Open Social: The Empire (and Friends) Strike Back

I recently wrote a post reacting to Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts On The Social Graph".  Brad recently left Six Apart to go to Google.  Now, as many predicted, the other shoe has dropped, with Google and others announcing the new "Open Social" standard. 
Here's today's NYT article on the subject.

The concept of the social graph -- a digital map of who knows whom -- represents an increasingly critical element of many web applications, especially public ones.   Early social networking services like Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook (and behind-the-firewall versions like Contact Networks, where I used to work) became valuable because they offered advertisers and other business users  "viral  pathways" to communicate through that more closely matched how people really filter/ absorb information -- word of mouth from trusted, or at least known, sources -- in an age of information overload.

Facebook recently pushed the utility of the "social graph" one step further by providing an API to allow others to build applications that take advantage of it.  This strategy has been a runaway success.  Third-party developers get more efficient access to an audience than would be possible through the conventional "email to a friend and then have each one register separately" MO we've been using for ten years.  Facebook gets inventory to advertise against, and maybe a cut of commerce at some point.  Users get more utility out of a platform they already like -- which means free stickiness for Facebook.  All this goodness is why Facebook is worth 100x revenues to Microsoft (and whatever other investors get announced).

Now, as is the way of all flesh in the software business, a group of Facebook competitors, who individually and collectively find themselves behind in the race to build their own social graphs, have banded together to see if they can re-capture the initiative.  The vehicle for this is a new standard called "Open Social".

The Open Social proposition is simple:  "Hey app developers, don't get trapped by Facebook, build to this open standard and run your app on any conforming social network!"  And, "Why build for Facebook exclusively, when only 3% [Note:  my calc, Facebook's users/ total global web users] of global web users are there today?"

Here's a really useful post by Marc Andreesen (for whose terrific Ning service having access to a social graph is mission-critical), that addresses the two critical issues necessary for success of this new standard:  how much liquidity (how many/ what kind of users) does it provide, and how easy is it to use?

In his post, Andreesen  suggests that together, the  initial sponsors of the new Open Social standard represent about 100 million users.  He doesn't break that down.  Here's my cut:

• LinkedIn 15 million? (source) -- high time for them to get with the program
• Orkut  ~70 million (source) -- big concentration (60-70%?) in Brazil
• Salesforce.com ~1 million (source) -- they got the "be a platform" bit a while ago
• Hi5  ???
• Ning ~ the difference, spread across 110k social networks -- including one of ours? (source)

Kind of an odd mix.  Certainly so for advertisers!  But hey, gotta start somewhere.  Andreesen calls out MySpace and Yahoo in his post.  But they, like Facebook, have to be  thinking hard about whether going the Open Social route is the best way to take advantage of their own massive-but-still-underleveraged social graphs.

As for ease of use:  his post certainly makes it seem so.  Memo to engineer friends -- I'll be really interested in your reaction...  (Easy predicition:  pretty soon we will see interfaces so that non-engineers can build their own FB/  Open Social  apps.)

BTW, where's "Old Media"?  For example,  NYT's  "most emailed" represents  an interesting data set from which a social graph could be assembled -- "who emailed whom" is a good proxy for "who knows whom".  I'd be open to them coming back to me and asking if I'd mind if they developed a Facebook-style friend network out of my past usage patterns.  Hope they haven't thrown away those log files!

Should advertisers care at this point?  Yes, to the degree they are developing FB apps, since the experience on FB has already indicated a big early-mover advantage.  It would certainly be worth evaluating the new spec to see if writing to it first and then extending to FB (as Andreesen suggests) makes sense.  And perhaps industry groups need to form their own tech spec committees to influence new standards like these,  rather than chasing the bus yet again?

December 21, 2007 postscript:  via Sim Simeonov's High Contrast blog, Open Social's looking a bit gamey.