Do you post tweets on Twitter? Do you upload pictures to Flickr? Do you post videos on YouTube? Can’t get enough blogging done in a day? Then FriendFeed is just the right thing for you and your friends.

Built with the same concept as “News Feed” on Facebook, FriendFeed let’s you aggregate your activities and subscribe to all the activities of your friends. Once configured FriendFeed accesses your activity from the external service(s) via back-end custom integrations. The data is retrieved periodically and aggregated into a unified stream of activities. Your friends and family then can subscribe to this aggregated feed and access all your activities across multiple services.

Unlike other RSS feed splicers, FriendFeed has implemented custom integrations to external services to offer access to various types of activities. For example once configured FriendFeed can access your blog posts, new media from YouTube / Flickr, new Diggs, new DVD selections at Netflix and many more.

As a user not only you can aggregate your feed, you can also subscribe to aggregated feeds of other interesting individuals. The service then allows you to comment on specific feed items or like / dislike it. This encourages community interactions between the users and their subscribers.

The service has been launched by ex Googlers as a way to aggregate interesting data from friends. At a high level this is a nice way to for me to access the data from people I am interested in. Otherwise I will have to browse multiple sites, which is painful and time consuming.

Yes I do have some suggestions for the service. As of now only FriendFeed users can subscribe to each other. Non registered users can only get an RSS feed of FriendFeed users they are interested in. This restricts my access to FriendFeed users only. I am hoping that Friend Feed can directly import “favorite” or “subscription” data from other sources. This way using FriendFeed I can get an aggregated view of YouTube favorites and Flickr contacts even if those other users haven’t regsitered on the service. In addition it will be nice to have a basic profile page for all users to give them a bit more identity on the service. This can easily be achieved by importing data from Facebook or LinkedIn.

Finally I must talk about the problem I have with the service, which I feel will grow over time as user-base grows and adds new subscriptions.  I have subscribed to 17 people at this point. Already I feel overloaded with the information they generate. My subscriptions are mostly bloggers and power users, so I maybe an extreme. However I see this happening gradually over time with other folks as well. Once you have decent amount of subscriptions, the data can get too much to handle, thus leading to information overload. FriendFeed needs to sort this out before it becomes an issue. Maybe an improved categorized UI would help, or an intelligent way to filter stories based on likes and dislikes.

Anyways they have bunch of smart people there who can figure this out better than I can. Go ahead check out the service. Who knows you may find it addictive. Don’t forget to subscribe to my feed.

Note: There has been some chatter about SocialThing, a competitor to FriendFeed. However I haven’t received my beta invite to check out the service. I will write further about it once I do.

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This week’s carnival (#114) is hosted at Chetan Sharma’s blog. As always he has a great collection of posts. This time the focus is on the recently announced iPhone SDK. He was kind enough to include my post on the subject as well.

In addition to the arnival, do not forget to checkout his post on the 2007 US wireless market update. As always he has done an amazing job of collecting the most valuable insights into the US wireless market.

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Thursday’s announcement from Apple was pretty impressive. I never expected to see such a complete execution of the SDK program. Apple really looked at this from a 360 degree angle and nailed almost everything:

• App Development
• Testing and debugging
• Deployment, distribution and discoverability
• Business model
• VC funding for developers
• Rich developer program and support

Apple’s approach to this makes anyone else look pretty pale. Compare this to Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile or any carrier’s development program. Almost everywhere else one has to deal with various parties and many restrictions before they can get their application on the phone. Apple has really offered a one stop shop to the eager developers.

However for me the fun part kinda stops there. The early excitement has somewhat waned at this point. I am sure you all know what I am talking about. The fact that Apple will not allow 3rd party background processes to run on the iPhone. This means that users cannot switch back and forth between applications seamlessly. Once you switch applications the previous one shuts down. This is a very realistic scenario where users can receive calls, text/email messages while using an application.

They had AIM guys during the keynote speech. They are a perfect example of apps which will be useless in this model. In the current model AIM will only run once you are within the app. If you decide to do anything else, the app will shut down and you are logged out. This is a serious issues for a bevy of 3rd party applications which need background processing. Not everyone is going to write stand-alone games for playing tetris or spore.

From what I have read, the reasons cited are that Apple does not want to have many applications taking over the background processes and making the iPhone slow. In addition they have published a list of limitations for app developers. These limitations maybe straightforward but the underlying message is that Apple is the overall “GateKeeper”. They control what goes onto your iPhone.

This is exactly the part that isn’t sitting well with me. The more I think about the subject I am starting to draw parallels between Apple and the big bad carriers. Within the proposed model Apple retains control of how the 3rd party application runs, what it provides, how it does business and how it is distributed. What happens if a 3rd party developer wants to write a RSS reader supported by advertisements? It will have to run in the background, probably use good amount of the bandwidth and will be free (supported via ads). Such an app will violate many of Apple’s rules.

Is Apple the new carrier? Is Apple’s iPhone SDK the new “Walled Garden“? Let me know what you all think.

In conclusion I must say that I am surely impressed by the overall SDK program. However not quite impressed with the direction of the SDK. I think the user should be in control. Ultimately they get to decide what gets installed on their iPhone. Once Apple sells the device they no longer should control what runs on that…

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I was over at GigaOm and came across a post from the man himself. It was about the new calendar sync application from Google for BlackBerrys. Just to give you a quick background here, Google has been rapidly releasing mobile applications for the BlackBerry platform, for its favorite services. So they support GMail, Search, Picasa, Maps and News. They launched these services in early December.

So the calendar sync impresses me the most. They have smartly integrated the native BlackBerry calendar with the Google Calendar in a bi-directional fashion. So any entries added to the Google Calendar online shows up on the handset within the native view and anything added within the native view is updated online.

It’s pretty slick as now my office appointments, which are synced to my BlackBerry are also synced with Google. This allows me to publicly publish my busy or free times. It’s pretty cool when you start using it frequently. However this post isn’t about syncing work calendar with personal. Although that area needs a lot of attention by itself. This one is about the potential impacts to the Enterprise business domain itself.

As we know, Google has been pushing hard in the small to medium business space for it’s web based office applications. There are many others in this arena, but Google by far is in the lead. They have gained some momentum by partnering with ISPs and service providers like Cap Gemini.

This recent activity within the BlackBerry space has interesting implications. RIM as we know has a solid hold of the Enterprise market. Most companies purchase BlackBerry Enterprise server infrastructure along with the mobile handset equipment, in order to deliver a better experience to their increasingly mobile workforce.

The recent applications, namely Email (called Mail by Google) and Calendar sync for the BlackBerry devices, provide a great option to small and medium businesses. These businesses no longer have to purchase enterprise infrastructure from RIM. They can simply utilize the Google App service and deploy the mobile applications on the handsets. This could potentially hurt the revenue for RIM coming from enterprise infrastructure sales.

In my mind, Google is taking an approach from behind and trying to spread its applications on existing smart phones. This is a smart move in addition to their Android initiative. Small and medium businesses on the other hand do get the benefit of accessing cheaper applications for the enterprise.

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Hot off the press, Amazon AWS has yet another new web service. This one is called DevPay and is squarely aimed at entrepreneurial developers. Frankly these guys are punching out web services by the dozen.

I particularly like this service as it allowing the developer to further focus on the applications and leave the business aspects to DevPay. Developers can enable applications using other services like S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. Once the apps are ready they can use DevPay to sell them with creative business models.

Many web service providers end up using credit cards or PayPal, which require some effort to configure appropriately. Not to mention security and privacy hassles when dealing with credit card transactions. Seems like DevPay simplifies all that.

Go ahead and check it out yourself. With these new offerings, the AWS portfolio is getting quite potent and headed towards next generation of hosting. I may have to follow-up with a detailed post.

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Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 fame posted a great article on the NYT. He talks about the fact that mobile handsets are gradually becoming more and more like wireless PCs. This change along with the movement within the service provider community is forcing the”Open” mantra within the mobile landscape.

He reflects disappointment behind the fact that even though carriers are beginning to listen, they have not welcomed this with open arms (no pun intended). I am in complete agreement with his recommendation to the carriers to adopt the well established internet/PC business models.

I have mentioned this in a previous post. Carriers are inching towards the “Open” thought process versus taking the bull by the horns. Its simply a strategy where they are hedging their bets with a safe approach.

Yes I understand that they do have a lot of responsibility with the service. Even if they get past the thought that going “Open” won’t hurt their business, they are still worried about security and privacy. Carriers are concerned about the fact that Open models will lead to malicious content on the device, which results in a bad experience and increased customer support calls.

I agree that, within the current mentality these problems do exist. However these emanate from the very nature of the current wireless landscape. We can draw parallels to the PC industry here and see the difference. Within the PC world users buy hardware from one vendor, bandwidth from other and software from a whole different group (no Apple doesn’t count). If a certain 3rd party software fails the hardware manufacturer or the bandwidth provider isn’t responsible for it. Bear in mind that this approach does not discount the operating system manufacturer from offering secure application behavior models.

The mobile landscape in this country will have to completely move towards this thought process. Let the users decide what they want on their handsets. Give them the option to install whatever software they want. This is with the understanding that they have complete responsibility of their actions. If this is an aggressive approach, I say start with offering both models and let the users decide. All in all, give subscribers the power to make the choice.

Otherwise we will have services, as O’Reilly says “Little Less Closed”…

Image courtesy W3C

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I have been away for a week due to some server issues. Now that those are resolved I am back with the post on latest announcement from Amazon. As you know Amazon has been pushing the web-services agenda for quite some time now. By enabling S3 and EC2 among other services they have had significant success in this space. On Friday they added a powerful weapon in their armory.

SimpleDB, the latest entrant into the AWS portfolio is a web-services database for structured storage. Typical databases use SQL type query language to add, modify and delete data in a structured fashion. SimpleDB simplifies this by enabling a web-services interface on top of such a “cloud-based” database.

Setting up a database could be a costly operation for many early stage start-ups. There are free solutions out there such as MySQL, in addition to the expensive ones like Oracle or IBM. However one needs an experienced DBA to manage the database to ensure optimal performance and scalability. In addition the actual infrastructure required to deliver the best experience becomes a very costly proposition. For most services, the database is a critical element of their infrastructure and hence most expensive (after labor of course).

SimpleDB dumbs down all that by moving that part of the infrastructure to the cloud. This allows start-ups and anyone else using this service to focus on the application and not worry about infrastructure and optimization issues. They can avoid software, DBA and infrastructure costs by writing applications, which use the web-services API supported by SimpleDB. In turn they have to pay for the service in a “Pay Per Use” model.

Along with the storage service and elastic computing, the database service completes the triumvirate of key web services. This portfolio is very valuable for any new start-up who want to defer any and all infrastructure headaches. They can start moving towards a “server-less” environment, where they focus all their energies on the application at the core of their business.

Bob Warfield and GigaOm also have good analysis on the subject. I do expect lot of positive feedback from the industry. Frankly I would like to see someone perform a cost comparison for a real service and publish their percentage savings.

In conclusion, I believe this is a great move from Amazon and I would like them keep adding new services to this portfolio. Preferably the ones from my list.

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1and1 my hosting provider is having some issues with the infrastructure where my blog is hosted. As a result the performance of the site is quite slow.

Hence, I am having troubles generating my usual posts. Hopefully this should be resolved in few days, after which I will post again.

Please stay tuned…

Update: The problem with my servers has gone away now. Seems like there was an issue with my Wordpress version and possibly the shared database at 1and1. Anyways things are better now and I will punch out some posts quickly.

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Most of you know about the infamous mobile Walled Garden, enforced by the big boys of wireless in the North American market. This approach to lock the wireless offering has led to significant frustrations for the service / application providers and subscribers alike.

The walled garden established by the carriers, allowed them to have complete / absolute control of the content and applications provided to the handset base. Application developers were at the mercy of the carrier, who essentially controlled most aspects of their business. Right from application functionality, marketing/promotions, discoverability and pricing were mandated by the carriers. Unless you as an app developer partnered with the carrier and deployed a native application (specific to their ecosystem), you had little or no chance of getting into the mobile ecosystem.

As expected this mode of operation has received lot of heat from the application developer community over time. Lately the pressure increased after Google decided to throw down the gauntlet for the upcoming 700 MHz auction. Google’s approach to open the ecosystem drew a fair bit of heat from the incumbents (obviously).

However one thing was certain, the mobile landscape was about to change. Participation from Google and other’s with the strong software background meant that carriers could no longer operate in a close environment. They would have to rethink their strategy.

Many of us thought that this would happen over the next few years and the carriers would like to milk this setup as much as possible. However to everyone’s surprise the industry has made significant leaps in the direction over last six months. So much so that I can say that the garden is officially going away. Let’s look at these key announcements and changes, which were responsible for this change:

Google’s Parlay into Wireless

I have covered this news in detail on this blog. You can read my analysis here, here and here.

The takeaway is that, Google’s introduction has been game changing and has effected the roots of the wireless industry. With Google entering the arena and pushing the “Open” agenda, there is no place for the walled garden. The consumer truly wins in this arrangement. Just last week they confirmed of their participation in the upcoming auctions.

Sprint Opens XOHM

XOHM, the WiMax (4G) network is scheduled to launch early next year. This is a huge bet from Sprint and they are really pushing the wireless data services envelope in this country. Once launched it will be the fastest wireless data service in the market.

Back in October they announced their business model for XOHM. To the surprise of many they took the leap and offered an “Open” model. This structure enables them to simply focus on the wireless data service and allow any device (with the chip) and any service to partake within the ecosystem. An interesting move, considering they being one of the supporters of the Walled Garden. Read more in my post on this subject.

This was a significant shift in their overall wireless strategy, thus pushing the bulldozer even further.

Android and iPhone SDK

iPhone was a significant launch. However it still did not allow fair access to 3rd party applications. So in October his Jobness announced availability of the true iPhone SDK in the Q1 2008 timeframe. Although the details are scarce at this point, the SDK is expected to allow 3rd party app developers to deploy applications which can leverage all capabilities of the iPhone.

Google on the other hand launched the open device operating system, called Android and established the Open Handset Alliance. This alliance brings together various OEM vendors and carriers alike. The idea is to provide a open operating system, which will enable carriers and OEMs to enable a flexible open ecosystem, where 3rd party developers and service providers can easily deploy applications. Although the handsets aren’t coming out till mid 2008, many remain hopeful of this effort. Read my early analysis on this here.

Verizon Goes “Any Apps, Any Device”

Just last week Verizon, who is one of the most powerful backers of the walled garden announced that it was opening up the ecosystem. They would allow any devices with user selected applications to run on their network as far as they were CDMA compatible.

This is a tectonic shift from their historical thought process, where they have kept their devices pretty much locked. It’s speculated that Google’s push for Open standards in the FCC auction is forcing Verizon to go down this path. Many are still skeptical about them delivering a true open environment. However I consider this as one of the final nails in the “Walled Garden” coffin. It is also reported that Verizon will be joining Google’s Open Handset Alliance.

So in conclusion, the aforementioned announcements, which have taken place over past 6 months truly have a game changing impact. 2008 and 2009 will be very interesting years for the wireless industry in this country. Tis will open up multiple opportunities for 3rd party services who could think outside the box and potentially start creating mashups for the mobile ecosystem.

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I haven’t done much weekly wrap ups on this blog. However the past week was pretty interesting. That’s why I am thinking of introducing a weekly post where I cover some of the salient stories for the week.

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.

• Rise of The GoogNet
• Rise of the GoogNet — Part 2
• Rise of GoogNet — Part 3, Well Sort Of…
• More stories

Verizon is Now Open

This is was a very interesting move from Verizon last week. Over most of 2007 they have been resisting and fighting against Google to make the service open. They were lobbying heavily at FCC against including Google’s recommendations.

However in an unprecedented move they announced opening their network to any applications and any devices. This will offer much flexibility to 3rd party developers and subscribers.

I will have further analysis in a detailed post later. In the mean time, read my prior analysis of Verizon.

• Welcome to Verizon 2.0
• Rise of GoogNet, Verizon Doesn’t Think So

Pepsi follows Universal

This one is not that significant, however it is continuing the exodus of music providers from iTunes in search of greener pastures. The music landscape is changing significantly and everyone is in search of a newer / better business model.

Last week Pepsi announced that they will be leaving iTunes and moving to Amazon. Here is my previous analysis into the matter.

• Growing iHate for iTunes
• More iHate for iTunes
• $0.89 on Amazon or $0.99 on iTunes

Tim Berners-Lee talks Graphs

The man who invented the web, recently talked about the social graph on his blog. His thoughts were pretty much at a high level and related to the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0)

Check out some of my posts on the matter:

• Free the Social Graph
• OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability
• Thoughts for Opening and Sharing the Distributed Graph

That wraps up the main items for the last week. I will be closely following these announcement and will have detailed posts.

Send me your comments and thoughts about this weekly feature.

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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:

Enable Web-Service Access to User Data

All services, which rely on user generated content, in any shape or form should enable a simple web-service, which hosts a XML version of user data. For example Facebook can offer web-services access to a XML file containing friends, messages etc and Amazon can provide service access to a XML file, with user wish-lists, ratings etc.

The intent is to allow access to this data by external services/applications or the user themselves. Now access to these services shall be secured and only upon authorization from the user. As this data clearly belongs to the user, these services can not claim ownership here and should expose the information in the interest of the user.

Note: W3C talks about various formats, which can be utilized for this purpose.

Establish a Single Web-Service Registry

Services supporting the aforementioned web-services scheme should be listed in this registry. The registry can support items like web-service URL, ID , data description format etc. The idea here is to create a generic repository where other applications (or user) can lookup these services. Think of this like DNS for web-services.

In this registry, each service shall receive a unique ID. This ID will be utilized while looking up the web-service resources. For all practical purposes the URL itself could be the unique key. This registry will be utilized by services/applications to find resources about other services. Think of it as the “Information Booth” of web-services.

Expand OpenID to Incorporate User’s Service IDs

Now this is the exciting part. OpenID systems should expand to incorporate user’s services. They should enable lookup of the “Service Registry” and allow user’s to configure the services they currently use (while registration or later). This will essentially enable OpenID systems to establish the relationship between users and services. Now bear in mind that this data is private and is only shared on user authorization.

This establishes the cross-web relational database of users and services. This doesn’t mean that any service having access to user’s OpenID can extract data from any of the web-services. Instead as mentioned earlier, each service is protected and user must selectively authorize access to the requesting 3rd party.

Applications and Services to Utilize Open-ID/Service Registry/Web-Service Combo

Once the relationship is established, other applications can easily take advantage of this setup. For example; the user signs up onto a new social network belonging to his local Fantasy Football club. The social network offers the user to sign up via his OpenID and at the same time requests to lookup his other services. Upon user authorization, the service can find that the user also belongs to Facebook. This triggers the application to prompt the user to import his/her friends from facebook onto this new network. Upon user authorization, the network can easily access the service registry, lookup the web-services URL and access the Facebook graph data.

That was probably a straight-forward example. However the possibilities with such a setup are endless. An application can potentially lookup any service you belong to and import data if its valuable.

Clearly such an environment allows data sharing across the services driven by user needs. The user receives the flexibility he/she needs to take their data anywhere they want and on the other hand this opens up new opportunities for application and service providers. These providers now have access to user’s data from other services, which offers them a level playing field. They can now focus on their features instead of building the graph all over again.

Accessing external data could also be used as a motivation for social services to open up access to the user content/graphs stored on their systems. I believe an entity like W3C could drive such an initiative. They could serve as the service registry for everyone.

Frankly this is what the web should be. As far as I am concerned this is a good implementation of the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) talked about by Tim Berners-Lee, where applications can understand data from other services, versus it being plain vanilla human readable HTML only.

Hope you enjoyed that post. Send in your comments and thoughts. I will be posting more in this series. Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to stay tuned.

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Welcome to the 100th edition of the carnival. This is a momentous milestone and it comes to you from foggy Santa Cruz. I have been participating in the carnival for past few months and am certainly lucky enough to host the 100th edition.

Before we jump into the posts, we should offer our gratitude to the people who made this happen. People who started this carnival and have maintained it for folks like us to enjoy. Please join me in thanking the following:

Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino of MobHappy who started it all back in Oct 2005. Along with Rudy De Waele they were original the visionaries. Finally Judy Breck and Troy Norcross for keeping the carnival going. Their efforts are really appreciated and without their leadership we wouldn’t have been enjoying this.

So let’s jump into the picks for this week. As expected there are a bunch about Android.

Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity discusses the component nature of the new mobile OS from Google. On the other hand Steve Ives of Taptology discusses the implications of Android on the mobile market. James Pearce of Tripleodeon provides his coverage of Google’s Android presentation at MoMoBoston.

Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens switches views and ponders on the lack of SIP/IMS stack within Android. Here is my quick analysis on Android as well.

Switching gears, Martin Sauter takes an in-depth look at the evolution of the current 3.5G HSPA standard. Sticking with the in-depth views, Thomas Menguy provides his analysis of various mobile coding platforms and the various execution engines. Azizi Jennis of TreoToday talks about his most used mobile web sites. My favorites would be GMail and Facebook.

Finally a post from Chetan Sharma, providing detailed analysis of the US wireless data market for Q3 2007. Chetan does an excellent job with these reports and they contain a treasure of valuable data. Hence this is my post of the week.

That wraps up the entries for this week. The 101st edition is being hosted by Martin Sauter. Please send in your entries by mail to mobilists@gmail.com or use this blog carnival page.

Once again thanks to organizers and coordinators. Looking forward to the next 100.

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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.

So what is the problem?

The very fact that my graph lies all over the place is the core problem. Over time I have signed up on these services for one of the following:

1. Offers unique new feature or
2. My friends were using the service and I got invited frequently

When I sign into one of these services, I have to go through the rigamarole of setting up a user name and password, which by the way is yet another username/password combo to remember. Secondly, each time I sign up I am creating a new graph, which is clearly not associated to graphs existing elsewhere. Over time, being part of so many services and interacting with people through these becomes a serious headache. Thus leading to what is known as the “Social Network Overload”.

Hence the core of the problem being that the social graph is not singular and not shared.

What is needed?

Starting from the ground up, I believe there is a need for consolidation. We need a service ( a Social Graph Database), which can host the aggregated social graph for a user. This isn’t a service like Facebook or LinkedIn. Instead it will simply host user’s graph, which could be as simple as a CSV file.

This service would then offer secure APIs to access user’s graph. This should preferably be tied to an OpenID type of consolidated authentication system. The APIs can be utilized by services mentioned above to access user’s graph and offer their value adds. Now there would be few simple rules to this system:

• Services can access the graph only when the user allows them by authenticating using his/her OpenID
• The data would be read only and should be considered transient. Services should check this graph database periodically (preferably once a day) for updates.
• Any updates made to the graph via a service must be added back to the consolidated graph.
  1. For example new friends or new relationship stats
  2. This will ensure that the graph doesn’t get broken and all other services are updated

I am sure all of us agree on the fact that the social graph data belongs to the user. Services and applications have “no right” over this data. So such a scheme only sounds fair to the user and participating services. Here is a graphic illustrating the thought at a high level.

In this model no single social network becomes host to the graph. They all become interfaces into the graphs. They provide applications, which allow you to act on the graph. Such an approach levels the playing field for everyone.

No one highlighted in the above graphic can host the graph. That results into trust issues and such. This database service will have to be offered by a non-profit organization. This service can also be offered by an affiliation of these entities. Yes, I do realize that is next to impossible.

The other impossible aspect is to create this graph from scratch. Users aren’t going to log into a database service and create a graph. Probably a geek like me would :-). So this service must adapt create a graph from user’s existing accounts on various services. The affiliation which may run the service can also mandate this so all the participants feed in the graph data.

So in conclusion, I must say that these are simply thoughts from top of my head. These are just ideas to solve the problem, which users like me face on a daily basis. I know that such solutions are too hard to implement and have way too many barriers. I am hoping to start a discussion with this post. Do comment with your feedback.

Next time I will post about Evolution of the Social Graph. That post shall take the conversation to the next level and delve into maturing the social thought process and making services around us smarter.

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As you know I typically cover technology and Web related topics on this blog. However in this post I want to switch gears. Today I was invited to a fund raiser by my good friends Bill and Susan Wishon. They are part of a non-profit organization called Mariposa’s Art, which helps “at risk” youth by conducting after school programs.

They primarily operate within Santa Cruz, Watsonville and San Jose areas. In 10 years of their operations, they have helped over seven thousand individuals. Their after school programs provide classes on art and music to youth, thus fostering their creativity. This is an excellent program as it builds creativity and prevents youth from getting into the wrong habits They also have student teacher programs, which enable students to teach, thus building confidence.

I was very impressed by their efforts and success. I recommend you visit their website and make a donation if you want to help.

I wish them Good luck and thank Bill and Susan for making me part of their efforts.

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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.

I am happy about OpenSocial as an effort to help networks and developers. However I would like to see Google focus more on the user’s needs. Someone needs to represent the user in middle of all this and in my mind there is no one better than Google.

As we know, there are new social services cropping up constantly. A user’s friends and acquaintances are distributed over multiple networks and thus the he/she has to register with more than one to keep track. For example, here are the services I use:

• LinkedIn (for my professional contacts)
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Orkut (for my friends in India)
• Plaxo (for contacts/calendar consolidation)

In addition I keep receiving invites from Hi5, Friendster and Yahoo 360. I am pretty sure this is typical of many users. Now I haven’t joined these networks because they offer something new and different than others. I join them because my friends have registered there. This is true for many users and this is quite a problem.

What we need here is consolidation and / or interoperability. We need simplification without hampering access to the social graph. It is natural for the social graph to be spread all over. This is same with other modes of communication. For example my wireless carrier is Sprint, but my friends and co-workers are spread over other providers. This problem appears in E-Mail and IM worlds too.

OpenSocial should learn from recent interoperability relationships in the IM world. OpenSocial can establish methods (APIs) for containers (Social Services) to access Social Graph information across the board. This access is not to steal the users (or the whole graph), but to just access friend information on user’s request. For example if I am registered at Facebook, I can invite and add friends who maybe in MySpace an/or Orkut.

Imagine, if you had a Gmail account and you could only message other Gmail users. Well it would be hard, wouldn’t it? Same thing is happening within our Social Networks today. Enabling interoperability will fix this problem and on the other hand prevent Social Networks to leverage the actual “Social Graph” to gain subscribers. They will have to enable new applications and features to convey users to join them. This is very similar to how IM and Wireless carriers behave today.

This is a clear and present problem, which must be fixed. The Social Graph belongs to the user, so no one can argue that Social Networks can leverage that for building subscriber base. Given the paradigm OpenSocial is establishing, enabling interoperability is not such a big leap of imagination. In my opinion such an interoperable environment will allow following:

• Ability to add friends on external networks
• Ability to access latest activity from friends on other networks
  • This will require interoperability of “My Feeds” across networks
• Ability to access friends buddy list “Social Graph”
  • This is purely read-only and enabled for users to discover friends
  • Networks cannot use this data to lure users from one network to the other
• Ability to message and leave comments (Wall to Wall, Scraps whatever)

The aforementioned feature-set will deliver the experience we all need. Social networks will compete with new applications and services to garner user interests. For example I moved from Yahoo mail to Gmail due to the improved experience. Same thought process can be applied to the networks.

I am hoping OpenSocial can evolve to enable this for us users. Simplification is what we need.

Until then we have to login into multiple systems to keep in touch with our friends and co-workers. Let me know what you all think aboutmy thoughts. Your comments are most welcome.

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