Not very open, not very social
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Networking on
I’ve been looking at Google’s OpenSocial, and to be honest, I’m not particularly impressed. There is a need for a way of bringing the spiraling maelstrom of social networks into some coherent, cohesive whole. I can see how easy it is for people staring at the headlights of the oncoming Facebook juggernaut to want to seize hold of the first possible escape route - it’s just a pity that OpenSocial came along first.
Yes, OpenSocial can be used to extract information from different web sites and bring them together, but it’s missing many of the features that would make it truly compelling.
Firstly, and critically, there’s no identity component to OpenSocial. All it is is a set of simple API calls that extract all the information that’s available. There’s no way for a data provider to control just who sees what and how,it’s an all or nothing system. The simplistic model that OpenSocial currently offers means there’s no way for me to set a set of rules that expose information in different ways for different people, which is something that’s critical when sharing information across sites - which is something that I see as vitally important, and I’m someone living what can best be described as a “radically transparent” online life.
Identity and relationship are where social networking falls apart. “Friend” has become the most overloaded word I can think of - even more than “sorry”. You might be my social networking “friend”, but what does that really mean? Are you someone I’ve known since primary school, or are you just someone I met at a conference once? I know - but the OpenSocial network doesn’t. There are things about myself that the first person would automatically see, but the second would have to build up a lot of trust before I let them know anything personal.
Secondly, it’s not really a tool for bringing sites and applications together. It’s a tool for building yet more widgets to clutter up our web sites. You can make widgets blend in with site branding, but looking at the horror that is a MySpace profile page, can you imagine someone actually letting that happen? Widgets are all about owning and delivering your brand experience on top of someone else’s. No Widget framework is immune to this - the same is true of Yahoo!’s Widgets, the Apple Dashboard and the Microsoft Sidebar, and yes, even iGoogle (which forms the backbone for much of OpenSocial’s API).
OpenSocial is really the OpenWidget platform. That’s a good thing, but it’s not what we’re being sold. I have to admit, it’s certainly not my thing. I may not like widgets, I may not have a pimped out MySpace page with all the bells and whistles, but there are plenty of people who want that. It’s what they’ll get, in spades, from OpenSocial. It’s just not what the hype is promising.
So what’s needed?
I can’t rip OpenSocial to pieces without offering an alternative. There is a need for a tool to open up and share the social graph, as it would give us the ability to build rich applications that could change peoples’ lives.
This is my shopping list.
A rich, permissions-based identity layer. My applications need to know who you are and what you want - and what I’m prepared to give you.
A strong relationship definition language. Let the semantic web folk go to town here, and build the ontologies we need. Just make it easy for me to define the relationship I want to define.
A common data model (or at least a central map). I want to be able to bring together information from Dopplr, from Upcoming, from LinkedIn, from Facebook. I want to be able to know that when I go to a place, I’ll know what’s happening there, who’s going to be there, who I should network with for my career, and who with and where I should hang out in the evening. Oh, and what’s good to eat.
That’s what the open social graph should give us. Not another set of bloody annoying widgets with badly written AJAX animations and Web 2.0 pretensions. In the face of Web 2.0’s Facebook fear, it’s what we’ve been doomed to.
Badger, badger, badger.
–Simon
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Loading ...Comment by Hank Maus - November 2, 2007 on 7:46 pm
Maybe a “depth-of-friendship” slider bar? 
My problem with all these social networking things is that they seem to have a half-life. They need to be a certain critical size to be useful; and unfortunately, they can’t stop there. You have to recruit new people to replace those who get jaded. But the rate of increase either stalls early (useless) or late (disaster!). If it’s early, the group never becomes useful; if late, itbecomes just too bloody noisy. And then all the useful people leave, never to return. UGC is fine, if someone is going to do the work of moderating. All the other factors, for me, depend entirely on whether the group can afford a moderator. Widgets, pah! Simple text with embedded pix is honestly fine; tags are great. After that, everything else is makeup on a corpse.
Comment by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe - November 3, 2007 on 2:29 am
we’re going to need quite a complex calculus of connection to cope with the full set of how I might know someone - but if we use claims and give people the option of confirming, denying or not commenting on a claim I could then say things like: I met you at a conference I commissioned you I lent you money I worked in the same company but we never spoke I quoted you in an article I might want not want to say: I have your business card but I can’t remember who you are I met you but I don’t want to meet you again It’s good for my status to link to you I’m allowing you to raise your status by linking to you I mistook you for someone I really know I’m stalking you -Mary
Comment by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe - November 9, 2007 on 12:14 pm
And given that it’s just another widget framework, I think Microsoft should add support in Popfly - remind everyone that it’s more toy building than network building. -Mary
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