Disclaimer: This post does not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or future intentions of my employer. These are solely my personal opinions. If you are seeking official position statements from Microsoft, please go here.
Recently there were three vaporware announcements by Facebook, Google and MySpace each describing a way for other web sites to integrate the user profiles and friends lists from these popular social networking sites. Given that I'm a big fan of social networking sites and interoperability between them, this seemed like an interesting set of announcements. So I decided to take a look at these announcements especially given the timing of them.
What Do They Have in Common?
Marc Canter does a good job of describing the underlying theme behind all three announcements in his post I do not compromise where he writes
three announcements that happened within a week of each other: MySpace’s Data Availability, Facebook’s Connect and Google’s Friend Connect - ALL THREE had fundamentally the same strategy!
They’re all keeping their member’s data on their servers, while sending out tentacles to mesh in with as many outside sites as they can. These tentacles may be widgets, apps or iFrames - but its all the same strategy.
Basically all three announcements argue that instead of trying to build social networking into their services from scratch, Web sites should instead outsource their social graphs and "social features" such as user profiles, friends lists and media sharing from the large social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut.
This isn't a new pitch, Facebook has been singing the same song since they announced the beta of the Facebook Platform in August 2006 and Google has been sending Kevin Marks to every conference they can find to give his Social Cloud presentation which makes the same pitch. The new wrinkle to this time worn tale is that Google and Facebook [along with MySpace] are no longer just pitching using REST APIs for integration but are now preaching "no coding required" integration via widgets.
Now that we know the meat of all three announcements we can go over the little specifics that have leaked out about each forthcoming product thus far.
Facebook Connect
Dave Morin gave the first official statement about Facebook Connect news in his blog post Announcing Facebook Connect where he wrote
Trusted Authentication
Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.
Real Identity
Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.
Friends Access
Users count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.
Dynamic Privacy
As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users' information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.
The key features to note are (i) a user can associate their Facebook account with their account on a 3rd party site which means (ii) the user's profile and media shared on Facebook can now be exposed on the 3rd party site and (iii) the users friends' on Facebook who have also associated their Facebook account with their account on the 3rd party site will show up as the user's friends on the site.
The "dynamic privacy" claim seems pretty vague if not downright empty. All that is stated above is that the user's changes on Facebook are instantly reflected on 3rd party sites. Duh. Does that need to be called out as a feature?
Google Friend Connect
On the Google Friend Connect page there is the following video
The key features to note are (i) a user can associate their Facebook account OpenID with their account on a 3rd party site which means (ii) the user's profile and media shared on Facebook account a small set of social networking site can now be exposed on the 3rd party site and (iii) the users friends' on Facebook the small set of social network sites who have also associated their Facebook account OpenID using Google Friend Connect to connect their account on the 3rd party site will show up as the user's friends on the site (iv) the user's activities on the 3rd party site are broadcast in her friends' news feeds.
One interesting thing about Google Friend Connect's use of OpenID is that it allows me to associate multiple social network profiles to a single account which may not even be from a social networking site (e.g. using my AOL or Y! email to sign-in but associating it with my Facebook profile & friend list).
Google Friend Connect seems to be powered by Google OpenSocial which is Google's attempt to commoditize the functionality of the Facebook platform by making it easy for any social networking site to roll its own Facebook-style platform by using Google's standard set of REST APIs, Javascript libraries and/or hosting services. In the above video, it is mentioned that Web sites which adopt Google Friend Connect will not only be able to obtain user profile and friend list widgets from Google but also OpenSocial widgets written by 3rd party developers. However since Facebook announced the JavaScript Client Library for Facebook API way back in January they already have the technology in place to offer something similar to Web site owners if this capability becomes in demand. More important will be the set of functionality that comes "out of the box" so to speak since a developer community won't form until Google Friend Connect gains traction.
By the way, it turns out that Facebook has banned Google from interacting with their user data using Google Friend Connect since it violates their terms of service. My assumption is that the problem is Google Friend Connect works by building an OpenSocial wrapper on top of the Facebook API and then exposing it to other web sites as widgets and to OpenSocial gadget developers via APIs. Thus Google is pretty much proxying the Facebook social graph to other sites and developers which takes control of safeguarding/policing access to this user data out of Facebook's hands. Not good for Facebook.
MySpace Data Availability
The only details on the Web about MySpace's Data Availability seems to be second hand data from tech bloggers who were either strategically leaked some details/screenshots or took part in a press release conference call. The best source I found was Mike Arrington's TechCrunch post entitled MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter which contains the following excerpt
MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.
A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.
The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.
But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.
The key difference between MySpace's announcement and those of Facebook & Google is that MySpace has more ground to cover. Since Facebook & Google already have REST APIs that support a delegated authentication model, MySpace is pretty much playing catch up here.
In fact, on careful rereading it seems MySpace's announcement isn't like the others since the only concrete technology announced above is a REST API that uses a user-centric delegated authentication model which is something both Google and Facebook have had for years (see GData/OpenSocial and Facebook REST API).
Given my assumption that MySpace is not announcing anything new to the industry, the rest of this post will focus on Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.
The Chicken & Egg Problem
When it comes to social networking, it is all about network effects. A social networking feature or site is only interesting to me if my friends are using it as well.
The argument that a site is better off using a user's social graph from a big social networking site like Facebook instead of building their own social network features only makes sense if (i) there is enough overlap in the user's friends list on Facebook and that on the site AND (ii) the user's friends on the site who are also his friends on Facebook can be discovered by the user. The latter is the tough part and one I haven't seen a good way of bridging without resorting to anti-patterns (i.e. pull the email addresses of all of the user's friends from Facebook and then cross-reference with the email addresses of the sites users). This anti-pattern works when you are getting the email addresses the user entered by hand from some Webmail address book (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Y! mail, etc).
However since Google and Facebook are going with a no-code solution, the only way to tell which of my Facebook friends also use the 3rd site is if they have also opted-in to linking their account on the site with their Facebook profile. This significantly weakens the network effects of the feature compared to the find your friends on your favorite "Web 2.0" site which a lot of sites have used to grow their user base by screen scraping Webmail address books then cross referencing it with their user databases.
How Does this Relate to Data Portability and Social Network Interoperability?
Short answer; it doesn't.
Long answer; the first thing to do is to make sure you understand what is meant by Data Portability and Social Network Interoperability. The difference between Data Portability and Social Network Interoperability is the difference between being able to export your email inbox and address book from Gmail into Outlook or vice versa (portable) and being able to send an email from a Gmail address to someone using Outlook or Hotmail (interoperable).
So do these new widget initiatives help portability? Nope. Widgets give developers less options for obtaining and interacting with the user data than APIs. With Facebook's REST API, I know how to get my friends list with profile data into Outlook and my Windows Mobile phone via OutSync. I would actually lose that functionality if it was only exposed via a widget. The one thing they do is lower the bar for integration by people who don't know how to code.
Well, how about interoperability? The idea of social network interoperability is that instead of being a bunch of walled gardens and data silos, social networking sites can talk to each other the same way email services and [some] IM services can talk to each other today. The "Use our data silo instead of building your own" pitch may reduce the number of data silos but it doesn't change the fact that the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world are still fundamentally data silos when it comes to the social graph. That is what we have to change. Instead we keep getting distracted along the way by shiny widgets.
PS: The blog hiatus is over. It was fun while it lasted. ;)
Now Playing: Fugees (Refugee Camp) - Killing Me Softly