Web2Summit: Opening Up the Social Graph

Slide 1: A story of <3 and </3 (David) - Story of social networking love and hate, love and heartbreak

Slide 2: My 20+ Social Networks (Brad) - Balancing many services online already - Having to re-enter the same information and make the same connections

Slide 3: My 20+ Social Networks - Dopplr, great idea, wanted to use it, asked to re-define friends again - So sick of doing this! - Broke the camel's back

Slide 4: - Dopplr, great idea, wanted to use it, asked to re-define friends again - So sick of doing this! - Broke the camel's back

Slide 5: social applications - But it isn't Dopplr's fault - Hacks such as scraping address books - No current way to get the social graph without asking for it or choosing a proprietary platform

Slide 6: social applications - But it isn't Dopplr's fault - Hacks such as scraping address books - No current way to get the social graph without asking for it or choosing a proprietary platform

Slide 7: social applications - But it isn't Dopplr's fault - Hacks such as scraping address books - No current way to get the social graph without asking for it or choosing a proprietary platform

Slide 8: social applications - But it isn't Dopplr's fault - Hacks such as scraping address books - No current way to get the social graph without asking for it or choosing a proprietary platform

Slide 9: So what about platforms? (David) - None of these services interoperate (with rare exceptions of RSS support) - Not a new problem

Slide 10: \"IM Wars\" - Their IM networks couldn't interoperate either - People were forced to pick one - Hacky solutions such as Trillian and Adium -- not real interoperability - Going where their friends are

Slide 11: Jabber / XMPP - Still evolving, but providing true interoperability between walled gardens

Slide 12: Identity Silos - Have to create a new account everywhere you go - Poor security using the same password everywhere, hack one account get them all - Overwhelming

Slide 13: Identity Silos - Have to create a new account everywhere you go - Poor security using the same password everywhere, hack one account get them all - Overwhelming

Slide 14: - Reduce the number of accounts - Strongly protect your OpenIDs

Slide 15: HOSTS (Brad) - Examples of non-emerging technologies - Had to FTP a single \"HOSTS\" file around to resolve all names - Couldn't get to new sites until they were in the file and you fetched the updated file - Didn't scale

Slide 16: DNS - Changes automatically propagate - Made sysadmins happy - More complicated than a white-space line-break separated file, but it scales

Slide 17: Segregated Messaging - Most successful example of centralization -> decentralization - 1960s demonstrated at MIT, required all users be on the same server

Slide 18: Email SMTP as you know it today - Took until the 1980s for SMTP to become popular - Couldn't imagine a World without interoperable email

Slide 19: Centralization - Social networks today are generally centralized

Slide 20: Decentralization - But as history shows, technology becomes decentralized

Slide 21: it's harder (but we always get there) - Scale - Data duplication / re-entry - Business decisions (geeks want to do the right thing) - Interoperability standards

Slide 22: \"Either social networks will keep their walls up to force individuals to choose, or they will open up in the hope that they'll get the customer even if their competitor does, too.\" O'Reilly Radar (David) - Dopplr, don't go there for everything - Not trying to steal users, let them go there - This is not a zero-sum game - Traditional network eects

Slide 23: \"A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform.\" Jeff Huber (Web 2.0 Summit '07) - There won't be just one walled platform, interop is a must - This battle was tried in the 1990s and was lost - HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML

Slide 24: \"As long as people feel that if they don't like what we're doing they can just switch, then that keeps us honest and keeps everybody else honest as well.\" Eric Schmidt (Web 2.0 Summit '06) - This year has had a trend reinforcing decentralization - With the move toward services in the cloud, data import/export is increasingly important - Good to see the large services understand this

Slide 25: Open Data is increasingly important as services move online Tim O'Reilly (OSCON '07) - Hosted services change the \"open\" game - Data is as important as source

Slide 26: social graph (another type of user generated/owned data) - Social graph already exists as Zuckerberg said - Everyone is having to map it out - Every user is declaring their own maps - The user maps are THEIR data, not the services they're giving it to

Slide 27: So how can we all make this happen? (Brad) - Today you'll be laughed at if you say you're a blog site and have no RSS/Atom - Want to get to the same thing for social networks oering an analogous form of data interop - To make it just as easy to move it, share it, mash it up as it is with blogs

Slide 28: markup and share data - Microformats, FOAF, RSS, Atom, etc - Format wars don't benefit users, we don't care where the curly braces go

Slide 29: import data

Slide 30: export data

Slide 31: put the people in control - History shown - Network eects as David said - Decentralization

Slide 32: privacy is important (As seen on Facebook and others) - Just fully public or fully private doesn't cut it - Share with your friends

Slide 33: OAuth (emerging standard; \"your valet key for the web\") - Standardized existing duplicate protocols from Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft - Remove the need to ask for email provider passwords

Slide 34: provide context outside your walls if users want to link accounts, allow it...they may even link to your service from another profile

Slide 35: Who does this right with XFN? • Wordpress • Twitter • Pownce • LiveJournal • Google Profiles • TypePad and Movable Type this month (Brad until TypePad) - Markup both on the service and outside the service - Context matters for XFN rel-me

Slide 36: make your network more accessible You can't fight it forever...David beats Goliath - As seen with content, services will just scrape you if they want it - Proactively sharing while respecting privacy reduces your own server load - Talk of nasty hacks within the browser for uncooperative services

Slide 37: Real-time Stream of Relationship Changes http://updates.elsewhere.im coming soon - As a way to make more accessible - Allows real-time relationship changes to be noted across services - Don't have to \"ping\" every news feed service that you're now friends with me

Slide 38: Let's all open the social graph! - This is user generated data - Watch for developments in this space - O'Reilly radar