Archive for the 'Data Portability' Category

Is FriendFeed Doomed?: Jarred Guest Posts at SarahInTampa.com

Published
by
Jarred
on May 20, 2008
in Blogging, Computing, Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Social Networks, Tropophilia and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Jealous of Taylor’s recent gig as a guest poster, I decided to accept an open call for contributors made by Sarah Perez for her excellent blog sarahintampa.com. Sarah regularly blogs for ReadWriteWeb — one of the preeminent resources for technology news and analysis on the web . Thanks to Sarah for letting me jump in!

My guest post talks about how FriendFeed is going to encounter enormous, if not deadly, pressure from the recently launched Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiatives.

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site. In “the real world”, we have one social graph of our friends and one identity. Both are centrally located in our brain. We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph. This is how the web should, and will, work. Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains. [...] When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you. You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

What does that have to do with FriendFeed? Well you’ll have to head to Sarah’s blog to find out!

Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots

Published
by
Jarred
on May 12, 2008
in Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google’s baby step into the social networking game, when it announced it was testing social features in its branded start-page, iGoogle. In an attempt to be a blogger rock star (hah!), I coined the term “scaled automation” to describe the web giant’s approach to this arena. In a nutshell, it combines Google’s penchant for automatically interpreting your social graph (”automation”) with its “long-tail” philosophy of breaking down barriers to the flow of information across the entire web (”scaled”).

To its credit, Facebook — the reigning champion of social networking — picked up on the “scaled” trend and announced Facebook Connect last week. This new feature will serve as a gateway to Facebook’s so-called “walled garden” of social graphs. Websites external to Facebook will be able to offer users the option of logging in using their Facebook credentials. Additionally, users can port some of their social graph data (friend connections, photos, etc.) to those external websites. From the Facebook Developers’ Blog:

Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. [...] As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

While Facebook will begin scaling across the web, however, it has not embraced the “automation” side of Google’s philosophy. Indeed, in response to Facebook Connect, Google revealed the rest of their social networking plans today with the announcement of the similarly-named Google Friend Connect. Google’s VP of Engineering describes his company’s vision of the social web, and you can instantly see how it differs from Facebook’s:

The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. [...] Now it is working to connect people to other people.

Google is basically launching the same initiative as Facebook, but the spirit behind the implementation is different. Google wants to connect you everywhere, just like Facebook; however, Google also wants to connect you to everyone.

Continue reading ‘Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots’

Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home

Published
by
Jarred
on April 15, 2008
in Data Portability, Facebook, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 9 Comments

This week, Facebook began slowly rolling out an update to their site that will probably have the most significant impact on the user experience since the introduction of the News Feed.  Ladies and gentlemen, Facebook Chat has arrived.

The upgrade hasn’t been applied to my account yet, and so this isn’t going to be an actual review of the new feature (though I’ve been reading about it and think I’ve got it pretty much figured out).  Rather, I just wanted to share some thoughts about how this is going to affect change revolutionize the social networking experience.

If you don’t count e-mail, instant messaging (I’ll refer to it as chatting for simplicity’s sake) was actually probably the first experience you ever had with online social networking.  Your buddy list was your first social graph.  It was the first time that you could connect and communicate with friends online.  It was the first time you could see how someone presented their online identity through their “profiles”, and the first time you could detect their online presence and know their ”status” through their away messages.  It is only natural, then, that the first generation of social networking is being reintegrated into the mainstream offerings.

Continue reading ‘Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home’

Will You Put Your Life In Google’s Hands?

Published
by
Jarred
on March 1, 2008
in Data Portability, Google, Health and Privacy
. 3 Comments

It’s been a long time coming and has a ways to go still, but Google Health is on the way.

Google confirmed last week that it is testing this new product (click here for a screen shot) with the Cleveland Clinic, followed by another update on Thursday by Google VP (and total babe, btw) Marissa Mayer:

One of the most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform strategy. We’re assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you’ll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors’ records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.

Meyer assures us that Google is emphasizing privacy, security, and user control in its Health offering.  But as Nick Carr points out, Meyer is careful to leave open a future loophole.  “We won’t sell or share your data without your explicit permission,” she says (with my emphasis).  Hmm.

Google Health is sure to be a useful product, but there is certainly a risk in putting your most private of information in a third party’s hands.  When it is released, would you consider using Google Health?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user j.reed.

Breaking: Facebook, Plaxo, and Google Endorse Data Portability

Published
by
Jarred
on January 8, 2008
in Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

A few days ago I wrote about the data portability debate sparked by the deactivation of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account following his attempt to siphon his social graph data out of that service.  Well, now Duncan Riley at TechCrunch and Steve O’Hear at ZDNet are breaking the news that Facebook (along with Google and Plaxo) have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.  Riley reports:

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

Riley congratulates Google and Facebook, but O’Hear is less optimistic:

Call me cynical, but while I welcome this move [...], I remain skeptical of how quickly users will actually see real-world benefits from Google and Facebook’s membership.

Whether there will be an immediate change in the services or not, this is a big step towards unlocking the social graph.