In a world with lots of socially-aware sites…

…and lots of “open social web” building blocks…

…how do the pieces fit together? …and what will the new Social Web look like?

Reminder: The social web today is broken… On each site, we still have to:  Re-create an account  Re-enter our profile info  Re-find our friends  Re-establish our relationships New social apps have limited options:  Create yet-another-silo (and start from scratch) -or-  Make a widget inside an existing walled garden

…but we know how to make things better!

Create a portable, durable online identity OpenID  Sign up / sign in with an existing account  Link / share your profile data between sites

Example: Sign up for Plaxo with OpenID

Create a portable, durable online identity OpenID  Sign up / sign in with an existing account  Link / share your profile data between sites rel=me (XFN)  Consolidate your online identity with me-links Social Graph API  See what your users said about themselves

Public profiles enrich online identity

Build and maintain real relationships Contact APIs  Find people from your current address book  Leverage previously established relationships OAuth  Share private data between trusted sites Friends-list portability  Continuous discovery across multiple sites

“A periodic check of new people from your networks on other sites”

Stay up-to-date with the people you know OpenSocial  Build social apps that can run anywhere

OpenSocial

Stay up-to-date with the people you know OpenSocial  Build social apps that can run anywhere RSS / Atom  Syndicate your activity to share with others Jabber (XMPP)  Real-time update stream between sites

How does friends-list portability work? Tell the site your Social Graph Provider Site fetches your data to find local friends Site lets you connect to people you want

How does friends-list portability work? Tell the site your Social Graph Provider  XRDS-Simple (discovery) + OAuth (access) Site fetches your data to find local friends Site lets you connect to people you want

How does friends-list portability work? Tell the site your Social Graph Provider  XRDS-Simple (discovery) + OAuth (access) Site fetches your data to find local friends Site lets you connect to people you want  Can periodically look for new matches

How does friends-list portability work? Tell the site your Social Graph Provider  XRDS-Simple (discovery) + OAuth (access) Site fetches your data to find local friends  ??? (no standard way to do this…yet) Site lets you connect to people you want  Can periodically look for new matches

Need a standard for portable contact data Effort underway to standardize: –contact schema –discovery / auth –common operations Focused on ease & speed of adoption –Great initial feedback from big & small players More coming soon:

Building blocks in action: contacts portability User signs in with an OpenID - Site fetches OpenID URL  looks for X-XRDS- Location - Site parses XRDS-Simple doc to discover available APIs Site tries to access contacts API  gets a WWW-Authenticate response header specifies OAuth - OAuth Discovery (via XRDS) provides OAuth endpoints Site sends user though OAuth flow to grant access - User returns to site with authorized access token - Site can now access users’ contacts data via API + token

…so how do these building blocks fit together?