Social Networks | Abhishek Tiwari

Google Officially in the Race

Google, who has been dabbling with the idea of participating in the FCC’s 700 MHZ auction, finally confirmed their participation on Friday. This comes after various discussions on this topic during most of 2007. The news was first broken by WSJ.

Here is some of my previous coverage around Google’s wireless plans.

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Thoughts for Opening and Sharing the Distributed Graph

November 28th, 2007

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As you know from few posts on this blog, I am a huge supporter of user’s owning their social graphs. Over multiple posts, I have been laying out the need for a consolidated service, which hosts the graph (along with identity) for a user.

Last week this discussion caught some steam with some great posts by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Winer. Dave’s post made me think that the data ownership problem is bigger than just the graph. Theoretically a user owns all the content they generate on any of these services. You know, things like Amazon ratings, YouTube videos, etc. While I don’t see anyone having the need for getting an XML file with this content for personal use. I do see them wanting to use this data on other services. For example (from Dave’s post) one can use their movie ratings at NetFlix and use it with Vudu or share it with their friends on Facebook.

This thought process clearly reflects that there are many graphs (social or otherwise) within many dimensions of services on the web. Every new service with any user generated content is creating a new graph. I talked about the need for consolidating the access to this graph in my last post. Given the dispersed nature of the graphs it will be pretty unrealistic for any web service to physically do that. Hence in this post I am recommending a slightly different mechanism whereby we can enable an ecosystem on the web and achieve the same results. So here it goes:

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Free the Social Graph

November 18th, 2007

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Few days back I talked about the OpenSocial initiative and how I believe that it can help making the online Social experience much better by enabling interoperability. Before that I have also talked about consolidation of online social experience. My theme continues to remain the same. How do we fix “Social Network Overload”? So in this post I am going deeper to the basics of the problem.

What is a Social Graph?

The term popularized by Mr. Zuckerberg (CEO Facebook) is a better name for your Social Network. Social Graph represents your network of acquaintances. It is a graph of your contacts (friends, family, coworkers etc). Services build upon the social graph and offer applications, which let you interact with your friends and acquaintances. Check out the Wikipedia page for in-depth details.

Where does it exist?

For a typical user, the social graph is broken and distributed among various services and applications. For example my graph exists across:

Social networks I belong to, such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace etc
Business networks I belong to, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo etc
My Email contacts, which exist on GMail, Outlook etc
My IM buddy list
My phonebook on my mobile handset
Finally my blog visitors and Twitter followers

For some of you this list will probably be longer. Now these services and people I interact with represent my social realm of influence. So as you can see my overall graph is spread all over the place, over various services. I am sure most users are this way.

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OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability

November 11th, 2007

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I am sure most of you know about Google’s latest initiative called OpenSocial. Google launched this effort to simplify and consolidate the ecosystem for application developers and Social Networks.

According to OpenSocial, Social Networks and other similar services can play hosts and implement to the standard Google API’s. Developers can write applications to these API’s and are automatically enabled to deploy them on any one of these hosts. This introduces the “Write Once, Run Anywhere” paradigm in the ecosystem. You can read more on their official website.

According to Google’s Vic Gundotra, this is valuable for both developers and host networks. With respect to Users, he mentions that they will receive “more, more and more”. More Applications, More Choices across More Websites.

Frankly, I disagree with Vic there. “More” is not always good. I will even go to the extent of saying that the idea of “More” is the single biggest problem with the social networking experience today. I have written about Social Network overload several times before.

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Orkut Refreshed, but Where is SocialStream?

August 25th, 2007

Orkut (Google’s Social Network) announced a new look yesterday. They haven’t had much success in North America or Europe (Bebo is hottest in Europe) but are pretty hot down in Latin America and Asia. Most of the invites I receive on Orkut are from my buddies in India. So after few years of service they are moving (according to their blog) towards cooler Web 2.0 like style. Here is a screenshot for your pleasure.

Well, quite frankly, that don’t impress me much. I am glad that they are bringing new features in like feeds and video. However smoother look, curvy edges and bluish coloring scheme ain’t cutting it anymore.

Although they have had a lot of success in Latin America and India, they are trailing behind likes of MySpace and Facebook. Based on a recent analysis from ComScore Orkut hasn’t really grown over the past year.