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 still “walled gardens” Many social applications (flickr, digg, ilike, etc.)  Little access to users’ social graph data Users stuck re-creating their profile and friends- list over and over; data is fragmented  Pain / friction starting to really matter to sites / users

Joseph Smarr 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

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 Open-source rel=me crawler (OpenSocialGraph.plaxo.com)OpenSocialGraph.plaxo.com    Online Identity Consolidator

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. Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble

Joseph Smarr A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web 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. 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 profilesActivity in Pulse stream

Joseph Smarr 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  “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. “ Tim Berners-Lee  “…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 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  Lots of s asking me “are you John’s friend?”  Can’t defer to existing authorities (e.g. LinkedIn, Geni)

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 = / URLs from all services you know  Social apps = running anywhere with same richness 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  Meet someone new  choose where to connect  Try new services  find out when your friends join  Social app developers can “outsource” who you know

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… Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web: Tantek Çelik’s talk: David Recordon’s talk: Brad Fitzpatrick’s essay: OpenID: Microformats: oAuth: OpenSocial: Slides available at