I just tried to sign up for Google’s new FriendConnect service. I filled in all the details and clicked “Submit” and then up came this page:

It appears Google is using one beta service (Google Spreadsheets - specifically, the feature which allows you to use forms to create spreadsheets for databases) to register for another (FriendConnect). As a result, “something bad happened.” This probably isn’t best practice for a hotly-anticipated new service from Google, much as I understand the urge to eat one’s own dogfood, as it were. Wouldn’t a standard web form with a more robust backend have done the trick?

At any rate, I’m looking forward to trying out the service if and when I can get it working. Looks like an interesting approach to “socializing” non-social networks, but a lot will come down to how it works in practice. I’m also looking forward to trying the other similar initiatives that were somewhat suspiciously all launched within a few days of each other (MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect).

Mashable has a guest post this week from “Drama 2.0” (an anonymous tech blogger), titled, Data Portability is boring. It’s a response to comments made by Tim Berners-Lee in this interview a while back, including the following lines:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site. When you do that, it is like a website that all of a sudden… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

Not very well phrased, but the essence is that if you’re a social networking site and you don’t do data portability, that’s boring (annoying might have been a more appropriate adjective).

Our drama queen says that, in fact, data portability itself is boring. By this he means that, even though bloggers, entrepreneurs and geeks get all excited about it, mere mortals couldn’t care two cents:

From what I’ve seen, it’s really only a small but vocal portion of the Internet population comprised primarily of technologists and Web 2.0 kool aid sippers who are beating the drum for data portability.

The truth is that the average mainstream Internet user doesn’t look at Facebook as a warehouse for data… I’m sure users wouldn’t complain if there was an easy way to take certain data from one service to another, but by in large, I think the technologists pushing for data portability are trying to supply something that there isn’t a whole lot of demand for.

I think this is true for many users today, who are perfectly satisfied with Facebook or MySpace (or some other platform of choice). But what happens if their current platform starts to move in a direction they don’t like, or something measurably better comes along? One doesn’t have to be a power-user of social networking applications to want occasionally to move from one to another or to establish a presence on more than one at once. And data portability serves that need just as well as it does those of the uber-social networkers.

Ultimately, I go back to my own main beef about all this which is that the lack of data portability is simply an artificial barrier to exit, allowing companies to rely on the ownership they have of people’s data rather than on positive competitive differentiation in order to keep their customer base “loyal”. As such, it’s a sign of insecurity as much as anything else. And for that reason alone, it should be highlighted and criticised. Now, if data portability does become available for more sites, it will disproportionately benefit the power users. But it will also benefit the mere mortals who might find the concept “boring” but will appreciate its effects.

Chris Brogan has an interesting post up today about what he wants from social networking etc.:

We’ve got OpenID. We have OpenSocial. We have cross-platform IM clients like Adium and Pidgin. We have life stream aggregators like Friend Feed, Spokeo, and Lijit.

I want the following to be product features of something cross-platform, and I want it soon-ish:

• Friends list portability.
• Proximity-based social networks.
• Mesh networking widely built into laptops.
• A Network Communicator (that allows for IM, Voice, SMS, Status, Presence, and a platform for commands (like “follow” and “@”). I want this communicator to work the same way on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, my IM client, etc, the way a cell phone just cares about connecting the call, not which network you’re reaching.
• Granular, modular grouping of friend data.

At the end of the post, he asked, “What do you want?” I responded as follows in the comments, along the same lines as this post from a while back.

I have been doing some similar thinking and posted on this topic over on my own blog. I think that ultimately what I want is:

• one place to input my data, friends’ names, email addresses etc.
• one place to check on everyone else’s (ideally the same place as the first)
• one tool to communicate with all of those people

The fact that data sent from/to that one place passes through / ends up in other platforms like Facebook/MySpace/Twitter etc. is irrelevant in some ways. I can always go and check it there if I happen to like a particular format or way of presenting it, but I want to have a single place (I use the word “place” - I guess site or even service or application would work too) to manage it all from. Then it’s less about data portability (since my data never moves - at least its home doesn’t) and more about APIs that allow me to plug my data in / feed data out of other services as needed. I think whoever figures out how to do all that will make a lot of money, and destroy advertising revenue streams on the social networking sites in the process. (just think what offline messaging has done to that aspect of Facebook’s site traffic).

It’s an idea I want to expand on some more in future posts. I’m surprised Chris hasn’t had more feedback on the idea yet.

I attended a couple of hours of the Money:Tech conference organised by O’Reilly Media in New York today. Tim O’Reilly himself - originator of the phrase Web 2.0 - was the keynote speaker, and was followed by a chat with Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, founder of TheStreet.com, etc. etc. The conference was about Web 2.0 and financial services, and O’Reilly started out by talking about Web 2.0 and what it means to him. Ovum certainly has a definition of it, which revolves around four parts - social, business, content and technology models which define Web 2.0 services and sites. However, O’Reilly has a simpler definition, which stays away from specific technologies and services, and is simply this:

Web 2.0 is really about harnessing collective intelligence. It’s about creating a network-effects driven data lock-in with accelerating results to the winners. [I'm paraphrasing based on my notes but that was the gist]

In this way, O’Reilly says, it’s similar to Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s “red-shift” concept - that is, as you start to successfully differentiate yourself in something, your lead over the competition begins to grow ever more quickly. It’s all about creating business models which thrive off network effects - examples, according to O’Reilly, include Google (where the network effects come from the number of links people make), eBay (where the critical mass of buyers and sellers is the biggest barrier to competitive entry), Amazon (where he suggests the reviews are the key network effect) and so on. The value lies in accumulating data which leverages network effects in such a way that it is very hard for competitors to emulate what you have done.

Another major theme at the conference was open source software, and a debate during a panel session focused on whether open source adds or destroys value from a market. There were arguments on both sides, but it’s pretty clear to me that it destroys value for existing players, since it replaces proprietary products priced at a premium with free open source products. At the same time, it creates new opportunities for players which didn’t have the in-house resources to develop their own software, and it reduces the cost of doing business for everyone, which increases liquidity and therefore provides broader benefits.

So, how does all this apply to the OpenSocial program, the Social Graph API and efforts to create data portability? Do these effectively do to value in the Web 2.0 world what open source is doing in the software world? Does Facebook’s value proposition go away? Part of the answer may lie in something else O’Reilly talked about, which is Clayton Christensen’s “law of conservation of attractive profits,” which states:

When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products usually emerges at an adjacent stage.

This would suggest that when open source enters a market, the value flees to the adjacent markets. And when data portability enters the Web 2.0 market, value will flee away from the Facebooks and MySpaces and to - where?

I would argue, as I’ve suggested in other entries, it flows to those best able to make use of the new technology - data portability - to create new services which thrive off it. I think this is the logical conclusion, and it’s another reason why Facebook, MySpace and others need to create value in something other than the information they hold about their users, because that will soon become commoditised and easily duplicated. They need to leverage that data in ways others can’t because of special sauce they themselves have concocted. It’s not clear to me that they have figured this out yet, hence (perhaps) their resistance to full data portability. But they’d better figure it out quick or that value really will go to someone else (and who would bet against Google here?).

I’ve just started reading Googler Brad Fitzpatrick’s essay on the Social Graph problem and his accompanying slides. While I agree with a lot of what he says, I find that one of his big assumptions (as stated in the slides) is

some edges/nodes secret (but most public!)

This remains one of my biggest beefs with social networking - that the assumption is we want everything public. I sound unfairly old when I say this, but I’m just not comfortable with the younger generation’s tendency to put everything in the public domain. I have very separate groups of acquaintances (they’re not all “friends” in either sense) in real life and would like to maintain the same distinction online. I will put some of it in the public domain (like this blog), allow Google’s bots to crawl it and so on, but just as I have a personal blog which isn’t linked to here (or crawled by Google), I want to control access to my information, even to the extent that “most” would be “private” in the sense of being shared with certain people but not everyone. And I think this is a key feature of the endgame of social networking I discussed in an earlier post. I also wonder how Google will participate when some of the data is password protected. I think we still need the current model of providing behind the scenes authorisations for one application to access another to download key data, and I don’t want all that going through Google.

Update: looks like I’m not the only one with this concern. Although this article takes a slightly different tack, the problem it points out is essentially the same - not everyone wants all data tracked and searchable by Google. Having said that, there are ways to put up stop signs respected by the Google search bots, but not everyone knows about them and certainly not everyone would have thought it necessary before the Social Graph API came along.

Google just released the API code for its Social Graph initiative and Plaxo already has an early application which makes use of it. While it’s a bit glitchy, it essentially allows you to create a lifestream from various sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Google Reader and others. I found that it wouldn’t import my Flickr feed and the Facebook feed is restricted to two elements - notes and posted items - rather than your news feed. But this is an excellent early example of what should become possible over time. And hopefully we can go beyond a lifestream and actually create dynamic profiles based on this information from other sources.

Closely related to my previous post is the whole issue of data portability. Today social networks are making it as hard as possible for people to take their data with them when they want to leave (or even if they just want to double or triple up on social networks). This is sadly reminiscent of the fight the mobile operators put up when they had to implement number portability.

Both are bad approaches because they seek to rely on artificial barriers to entry/exit rather than genuine competitive differentiation in their products. If wireless carrier A was good enough, it wouldn’t have to worry about number portability because no subscriber would want to go to carrier B. Ditto with social networks. Facebook should be trying to make the experience it offers to its members as good as possible, rather than trying to raise the bar to data portability as high as possible.

The endgame for social networking has two elements - input and output:

• Input: One place to enter all data which will show up on all profiles. I want to enter my email address, my favourite music, my photos, my friend lists etc. in one place and one place only. Currently I have to repeat these tasks and others every time I log in to a new site
• Output: The ability for my one set of personal information and social network data to be presented on a multitude of different front ends, with the ability for me to customise which information appears where and to which groups of people.

Facebook is slowly getting to the second part with its forthcoming friend lists privacy options, but of course that will only apply to Facebook and not to any other social networks. Moli is geared up to doing the second part very well too. Mahalo appears to have a function which will kludge together different profiles into a single setting, which mimics some of the benefits of the first option but doesn’t really bring it all together, and doesn’t allow me to enter my data once.

The Google OpenSocial initiative will hopefully push us further down the road towards the achievement of both goals, but ultimately it should be relatively easy to do the first given all the APIs available for social networking sites today. The second shoudn’t be too hard either, for the same reason. Ultimately, I think that either the single service provider or perhaps two separate service providers who can provide this backend and front end to the social networking world will be kings, not players like Facebook, which will merely sit in the middle, watching data fly through from and to other places.