Disruptive Conversations

I've been too busy to comment on LinkedIn's announcement of their "Intelligent Application Platform" but there are certainly tons of others who have (see also here). Some of the posts I found most interesting were at VentureBeat and GigaOm.

LinkedIn, naturally, had a blog post with an introductory video that explains the platform.

While Facebook obviously has an enormous lead in terms of developers, it will be interesting to see what traction Linked does or does not gain. They indicate they will be supporting OpenSocial, which will allow developers to make apps that run in other OpenSocial-compliant social networks as well. They also have a strong user base within the business/professional community (include me) which could be quite attractive to developers as well.

In any event, I look forward to watching the announcements from LinkedIn as they roll out this developer program over the next few months.

Technorati Tags: facebook, linkedin, applications, apis, platforms

Google's OpenSocial effort passed a milestone yesterday when the first pieces of code were uploaded for Shindig (tip of the hat to Mr. Topf for pointing this out), an open source implementation of the OpenSocial API. Why is this important? Quite simply, I see an open source implementation as critical for the success of any API. As noted in the Shindig Proposal on the Apache Software Foundation's web site:

Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants. A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users. The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development. The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.

The key part is that last sentence. A "reference implementation" does a couple of things. First, for developers for whom the license terms are appropriate, they can simply incorporate the code directly into their products and... ta da... they are writing OpenSocial applications. Second, for developers who can't directly use the code verbatim due to licensing, they can at least study the code and understand how it works. They can see how the OpenSocial interaction occurs in a working example. Getting an open source reference implementation out there enables developers all over to rapidly use and learn about the API. While this news yesterday represents only the very first step in the development of the project, it's a good start down the path. Now, developers can download the existing code, try it out, and, hopefully, contribute patches/fixes/etc. back into the code base. Shindig will be a good project to watch. There does not yet seem to be an official project web page, but there is a "project status page" on the Apache Incubator site. P.S. And for those wondering, "shindig" is an English word for "a social gathering" which makes it rather appropriate.

Voting is now open for the "Applications and Widgets" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Category: Applications and Widgets

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

What sites would you nominate for "Applications and Widgets" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".

This category is by far my favorite and I'm looking forward to seeing what sites people nominate. As noted in the Mashable.com post:

Late last year, Newsweek predicted that 2007 would be the year of the widget. Boy, were they right! Aside from the usual buzz that surrounds the likes of Google, Facebook, and MySpace, this year was dominated by stories of companies coming out of nowhere with distributed applications to become household (well, at least Web 2.0 household) names. In fact, even USA Today has caught on to the trend, highlighting the rise of companies like iLike, Slide, and RockYou in today’s edition.

While flash widgets for things like slideshows and scrapbooks were the big success story in the first half of the year, much of the focus in the space shifted to Facebook applications this summer, with developers building tools ranging from the trivial to attempts to turn the social network into a serious business tool. Then, just last month Google threw its hat in the ring with the announcement of OpenSocial, an effort to align virtually all of the other major social networks against Facebook in application development.

In short, this should be a wide open category with dozens if not hundreds of companies that feed into the social networking ecosystem to consider nominating.

What applications and widgets do you like best? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.

Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)

Technorati Tags: applications, mashups, openweb, openwebawards

As readers are aware, I've been writing both here and over on my Disruptive Telephony blog about "mashups" and how the future of communication belongs to application platforms, open standards and such. Mashable.com has long been one of the main sites I've followed to stay up on what is happening in the rapidly evolving world of mashups and applications and so when they announced the creation of the OpenWeb Awards I thought I'd join in helping promote the awards. There are now 30 blogs joining in, including many that are much more popular than I am and whom I read all the time! As the site indicates, the Open Web Awards are about:

The Open Web Awards, hosted by Mashable.com, are the first ever online, open collaboration awards event, to recognize the best online communities representing web 2.0. This unique approach to an online event is about communities, so we've taken a collaborative approach to finding a winner, enabling other blogs and websites to take part.

I have committed to soliciting nominations and votes for the following categories (FOLLOW THE LINKS to nominate a site in a particular category):

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

And I will shortly be posting notes about each of those soliciting nominations. PLEASE POST YOUR NOMINATIONS IN THE POSTS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL CATEGORIES so that the Mashable folks can easily find the nominations.

Thanks for your participation and assistance.

Technorati Tags: mashups, openweb, openwebawards

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few days, you should by now be aware that Google released an API called OpenSocial. There is a new Google blog that had the announcement, which included this:

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language.

The list of OpenSocial partners is quite extensive... basically everyone in the social networking space except Facebook, but also including other companies such as Salesforce.com and Oracle. Having the big players like MySpace and LinkedIn is definitely key. Google has also provided a wealth of information:

• FAQ
• Articles (including tutorials to help get started)
• Documentation
• Developer's Forum

I find it all intriguing. There is a great amount of talk in the blogosphere about how this "tears down the walls" of social networks... and it does - in one aspect. It seems to me that this is really a direct shot at the Facebook Platform in that it gives application developers the ability to create applications that work across multiple networks. So from the point-of-view of a developer, this truly does open up the world of social networks. You can now write an app that is not just restricted to the confines of Facebook's walled garden, but instead can run in any of the other social networks out there (that support OpenSocial).

So it solves part of the problem out there in social networking... and it looks like quite a compelling way to do so. I'm certainly going to be reading the tutorials and experimenting with sample code.

But please let's remember that there are other issues with the walled nature of social networks. For instance:

• Why do I have to sign in with a different username and password to each of them? Why can't I just have a common (and secure) username/password that I use? (such as OpenID)
• Why do I have to recreate my friends list in each social network? (something the "social network portability" folks are looking at)

OpenSocial lets apps be created that work across multiple networks. I commend the folks behind it and supporting it. But let's please remember that it solves only one part of the overall "open" issue.

I need to really play with it more before I can comment further. In the meantime I'm capturing here a number of links related to OpenSocial that I have found useful:

• Marc Andreessen: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web - and also a screencast and screenshots
• It’s Official: Google + MySpace = OpenSocial
• Facebook’s dilemma: To be OpenSocial or not to be
• Read/Write Web: OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns
• Read/Write Web: Confirmed: MySpace Joins Google's OpenSocial (includes link to video from Scoble)
• Wired: Salesforce and LinkedIn: OpenSocial Means Better Business-Centric Apps and Services

Stay tuned for more...

Technorati Tags: apis, applications, facebook, facebookplatform, google, opensocial, socialmedia, socialnetworking

Over on his O'Reilly Radar blog, Tim O'Reilly pierced a bit of the Facebook application hype with his post last Friday: "Good News, Bad News about Facebook Application Market: Long Tail Rules" where he notes this:

The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users.

He subsequently noted that he did mis-use the "Long Tail" term a bit... the story here really is that the "short head" is where all the action is. Tim is careful to note:

This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism.

Translation - all of those out there hyping the Facebook platform as the greatest invention since sliced bread need to slow down a wee bit. The Facebook platform is very cool and is an evolving application platform. It's definitely a space that people need to pay attention to... and it very well may be a place where your application may be a runaway hit - but it may not bring the instant riches that your startup's business plan envisions. At least... not yet.

Good to see this kind of data emerging and I would expect that we'll start seeing similar reports emerging from the mainstream analyst houses. Kudos to O'Reilly for being the first one I've seen out there on the topic.

P.S. I should, of course, note that Tim's blog post references the report published by O'Reilly Research: "The Facebook Application Platform" which is available for purchase for $149.

Technorati Tags: applications, facebook, facebookplatform, oreilly, oreillyradar

In the spirit of BarCamps and PodCamps, I was pleased to see that there will be a "FacebookCamp" up in Montreal, Quebec, on Wednesday, November 7, 2007. It's from 4:00pm into the evening and is for people interested in developing apps for Facebook. As I write this, there are 57 confirmed guests and 36 people who are "Maybe Attending"! If you are in the Montreal area and interested in developing apps for Facebook, do check it out:

• Facebook event
• Facebook group
• FacebookCamp Montreal wiki

I am in that "Maybe Attending" category myself. Montreal's only about 1.5-2 hours (and a border crossing) away, so I may shoot up the highway for the event.

Technorati Tags: facebook, applications, facebookcampmontreal

One of the greatest bits of buzz around Facebook these days is the application APIs, the "Facebook Platform".  It's also one of the most frustrating aspects from a user perspective.  Very often I'll see on my News Feed that someone installed an application and I'll think to myself that I should check out that app.  However, if I don't do it right at that precise moment, well, the odds are that I won't... because it seems next to impossible to find apps in the directory!

Has anyone else been able to successfully use the "search" feature in Facebook's Application Directory?

Take today... I saw on my Facebook News Feed at some point in the day that someone I know had installed the "Appsaholic" application.  Subsequently in a lunchtime conversation I wound up learning about this app enough that I got curious.  So I went to my Applications page inside my Facebook account and entered "Appsaholic" in the search box.  This was the result (click on image for larger version):

Oops.  I tried several other variations on the name to no avail.  Finally, I just went to Google and searched on "facebook apps-a-holic" which brought me to this article which gave me the application URL inside of Facebook.

Crazy.

Why should I have to go outside of Facebook in order to find an application? 

Unfortunately, this has been my experience several times on different days, and I find it a bit of a concern.  So much of developing an app for Facebook is about being found.  Obviously the viral path through newsfeeds is one way to be found, but the application directory is an obvious one.  If you make it to one of the provided lists, you'll be found, but searching should work, one would think.

Have others experienced this problem?

(Now I would note that I couldn't find any of the applications I've already installed when I searched in the directory - perhaps the issue is that the search engine is down itself.  If so, it would be best for Facebook to put up a statement that the search engine is having problems rather than just saying "No applications found.")

As I've always been fascinated by ways of visualizing data, I naturally had to try out the "FriendWheel" application now available inside of Facebook.  One result, taking all the defaults, is now visible on the right (click for a much larger image).  The "What is this?" link on the page says this:

The circle shows part of a social network. Around the edge of the circle are Dan York's friends. If two of them are connected by a line, it means that they are friends with each other. Relationships between different groups of friends (eg. "Home friends" and "University/College friends") can often be seen in the circle. It's also brightly coloured and looks pretty.

Once you add the app to your Facebook profile, you can then configure it using a range of settings and then generate the wheel image.  It takes a little bit because it has to get information about your friends and their connections in order to generate the information. 

Naturally, I was a bit concerned about the fact that data about all my friends and their connections were going to someone else's computers, at least for the time required to generate the image, and so did read the privacy policy, which states this:

Friend Wheel will retrieve the names of all your friends and all links between your friends. This data will be shown on the friend wheel image. This image is not publically viewable (but you can show it to whoever you want by sending them the entire URL of the enlarged image).
Your Friend Wheel will be accessible to anyone who knows the pass-code for your wheel. This is shown (as part of the URL) in the "Friend Wheel" box on your profile, so anyone who can see this will be able to see your wheel.
To configure who can see the wheel on your profile, visit the Applications Settings page (click on "edit settings" next to Friend Wheel and choose from the drop-down box).
You can remove the application at any time. Your Friend Wheel will then be deleted.

However, this doesn't answer the larger question to me about the fact that the data about all my friends and their connections is at least temporarily residing in "Thomas Fletcher's" computers while the script is running.  I guess we have to hope he's not doing anything with the data (or else we don't use the app).

In any event, potential privacy concerns aside, the tool is quite interesting.  You can choose to graph only a subset of your friends, graph one of your networks, graph a random assortment of friends, graph mutual friends of one of your friends... and more.  Lots of other tweaks you can make to it.  In the image to the left, I changed the "grouping algorithm" from the default of "FriendGroupster-4000", which appears to put blocks of your friends together, to just a straight alphabetical grouping.  This, obviously, doesn't really help you see a whole lot.

I noticed today that the developer has added an "Interactive Flash Map" which lets you play even more with the data:

You can mouseover friends to highlight their links, click and drag to move friends around, zoom in and out by using the buttons in the top left, and pan by clicking and dragging in white space.

All in all an intriguing little app that helps highlight the connections between your various "friends" within Facebook.

UPDATE: I meant to note that where I first saw Friend Wheel being used was in Phil Wolff's new banner for Skype Journal (described here).