Transcript PPT - Joseph Smarr

Opening up the Social Web
Joseph Smarr
Chief Platform Architect, Plaxo
11/28/2007
Joseph Smarr
Something very exciting is happening…
The social web is opening up…and fast!
 What’s
going on?
 How did we get here?
 How is Plaxo involved?
 Who else is working on this?
 What’s next?
 How can I get involved?
Joseph Smarr
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

Many social applications (flickr, digg, ilike, etc.)
 Little

still “walled gardens”
access to users’ social graph data
Users stuck re-creating their profile and friendslist over and over; data is fragmented
 Pain
Joseph Smarr
/ friction starting to really matter to sites / users
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”
Joseph Smarr
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
Joseph Smarr
Joseph Smarr
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”
Joseph Smarr
Online Identity Consolidator
Open-source rel=me 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
Joseph Smarr
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

Joseph Smarr
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
Joseph Smarr
A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
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Sites supporting these rights shall:
 Allow
their users to syndicate their own profile data,
their friends list, and the data that’s 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
Joseph Smarr
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

Joseph Smarr
OpenSocial gadgets in Plaxo Pulse
Gadgets in user profiles
Joseph Smarr
Activity in Pulse stream
Is “Open” good for business?
Joseph Smarr
We’re not alone:
Building blocks of the open social web

Who am I?
 OpenID:
prove that I own a URL / profile
 rel=me: these URLs describe the same person

Who do I know?
 oAuth:
securely share my (private) friends-list
 SixApart’s (public) relationship update stream

How can I use my data?
 OpenSocial:
cross-platform social applications
 FOAF, XFN, vCard: standard data interchanges
Joseph Smarr
Growing awareness and support

Tim O’Reilly


Tim Berners-Lee


“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. “
“…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.
Joseph Smarr
Where we are today

Many sites implementing “poor-man’s 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. can’t find friends that link to their twitter profiles from blog
Have to re-assert relationships on each site
of e-mails asking me “are you John’s friend?”
 Can’t defer to existing authorities (e.g. LinkedIn, Geni)
 Lots
Joseph Smarr
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
Joseph Smarr
Towards a truly open social web

The open social web’s “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

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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
someone new  choose where to connect
 Try new services  find out when your friends join
 Social app developers can “outsource” who you know
 Meet
Joseph Smarr
There’s room for everyone to win

What we’ve 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 there’s 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
Joseph Smarr
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 build…and it’s in our grasp
Let’s open up the social web!
Joseph Smarr
For more on opening up the social web…
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Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web:
http://OpenSocialWeb.org
Tantek Çelik’s talk:
http://tantek.com/presentations/2007/10/social-network-portability/
David Recordon’s talk:
http://daveman692.livejournal.com/318735.html
Brad Fitzpatrick’s essay:
http://bradfitz.com/social-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
Joseph Smarr