Last Thursday Facebook announced a major step in their growth strategy. It is now possible for others (both companies and Facebook-users) to build so-called applications that can be integrated in your Facebook profile. this is way more than just making widgets possible. Facebook now gives API access to their core functionality, like replacing their well used own photo-functionality with your own.
Twitter in Facebook
Immediately a wave of applications has become available. Some like Twitter, in cooperation between Facebook and the third party, others like Flickr, are made by some student with a Facebook profile.
I added applications for Last.fm, Flickr, my presence in other YASNs, Twitter, Radar and one for developers. I hope for the quick availability of apps for Plazes, Jaiku and Skype.
I think this step is interesting in a couple of ways. First the degree of openness (where MySpaces clumsy handling of widgets pales in comparison), but also for platforms that position themselves as ‘ open’ such as PeopleAggregator and Ning where you can start your own network, this is good news.
I see this as a sign that openness and the ability to migrate your network across platforms now can become part of the competing elements in the YASN field. If you love somebody, set them free, now stands a change to become true for YASNs a bit more. Keeping your customers by acknowledging they do not want to be imprisoned by your product.
Flickr and the YASN application
Compare this to the weird strategy Ecademy had, making their free functionality next to useless, and making it impossible to even delete your account.
I think Facebook made a great step, that also brings value to the student communities that made Facebook big. With that the criticism Facebook reaped when opening up to all last September, amongst others from Danah Boyd, that opening Facebook would mean the end is answered too. Also for the ‘ab origine’ community in Facebook new value has been added.
Apps you add are also mentioned to your contacts, making quick adoption of apps possible.
Tag: yasn
The Death of YASN As Usual
Last week at an so-called executive update for a big publishing company I talked about YASNs in the context of communities and networks.
How YASNs are walled gardens.
How they often are positioning themselves as the ‘only’ channel of communication.
No export, no migrating your content, let alone your network, to another platform.
And then I heard myself say it:
“They are also separating your real live networks and communities from their digital representation on-line.
That is why it is exciting to see services that allow you to take your digitally represented network with you into the physical world. With tools like Jaiku (and not Twitter!), Plazes and Imity, a bridge is build between your real world interaction and your on-line interaction. Augmenting each other, strengthening each other. They’re mobile clients as well as yasns.”
The death of YASNs.
I’ve said it before, but this time I heard new meaning in my own words. The coin dropped so to speak.
So when PeopleAggregator is an answer to the walled gardens, and maintaining too many profiles…will it also start allowing me to take my network with me to the place where it matters: my physical world movements and face to face interactions? Marc? Paolo?
Or will the Plazes’s Jaiku’s and the Imity’s take yasns to the next stage of evolution?
I now wonder when I will be deleting my profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Tribe or Hyves and such. On the other hand, I still have a profile at Orkut and Ryze…. 😉
How to Get P2P Social Networking
During BarCamp Amsterdam last Friday I prepared a few sheets that in the end I didn’t use. As everybody was busy coding or already in a presentation, and by the end of the afternoon everybody was starting to concentrate on the beer in the fridge more, I didn’t see a useful window of opportunity to get a group together for what is basically a conversation around a question I have. It concerns peer to peer social networking, and at this point is much more about concepts than tools I think. So Roland, sorry I didn’t grab a room and presented this, but let’s see if this conversation can get off the ground here as well.
My starting point is the notion that Information Overload doesn’t exist. The perceived stress is the symptom of failing information strategies that work fine in an environment where info is scarce but do not scale to the information abundance the internet offers us.
A good way to build strategies that do work in information abundance, is taking the social context of information into account.
Doing that you then look for patterns without paying much attention to individual information items (the outside-in approach), or focus and those singular items that relate to a specific list of topics that concerns your current goals and actions (inside-out approach). Also, as you look at information within its social context (that basically taking its human source into account) you try to move up information paths and networks of your contacts that are the source of that information.
Moving up those paths, and having a clear notion of the social context of an information item, requires some social networking tools if done on-line. The first generation yasns (linked-in, openbc, tribe, orkut etc) don’t cut it for me. Firstly because they have my data somewhere else, in the clubhouse so to speak, and if I am to do anything with it I have to do it in that clubhouse. As if my whole life takes places there, and I am not meeting people in the on-line equivalents of my home, my friends houses, my fav pubs, and public squares etc. Also relations require substance, an object to revolve around. Networking for the sake of networking such as most yasns seem to only offer is useless. Flickr and Plazes on the other hand readily provide object to form and have relations around.
What I really want from social networking tools is:
a) to have my data at home, or at least in one, not service specific, location where I can control it.
b) to finely nuance the levels of trust around information items I share (so that e.g. friends see more in my blog than the general public.But being able to specify that seamlessly per item per context, not as general settings only or merely on/off)
c) to be in the center of my own network, be able to visualize that, spider it, and do that in real time and over time. (Like Anjo Anjewierden in the picture above, or Valdis Krebs does)
How to do that? I don’t know.
I would like to have a true peer to peer social networking platform. Also I’d like to have my own spiders and agents.
FOAF isn’t ready for this kind of thing I think, but we might look to an existing p2p infrastructure like Skype to be a carrier. Boris Mann pretty much repeatedly said Jabber can do anything during BarCamp, and seemed to be only half joking.
What do you think?
Skype 1.4 Release: Steps to Social Networking?
Yesterday saw the release of Skype 1.4.0.78
Apart from some bugfixes, extra language support and improving on the API (important!), Skype makes a small step to adding social networking like features to Skype with this 1.4 release.
The profile page will now show how many people are in your contact list. This can have interesting consequences, as Stuart at SkypeJournal also notes. For those of you who are publicly listed this might be something to opt out of, but I use Skype with a closed list of users, and can only be called by people in my list (though I leave the chat function open). These are people that are part of my social network, and I am happy to share my network with them. Otherwise they would not be in my list in the first place. So for those people I might want to disclose not only the number of contacts (which to me means nothing) but who those contacts are.
That to me would be a better way of sharing my network than with for instance LinkedIn. Not in terms of the information that is shared, but because of where that information resides. With LinkedIn OpenBC and all other YASN’s I hand over my information to a third party. What I’d really want is a peer to peer social networking application, as it allows people to control the information at the source (themselves) and share what they like in situations they like. FOAF builds on that, but is only a machine readable format at this stage. Maybe piggybacking on existing peer to peer infrastructure such as Skype is a way to gain traction for a distributed social networking functionality?