Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Standards for the Social Web
We first talked about the need for standards for the social web back in 2005, when Mike Liebhold, Kathi Vian, and I presented our research report on "The Many Faces of Context-Awareness" at the Technology Horizons Exchange. At that time, while the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) XML schema for describing social relationships existed, almost no one was using it. The dominant social networks of that day - LinkedIn, Orkut, and (soon) MySpace all were walled gardens. They didn't share information, and there was no mechanism for outside developers to build new socially-aware applications that leveraging all that valuable social data.
Well, that's all changing incredibly quickly. Facebook opened up back in May, announcing an API for developers that has spawned thousands of applets and plug-ins that many said would turn the site into the "operating system for the web".
Not so fast. This week we saw Google come out of the social networking shadows with a huge alliance backing its OpenSocial platform, an initiative that will cover 200 million users across a couple of dozen social sites (though I suspect a lot of those are people like me, who despite the challenge of updating all those profiles, maintain identities on many of those platforms).
This may be the first step at unleashing a wave of innovation around online digital identity management - a potentially groundbreaking move towards improving intelligence, trust and usability in the social web, but also a potentially devastating opportunity for content providers to elevate the art of online surveillance and profiling. Perhaps that's why the Center for Digital Democracy is going bonkers over the OpenSocial proposal. (Time to re-up your ReputationDefender subscription!)
Coverage:
- San Jose Mercury - MySpace Joins Google's Social Networking System
- New York Times: MySpace Joins Google Alliance to Counter Facebook
Technorati Tags: information technology, infrastructure, social networks, social software