data portability (FOAF, XFN)
• Too early? Too complex?
• New social networks grow huge (MySpace, Facebook,
  Hi5, etc.)
• Most still walled gardens
• Many social applications (flickr, digg, ilike,
  etc.)
• Little access to users social graph data
• Users stuck re-creating their profile and
  friends-list over and over data is fragmented
• Pain / friction starting to really matter to
  sites / users

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How Plaxo got involved in all of this

• Plaxo keeps you connected to the people you know
  across all the services tools you use
• At launch in 2002 Outlook, Mac, AIM,
• These days social web sites just as important /
  painful
• Problem harder to help users of social web sites
• Data trapped in walled gardens
• Lack of clarity that users should own / control
  their data
• Solution help open up the social web
• Advocacy and adoption of open standards user
  rights
• Technology to make things just work

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What specifically is Plaxo doing to help?

• Adopting championing open standards
• OpenID, hCard, XFN, FOAF, SyncML, iCal,
• Plaxo Pulse an open social network
• See what your family, friends, and business
  network are sharing with you across the web
• User can aggregate and re-publish their data

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What specifically is Plaxo doing to help?

• Adopting championing open standards
• OpenID, hCard, XFN, FOAF, SyncML, iCal,
• Plaxo Pulse an open social network
• See what your family, friends, and business
  network are sharing with you across the web
• User can aggregate and re-publish their data
• Open-source online identity consolidator

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Online Identity Consolidator
Open-source relme crawler (OpenSocialGraph.plaxo.
com) http//twitter.com/jsmarr ?
http//josephsmarr.com ?
http//www.bloglines.com/public/jsmarr
http//flickr.com/people/jsmarr
http//joseph.myplaxo.com ?
http//claimid.com/jsmarr
http//del.icio.us/jsmarr
http//digg.com/users/jsmarr
http//jsmarr.yelp.com
http//pownce.com/joseph
http//www.linkedin.com/in/jsmarr
http//www.socializr.com/user/jsmarr
http//www.facebook.com/p/Joseph_Smarr/204060
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What specifically is Plaxo doing to help?

• Adopting championing open standards
• OpenID, hCard, XFN, FOAF, SyncML, iCal,
• Plaxo Pulse an open social network
• See what your family, friends, and business
  network are sharing with you across the web
• User can aggregate and re-publish their data
• Open-source online identity consolidator
• Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

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A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

• We publicly assert that all users of the social
  web are entitled to certain fundamental rights,
  specifically
• Ownership of their own personal information,
  including
• their own profile data
• the list of people they are connected to
• the activity stream of content they create
• Control of whether and how such personal
  information is shared with others and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their
  personal information to trusted external sites.

http//OpenSocialWeb.org Joseph Smarr, Marc
Canter, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble
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A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

• Sites supporting these rights shall
• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile
  data, their friends list, and the data thats
  shared with them via the service, using a
  persistent URL or API token and open data
  formats
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream
  of activity outside the site
• Allow their users to link from their profile
  pages to external identifiers in a public way
  and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know
  is also on their site, using the same external
  identifiers made available for lookup within the
  service.

http//OpenSocialWeb.org Joseph Smarr, Marc
Canter, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble
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What specifically is Plaxo doing to help?

• Adopting championing open standards
• OpenID, hCard, XFN, FOAF, SyncML, iCal,
• Plaxo Pulse an open social network
• See what your family, friends, and business
  network are sharing with you across the web
• User can aggregate and re-publish their data
• Open-source online identity consolidator
• Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
• First site to implement OpenSocial APIs

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OpenSocial gadgets in Plaxo Pulse
Gadgets in user profiles
Activity in Pulse stream
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Is Open good for business?
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Were not alone Building blocks of the open
social web

• Who am I?
• OpenID prove that I own a URL / profile
• relme these URLs describe the same person
• Who do I know?
• oAuth securely share my (private) friends-list
• SixAparts (public) relationship update stream
• How can I use my data?
• OpenSocial cross-platform social applications
• FOAF, XFN, vCard standard data interchanges

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Growing awareness and support

• Tim OReilly
• The only way we'll get to a truly comprehensive
  "social network operating system" is by defining
  protocols that will let everyone who has social
  networking data, from general purpose friending
  sites like facebook, to special purpose sites
  like geni and dopplr, to corporate directories,
  to interoperate via a set of clearly defined
  interfaces.
• Tim Berners-Lee
• the frustration that, when you join a photo
  site or a movie site or a travel site, you name
  it, you have to tell it who your friends are all
  over again. The separate Web sites, separate
  documents, are in fact about the same thing --
  but the system doesn't know it.
• Mainstream press
• Wired It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up
• Coverage by NY Times, WSJ, Newsweek, etc.

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Where we are today

• Many sites implementing poor-mans friends-list
  portability (e.g. scraping your webmail
  contacts)
• Insecure
• One-time only (not told when people you know join
  the service later or when you meet new people)
• Only looks up users via e-mail address (not URL,
  etc.)
• e.g. cant find friends that link to their
  twitter profiles from blog
• Have to re-assert relationships on each site
• Lots of e-mails asking me are you Johns
  friend?
• Cant defer to existing authorities (e.g.
  LinkedIn, Geni)

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Where we are today bottom line

• Still too much (non-core) work for social app
  developers to use existing friends lists
• Still too hard for users to find who they know on
  social apps social networks
• Social networks still mainly walled gardens

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Towards a truly open social web

• The open social webs facebook platform
• Friends list people you know from any site(s)
  you use
• User IDs email / URLs from all services you
  know
• Social apps running anywhere with same richness
• Services can still run their own external web
  sites
• Activity streams and profile badges show up in
  social networks
• Apps connect users and data across multiple
  services
• Manage relationships in one place and over time
• Meet someone new ? choose where to connect
• Try new services ? find out when your friends
  join
• Social app developers can outsource who you
  know

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Theres room for everyone to win

• What weve seen already
• Huge inefficiency in finding all the content made
  by people you know across the web
• Injecting a real social graph turbo-charges
  social apps
• ? People end up producing consuming a lot more
• Lots of people are not using social applications
  because theres still too much friction
• Social networks become more powerful as they
  connect you to more social apps
• Social apps get easier to build and scale

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Want Open to win? Get involved!

• Make your voices heard and demand your rights
• Support open standards make use of them
• The future is ours to buildand its in our grasp
• Lets open up the social web!

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For more on opening up the social web

• Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
  http//OpenSocialWeb.org
• Tantek Çeliks talk http//tantek.com/presentati
  ons/2007/10/social-network-portability/
• David Recordons talk http//daveman692.livejourn
  al.com/318735.html
• Brad Fitzpatricks essay http//bradfitz.com/soc
  ial-graph-problem/
• OpenID http//openid.net
• Microformats http//microformats.org
• oAuth http//oauth.net
• OpenSocial http//code.google.com/OpenSocial

Slides available at http//JosephSmarr.com