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Posts Tagged ‘Open Web’

How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards

Google rolled out a social stream service today called Buzz. It looks on the surface like Facebook, FriendFeed and other stream reading and writing services. It will compete with Facebook and Twitter. Under the covers, though, this major product was built by a team of people taking a radical new approach to online publishing: Buzz is all about open, standardized user data.

Google Buzz data can be syndicated out to other services using the standard data formats called Atom, Activity Streams, MediaRSS and PubSubHubbub. That couldn’t be more different from Facebook. Google has taken open data standards to battle against a marketplace of competitors that are closed and proprietary to varying degrees. This is a very big deal.

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Google Buzz was presented as a destination site, but a look at its APIs and developer roadmap indicate that it may actually intend to be a platform – the central hub for a world of distributed social networking. “This is a downpayment on where we’re going with the open, social web,” Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina told us.

It’s tempting to recoil at the thought of Google powering one more part of our lives online, and our friends’ activity streams are a very important part of the online experience now. But if the growing number of data portability and open web advocates the company has hired can do their jobs well – then Google Buzz could be a big force for good.

People will build services on top of analyzing your public Buzz activity. They will build new applications for publishing to Buzz, just like the Twitter ecosystem has today. Planned support for things like the Salmon commenting standard mean that comments left on Buzz could appear out on blog posts around the web, and comments on blog posts could be viewed inside of Buzz when the post links are shared.

The use of full email addresses in @ public replies demonstrated today seems to indicate that it will be a cross-platform messaging service. Facebook users can only message other Facebook users but Buzz users may be able to reply to people using email IDs from other networks. That’s hot stuff.

Once Activity Streams consumption, @ messages that look like Webfinger profiles to me and Salmon are in place then Buzz users should be able to read, comment on and message to conversations with people who have never seen Buzz in their lives, simply by subscribing to their feeds. There’s huge potential for interoperability here.

Facebook and Twitter will face renewed pressure to publish and consume standardized data feeds as well now. If Buzz is big enough, it could break the dam holding back a flood of standardized data. Where there is standized data, there is scalable network effects, consumer choice, competition and thus innovation.

Buzz’s embrace of the open web could make it a very important player in the development of the future.

Update: One critique to take into consideration is this. Google has scooped up a substantial number of formerly independent open web advocates – most recently Chris Messina, who was the leading spokesperson for the Activity Streams standard. See How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google. In that article we included the following argument from Yahoo’s Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth. This perspective is important to consider in thinking about the Buzz announcement and standards.

“This is clearly a big win for Google,” Hammer-Lahav told us.

“Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space. My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it’s just Google.

“While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will ’sell out’ or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products.”

Is Google centralizing too much of the decision making about the future of an ostensibly decentralized web? Time will tell, but this may be the heart of the battle for the future of the social web.

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Confluence Supports Google’s Open Social, Microsoft Office 2007

Confluence now supports Open Social, allowing users to pull in gadgets to check Salesforce contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar and other items.

The new features in Confluence 3.1, an Atlassian product, show that dashboard environments are certainly in vogue as the social web becomes a pervasive part of the business user’s daily work life.

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Wikis, though are not a marketing term that has as much resonance. Enterprise collaboration is the holy grail. The release from Confluence shows the importance of open, collaborative services that provides the ability to stitch different data sources together into one environment.

With its new release, Confluence is adding a number of new features:

Open Social gadgets may be added by pointing and clicking. The upgrade to Confluence 3.1 includes two gadgets. Confluence Activity Stream displays a list of recent updates from a Confluence site. Quick Navigation provides Confluence search capabilities and suggests results while typing.

Here’s an example of how a gadget is pulled into Confluence.

Attachments may dragged and dropped into the Confluence environment. The idea being that Confluence can act much like a desktop application.

Support is now provided for Microsoft Office 2007. Users may view attached Office 2007 documents, such as PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets within the Confluence wiki page. Users may search inside files and edit documents.

Confluence is one of the leading service providers in the Enterprise 2.0 space. The service demonstrates how 2010 will see the continued integration of the open web within enterprise environments.

As Bill Arconati of Atlassian said in an interview:

“It’s all about interoperability.”

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Mozilla’s Raindrop: An Open Conversation Aggregator

While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs site the company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they’re calling “open messaging for the open web”. While Mozilla’s Snowl Firefox Add-On made it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard.

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Raindrop’s mission is to “make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend’s blog or as part of a social networking site.” Essentially, Raindrop is cutting out the noise and pulling in the information that is actually of interest.

While email clients can filter bot and spam messages, it’s more difficult to discern between personal and general messages from real people. With Raindrop, users messages are categorized and prioritized. For example, in Twitter your direct messages and reply messages are highlighted while the rest of the stream is cast aside. Meanwhile, mailing list messages are also given their own category, separate from personal emails. As with most Mozilla products, the group will encourage front-end widgets and code from outside 3rd party developers.

While the tool certainly shows promise, it is currently only available to developers. The group’s first priority is to build a downloadable installer. To ensure that you’re one of the first non-developer testers, keep an eye on labs.mozilla.com/raindrop.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Thanks to Arjo for the tip!

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Things Have Changed: Facebook to Open Public Messages to Search

Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.

Facebook is opening up to a search engine – that’s very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it’s a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly – once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This ‘aint your big sister’s Facebook anymore.

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Facebook opened on-site search across user profiles and messages late this summer. The company has been careful to only expose information from people who have opted-out of their own default privacy settings and we don’t expect this Bing deal to be any different. While some people like Facebook because of the privacy settings, a growing number of users like it for the promotional and networking advantages that can be maximized with a public profile.

You don’t want to be public with your Facebooking? Facebook will respect that, but the company does hope you’ll change your mind.

Facebook status messages used to be entirely closed to outside search engines – and now they will not be. Even these public search results won’t be full participants in the open web, though. It’s very unlikely that Bing will be allowed to cache the Facebook messages it serves up. Facebook prohibits other software from keeping user data in cache because the company says users must be allowed to change privacy settings and have those reflected everywhere around the web that Facebook data could be found. That’s an unusual arrangement for a search engine. It breaks one of the fundamental laws of the internet – that what you publish publicly once is public forever.

Will the company make a similar deal with Google? Probably not. Twitter may have gone both ways, but Facebook’s long term ambitions to challenge Google and the Microsoft backing could mean that the world’s leading search engine will never be allowed to index the world’s leading social network.

Say hello to the new Facebook, now a partial player in one public part of the rest of the web.

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Personalization

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That’s the long-standing dream anyway. Let’s see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

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All of the trends that we’re profiling overlap. This is particularly so with personalization, as we’ll see.

Filtering the Real-Time Firehose

Personalization is often used to provide an organization layer for users on top of real-time data. As Ken Fromm put it in his primer on the Real-Time Web:

“The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.”

If you use a dashboard product like TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr to use Twitter, then you’re able to group people, keywords and topics. This is effectively personalization at work.

Open Web: More Data About You, Better Personalization

Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the Web. A lot of companies make their data available on the Web via APIs, web services, and open data standards. And as we discussed in the first post in this series, much of that data is structured – allowing it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties.

How does open data lead to personalization? Simply put, the more data about you and your social graph that is available to be used by applications, the better targeted the content and/or service will be to you. There are non-trivial privacy issues about this, however the personalization benefits can be significant.

There are a whole host of open data standards on the Web now. They include:

• Data portability – taking your data and friends from one site to another.
• OpenID – portable identity; single sign-on.
• OpenSocial – Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn’t.
• APML – growing ‘Attention’ standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume.

Recommendation Engines

Many consumer products on the Web aim to recommend you things that you may like. A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold outlined what he saw as the 4 main approaches to recommendations:

• Personalized recommendation – recommend things based on the individual’s past behavior
• Social recommendation – recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users
• Item recommendation – recommend things based on the item itself
• A combination of the three approaches above

Amazon is probably still the best example of recommendations on the Web, but an example of something new from 2009 was Netflix launching better personalization features in March. They included new taste preferences, allowing users to (for example) choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark. Other additions included a personalized homepage and a feature enabling users to mix and match genres.

Conclusion

Personalization has shown slow but steady progress in 2009. It hasn’t been as wild a ride as Structured Data or Real-Time Web, but we consider personalization to be a key facet of the evolving Web.

• Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: The Real-Time Web
• Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data

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Facebook Snags Open Web Community Leader Recordon

David Recordon, an outspoken young advocate for Open Source and Open Web technologies, is leaving blog software company SixApart to join Facebook.

He confirmed to us that he’ll be starting on Monday with the title Senior Open Programs Manager. The move was first reported by Spencer E. Ante this afternoon in BusinessWeek.

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Additional Facebook hires reported by BusinessWeek today include top Yahoo Engineer Arturo Bejar, former Genentech Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, and senior Google engineer Greg Badros. As close observers of the movement to develop open technology standards for the social web, we find the hiring of Recordon to be of greatest interest.

David Recordon traveled all over the world advocating open standards apparently in the belief that an open web would ultimately benefit SixApart. By the same logic that more web use and thus more search is good for Google, so too is more blogging and more online activity good for an activity stream-savvy SixApart. But the company’s activity stream products don’t appear to have flowered as much as its blogging software, and Recordon’s international advocacy must have been expensive.

Facebook, on the other hand, may have a clearer interest in fostering increased activity and syndication of that activity data. While some critics, including this site, have noted Facebook’s tendency to both horde user data and push definitions of privacy in directions most users are unlikely to approve of, the company has also been an active participant in standards discussions concerning both data syndication and privacy. (We worry that users are being pushed to open up data that developers will only be able to access in aggregate for a high price.)

Recordon has been a key leader in the movement to advance standards-based technology concerning identity and activity. We hope that he will help usher in future developments at Facebook that will both make user data available to as many developers as possible to build on and help users stay in control of their privacy in ways they are comfortable with. That’s not going to be an easy job.

Just like when open source advocates take jobs at Microsoft, it’s hard to know to what degree they are changing the nature of the company and to what degree they are being co-opted.

Meanwhile back at SixApart, long-time team member Anil Dash has greatly increased his public profile in recent weeks with big posts about what he calls the Push-button Web.

Key questions then seem to be these: can Dash and others at SixApart keep pushing the Open Web agenda by bringing new technologies to market effectively? Can Recordon help the part of Facebook that favors open innovation and not just put a happy face on what departed Forrester marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang recently predicted would be a future of big social networks “colonizing the rest of the web.”

Facebook recently announced that it will be expanding its staff by as much as 50% this year, and blogger Robert Scoble notes that he was told by Google employees today while visiting that they are being recruited hard by Facebook as well.

Photo by Joi Ito.

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