Saturday, October 13, 2007

How to Fix Yahoo!: Building a Yahoo! Platform

As part of our focus on Yahoo!'s next 100 days this week, I am going to dive into how I would go about fixing the company. Or at least starting along that path. According to comScore, Yahoo! is the 3rd most visited collection of web properties worldwide (trailing only Google and Microsoft), reaching about 61% of the global web audience. In the US, the company's websites are still #1, and actually have a broader ad reach then Google domestically. Yet Yahoo!'s total revenues for the first six months of 2007 were less than Google's revenue for just the last quarter.

Though that serves as a table setter for the problems at Yahoo!, I won't get into financials in this article, as that is not my forte. Instead I will focus on what can be done to create a more useful and meaningful Yahoo! for users, one that can keep people on the site and drive them to use their search engine. Remember that Google controls ~50% of the search market share and pay-per-click text ads on search results drive a significant portion of their revenue -- search share is very important to Yahoo!

The Platform is the Killer App

The killer app on the web is the platform. We've talked about this before on this blog in terms of social networks and AJAX start pages, and software like Google Gears, the Adobe Integrated Runtime, and the Dojo Offline Toolkit that let developers take the web out of their web apps and have added credence to the idea that the platform of the future is the Internet.

Social networking darling Facebook has realized the power of the platform, which is part of the reason for all the hype, so have start pages like Pageflakes and Netvibes, who are building sophisticated (and increasingly more social) web platforms for developers. These platforms are beneficial for users because, like a desktop operating system, they allow people to aggregate the applications they use in one, central, organized location for quick access. For developers, platforms are a central location to launch new applications to the greatest number of people. For these reasons, the platform itself becomes the web's killer app.

One need look no further than this year's hottest gadget, the iPhone to see how beneficial a strong platform can be for a service or product. While Apple didn't provide a platform for developers in the true sense of the word, the number of iPhone-specific web apps that have been developed for the phone grows daily. These applications extend the functionality of the device and add value to users at no cost to Apple. Often, it is third party applications on a platform that attract new users or retain existing ones.

Building a Yahoo! Platform

Yahoo! needs to realize that the web platform is getting more and more important. Google already has, and is building a platform around their start page, iGoogle, by encouraging developers to build "gadgets" specifically for it. For Yahoo!, a platform can unify their services -- which right now are scattered -- and add utility to their page that will keep users there long enough to conduct searches. Yahoo! controls some of the hottest and most useful properties on the web, but has not figured out how to tie them together. They've started to bring some of their acquisitions under the single Yahoo! sign-on umbrella, but that still doesn't bring my del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos and my fantasy sports team management to one central location.

The good news for Yahoo! is that they already have a property just waiting to be turned into a full fledged platform: My Yahoo!

My Yahoo! is one of the oldest and most popular start pages on the Internet (I've used it since 1999), visited by about 50 million people monthly. The path toward a Yahoo! platform begins with My Yahoo!, which has been undergoing a major update via their new beta site. Many of the changes the My Yahoo! beta showcases are good: drag and drop page organization, more customization tools, multiple pages, and the ability to create a module out of any RSS feed are all great features. Yahoo! has also wisely begun to utilize their start page as a way to tie their various services together -- for example, I can add a static module for my del.icio.us bookmarks or my Flickr images. But there is still a lot more they need to do. Below I will outline three things I think they need to do to compete with the other fledgling platforms on the web.



1. An Open API

When it comes to developer APIs, Yahoo! is at the forefront. According to ProgrammableWeb, Yahoo! ties with Google for having the most APIs (25), which is why it boggles my mind that they don't have one for My Yahoo! the way Google does for iGoogle, or Facebook, or Pageflakes, or Netvibes do. Even more amazing, Yahoo! actually already has a widgets API, it's just focused in the wrong direction: on the desktop instead of toward their own web platform.


"The bottom line is, if we expect you to make My Yahoo! your home on the Web, then we need to deliver the content that’s important to your life. Hence we’re working around the clock to add more and more relevant modules to choose from." -- My Yahoo! Team, June 2007


The best way to add more relevant modules is to open the platform to anyone. Why have a team of people adding only "official" modules and working from a limited perspective when you could have thousands of developers doing the work for you for free? Look at the explosion of applications on Facebook's platform as an example of how well this works. Right now there are over 2300 apps on Facebook, created in just the first two full months of the platform, and that is about 500 more than there were 12 days ago.

Sure not all of those apps will be great, and many of them will likely be downright awful. But the chances of adding applications that are useful to your users and will potentially attract new ones greatly increases when you open up your platform. Further, it is now your users, rather than a small team of paid employees, who are deciding which applications are useful to them. Yahoo! could still retain editorial control by approving applications before adding them to the site, or by featuring modules vetted by the editorial staff.

Certainly for a content company like Yahoo!, opening up their platform might seem like giving their competitors a way to leech users away from their own content, but in reality the opposite it a true. It actually means giving users access to competitor content while keeping them on your site, which is a net positive.

2. Richer Applications

Currently most My Yahoo! modules are one-way, meaning that they give you information but you don't really interact with them. I can get my email via a My Yahoo! module, but I can't compose and send or even read a full email without leaving the My Yahoo! page. Some widgets have basic input functions -- like the reference or stock quote widgets -- but query results are still returned on a separate page, rather than inside the widget.


iGoogle's YouTube app can play videos directly in the app.

For My Yahoo! to be taken seriously as a platform and compete with Facebook and iGoogle, they'll need to support richer applications. That means applications that can be interacted with on the page, such as a dictionary app that loads the definition I am after without sending me away from my My Yahoo! page, or a Games application that lets me load a game of Literati right inside my start page, or a Flickr app that lets me upload photos and manage my galleries without actually visiting Flickr.

One of the reasons people get so excited about Facebook and other burgeoning web platforms is that there exists the potential for nearly any sort of application. With the right apps, Facebook could theoretically become a one stop shop for web surfers to consume information and perform tasks. Support for richer applications would put Yahoo! in the mix for creating the web platform that demands the most of your attention.

3. Make the Platform Social

This is probably the last step Yahoo! should take when building their web platform. Richard and I have both talked about turning start pages into social networks (here and here), and this is certainly where I see these companies going. As Richard said, it seems to be almost a natural evolution -- once you have the users, why not allow them to interact? But Yahoo! needs to focus on building out their platform for developers before turning it into a social network.

It's no secret that Yahoo! has long wanted a social network. There was their famous failed attempt to buy Facebook last fall, and they have since been linked with bebo as well. When Yahoo! launched the beta of their new My Yahoo! service last March, they hinted at the prospect of making their start page property more social, so it is possible they already have plans to do so.

I think growing a social network around their platform makes more sense than purchasing one. My Yahoo! already has 50 million users (by December 2006 numbers) -- or a lot more than Facebook. Since we're already using My Yahoo! to tie Yahoo!'s services together and already want it to be the hub for the Yahoo! universe and the web at large, it makes sense to build in a social network, rather than purchase one from the outside an go through the headache of figuring out how to get it integrated.

Conclusion

Certainly the Yahoo! platform won't fix Yahoo! by itself, but I think it should be a major part of their plans going forward. Turning My Yahoo! into an open platform for rich internet applications does two things: 1. it can unify Yahoo!'s services under one umbrella -- something they have long struggled to do, and 2. it adds utility for users and gives them less reason to leave Yahoo!, and the longer people stay on the page, the more likely they are to start using Yahoo! for search.

I think Yahoo! is actually in a better position to create a winning platform than Google is right now. Their start page is already established and has an enormous user base, they have a rich developer culture built around their other APIs and they can seed their platform with some of the best content on the web.

What do you think of my proposed idea to turn My Yahoo! into a platform? Do you use My Yahoo! now? Would you if it was the platform I envision? Would that be a step in the right direction for Yahoo!? Leave your thoughts below.

The Structured Web - A Primer

There is some controversy floating around the blogosphere about the nature of the next web. We got a clear signal from Tim O'Reilly that there is no need to continue the versioning fad and call it "Web 3.0," but still, people disagree about what's coming next. To me, what is coming is not a single thing, but a web that is characterized by several major themes.

Among the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention (Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, the information in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us.

A critical piece of the next web evolution is the introduction of structured information. This concept is so basic to us as humans, that we completely overlook the fact that it is quite foreign to computers. When a person looks at a book on Amazon, she sees a book, with the author, ISBN number, publisher and the publication date. To a computer that page on Amazon is nothing more than a bunch of HTML. Increasingly, information on the web is becoming more and more structured. This process is happening via several major movements:


  • The rise of APIs
  • The proliferation of vertical applications that run on top of existing data
  • An increase in classic Semantic Technologies and Microformats
  • The spread of RSS as an information delivery mechanism

In this post we'll look at how these movements collectively help power a more structured web.

The Basic Problem

To understand the basic issue with unstructured information consider the following example - a description of a book in HTML and XML. Here is a typical representation that you find if you look at the source of a web page:


Compare this with a representation typically found in XML:

The HTML does not capture the structure of the information, and mixes the information with the representation. XML, on the other hand, is focused on structure only and does not say anything at all about how information should be presented. Billions of web pages today contain unstructured information. To people, this is a non-issue because we are good at semantics and we do not need primitive XML annotation to make us understand. But for computers, lack of structure is a deal-breaker - they can't interpret unstructured, non-standardized information very well.

Why Unstructured Information Is Bad

Way before people created the web, they created relational databases - the platform on which many corporations and web sites are built today. A great thing about relational databases is that they represent the information in a structured way.

The query language know as Structured Query Language (SQL) supports fetching the information from a single database table. More importantly SQL allows queries that correlate or select information from multiple database tables. Simply speaking, SQL allows the data to be remixed. The only condition for this is that the data must be structured.



On the other hand, if the information is not structured, it is effectively stuck in a proprietary silo - closed and immobile. Its representation is only understood by the creator, and it is not readily consumable by any other application or a web service. In a way, this is sort of wasteful because it can not be remixed with the rest of the information on the web.


The Key Drivers of Structured Information

1. The Rise of APIs. APIs are in fashion these days. Since del.icio.us, the web sites that have defined the social web era have offered interfaces to access their proprietary databases. This effectively accomplishes two things. First, APIs make it easy to fetch information. Second, most APIs these days emit the information as XML, so it is automatically structured. For more about the impact of APIs on the web read our "When Web Sites Become Web Services" post.


2. Top-Down Semantic Applications. We've written recently about the proliferation of top-down semantic applications. In addition to creating utility by extracting meaning from content, these applications do another very important thing: they automatically transform unstructured content into structured information. It happens because after extracting the info, the services offer an API or structured RSS feeds, effectively injecting the structured information back into the web.



3. Classic Semantic Technologies and Microformats. The main goal of the Semantic Web is to make information structured. XML-based languages like RDF and OWL are designed to capture information so that not only things, but also their attributes and the relationships between them, are represented clearly. The classic approach, however, is running into many difficulties. People are enthusiastic about the prospects and theory behind it, but lack of consumer focus and business value, as well as technical difficulties, have made the implementation of classic ideas elusive.


In the mean time, microformats, a more simple approach to information annotation, has gained some momentum. The idea behind microformats its simple: embed markup that indicates the structured information within HTML pages. What's good about this approach is that annotations are compact and can be interpreted by web browsers as well as any other program that reads the HTML page. The approach also has issues, though. First, the number of things that can be described by microformats is limited. A popular microformat is hCard, which describes contact information about people, organizations, and places.



The diagram above is from the Microformats web site.


A bigger issue revolves around how microformats are intended to be used. According to the designers, they are not a new language, not infinitely extensible and open-ended, nor are they made for defining the whole world. Rather, microformats are an evolving solution, initially aimed at designers as a "set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general." Despite its simplicity, microformats are doing a lot of public good by adding structure to unstructured content and pushing the envelope along with other solutions.


4. RSS As A Delivery Mechanism. There is a common misconception about RSS - people think that it is a structured language. It is not. Basic RSS is a simple format for delivering news. Each RSS entry contains a title, a link and a description. In addition, RSS allows flexible embeds to deliver things like images, video and podcasts.


However, what is true is that RSS, like the XML language, is extensible. What has been happening is that companies have started using RSS extensions to deliver results from their APIs. For example, as we've written, Wine.com does exactly that - its API calls return RSS.



What does this mean? In addition to the standard RSS attributes, Wine.com outputs proprietary ones like id, sku and price. Any application that would like to interact with this API can leverage the additional attributes. It is likely that companies will continue to use RSS like this in the future. That's because RSS is already well known and the bottom line is that it doesn't matter what XML-based language we use. Technically speaking, any RSS extension is just XML and does not really have much to do with RSS. But if the world wants to think that it is RSS and is willing to agree on a standard - so be it!


The Big Picture


So what happens if we take all of this and put it together? Something really profound - a structured web. Possibly a precursor to the Semantic Web, the structured web would be much more readily remixable. It truly will be the web as a database. Yes, a good old relational database, but instead of tables we would be remixing web sites and web services.



Probably the most interesting thing to note about the structured web of the future is that it will still be non-standard. Just because information is represented as RSS or XML does not mean that two different services will have the same representation of a book. However, the problem of mapping one representation onto another is generally not difficult, as long as the information is structured (financial companies have been doing this for decades). So structure promises to bring nearly automatic interoperability.


Another outcome, is that the web where information is structured is much more amicable to be transformed into what is currently envisioned as the Semantic Web. The ontologies and relationships are much more readily overlayed on top of structured information. Likely, RDF and OWL would be used to do just that, as they were originally intended, except on top of the new structured layer. Then the coming next web becomes a direct precursor to the Semantic Web. The leap of faith that we are now being asked to make would disappear, and instead, the jump to semantics becomes obvious.


Conclusion


The next web is not just about one thing, its about many themes. However, what is fueling the web of the future is structured information. As we discussed in this post, many different technologies, in their own way, are gradually transforming the web from its current HTML chaos into a structured XML heaven. It has already happened in quite a few places and over the next few years we will be seeing more and more structured information online.


The benefits? We hope that some of the promised semantic tools will be able to take advantage of the structured information. We look forward to smarter search, and mashups that bring us exciting remixes that were not possible in yesterday's world of unstructured HTML silos.



GMail to Kick Up Free Storage - Where's My GDrive Already?

gmaillogo.jpg I'm regularly outspoken about my concerns that Google is going to take over the world and start passing out brain implants - but the fact of the matter is that I love Google services. Today's announcement that more GMail storage is on the way is heartening, but you've got to wonder: why is this mighty giant messing around with anything other than a total storage solution for all my data across all their apps? Where is the GDrive already?


Google told analysts more than a year ago that it wanted to store 100% of our data, a "golden copy." Perhaps its failure to do so yet is a sign of the finite power it truly holds. Or perhaps its just a ruse to lull cynics like me into a false sense of security. That's probably not what's happening.


I should probably pay $50 for super Google, as advocated this morning by Amit Agarwal in reference to the news. See also one estimate of forthcoming free storage capacity over at the blog Googlified.


Finally, I'm sure there are some of you out there that still haven't seen the following video about the future of Google and the web in general. It's not to be missed, it's thought provoking and funny. See you in the "hive mind" if it ever arrives!




The War On Spam

Here's a political plank for the Democrats to adopt: instead of a pointless and expensive war on drugs and a fruitless and expensive war on illegal immigrants, let's have a war on spammers:

[from Guardian Unlimited Business Spam closes web security firm]

A popular email security company said it would cease trading after being victimised by one of the world's biggest spammers. The Israeli-based firm Blue Security said it could no longer continue to operate in the face of an escalating threat to the internet from a malicious Russian spammer known only as PharmaMaster.


[...]


Eran Reshef, the founder of Blue, said his company, which recently drew $4.8m (£2.5m) in funding and counts several senior industry figures as directors, was simply unable to become trapped in a war against a criminal group. "This is something that's really got to be left to governments to decide. To fight the spammers you really need to spend $100m."


Let's make the world safe from spammers. Wake up, Howard Dean!

Cultural Dissonance

I have taken the DLD conference off my upcoming events. The request for me to speak has been withdrawn.

I have never attended the DLD conference, which is managed by Hubert Burda Media, a German publishing company I have had no contact with, so there is little social capital involved. But I think this is an interesting case in cultural dissonance: since this has occurred in the past few years with two European conferences. In both cases I was asked if I would like to speak, to which I responded, yes. And in those cases, subsequently, the offer was taken back. With apologies, etc., very politely. Nonetheless this has never happened in the US, where I have spoken countless times. Maybe it is some subtle interpretation of 'would' that I am missing, as in 'would you do this if we ask you to?' with emphasis on the if.

Or perhaps it is just a different model of developing conference programs. I have served on dozens of US program committees, and people are solicited for proposals, but once you accept them as speakers you do not reneg later.

Well, I am scaling way back on conferences in general, and I can happily forego yet another travel opportunity. But being called 'Steve' in the last email rankled more than being told there were far, far too many wonderful speakers vying to participate.

Yahoo Messenger For Vista

I got a demo of the new Yahoo Messenger for Vista, which has been redesigned to take advantage of Vista-specific features. Since it was the first time I was seeing Vista, I must admit that I was operating at a disadvantage, but what I saw suggests that Yahoo is continuing its Messenger strategy of developing the Messenger client that best takes advantage of the specific operating system, like Vista's transparent windows.

Yahoo has introduced tabbed windows for IM in this version, which means you can drag one independent chat window onto another, and wind up with one chat window with two tabs. Or you can drag a tab off to create a new window.




Yahoo is also trying to integrate other services more closely with Messenger. For example, Fantasy Football is supported by the automatic creation of a group in the Messenger contact list.



The product is not in beta yet, but Yahoo plans to roll that out as soon as possible, and to continuously be rolling out new functionality as more user roll onto Vista.

My sense is that the adoption of Vista will be much slower than Microsoft would have us believe, but Yahoo is being sensible, building a Vista version of Messenger with basic functionality immediately. I just hope that Yahoo continues the push on the Mac client as diligently, since that client is woefully behind the curve relative to the Windows client.

ooprint's Blogger Business Cards

I love it! Business cards with a tag cloud:

OOprint Blogger's Business Card


I don't think I am going to switch from Moo cards, but I like the ooprint designs, and the tag cloud could actually be helpful as a way to forestall that quintessential American cocktail party question, "What do you do?" (My usual answer, by the way, "As little as possible."). You could just hand the interrogator a card and let the tag cloud explain. Maybe I could craft a tag cloud, and get it on the back of my next batch of moo cards? Or maybe the design geniuses at moo will just offer this as a service. Or ooprint could start offering moo-sized cards with the tag cloud on the back? Looks like a looming global competition for the all-important technoid geek business card market!

Still Looking For Typepad Template Hacker

I want to make some changes to my Typepad style sheets and templates. Last time I went down that rat hole (no offense, Six Apart) I barely got out alive.

Any designers/hackers out there interested -- I'm paying real money -- can contact me by leaving a comment on this post.

Internet Evolution

CMP has started a new collective blog at the new Internet Evolution, and asked me to get involved along with a roster of very, very interesting people, including these folks, and a long list of others:

  1. Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com
  2. John Grimes, CIO, U.S. Department of Defense, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration
  3. Philip Rosedale, CEO, Linden Lab
  4. Ralph Szygenda, CIO, General Motors
  5. Don Tapscott
  6. Thomas Dolby
  7. David Weinberger
  8. Robert Scoble
  9. Cory Doctorow

For some reason the Groucho Marx quip -- "I would never join a club that would have me as a member" -- comes to mind, although I really don't feel that way in this case. I have kicked off with the so aptly titled post, So This Guy Walks Into A Bar, And ..., where I deftly sidestep the reasons that CMP would ask me to be involved in the Internet Evolution project: I'm flattered, but baffled. However, I do divulge something, a project I have dreamed up. I plan to write a series over the next six months at Internet Evolution, leading -- I hope -- to a book. My working title is The Social Revolution: Why The New Web Matters, and my next post will be What's The Web Worth?. Stay tuned, Edglings: more to follow.

Send Word Now Raises $8.5 Million Series C

Swn Send Word Now has raised $8.5 million in Series C financing. Southpaw Asset Management led the round; many of the company's existing investors, including Ascend Venture Group, also participated. Silicon Alley-based Send Word Now sells voice- and text-based alerting services and two-way mobile messaging services. Customers include Boston University, Wal-Mart, and Pfizer. Last August, the company raised $10.6 million. Release

Jamba CEO, Fox Mobile President Hood Resigns

Lucy_hood Lucy Hood, President of Fox Mobile Entertainment and CEO of News Corp./VeriSign mobile entertainment venture Jamba has resigned. Jamba COO Lee Fenton will take over in the interim.

Hood says she's "eager to pursue more entrepreneurial ventures" and "looking forward to the next opportunity," which usually means "I can't stand it here" or something worse. But this split looks to be a bit unusual. The Jamba/News Corp. press release announcing her departure is closer to a mash note: It includes a 364-word bio and this glamour shot.



NYT Adds Reader Comments to Front Page!*

Nytlogo379x64_2We're always impressed with the New York Times' (NYT) progressive use of its web site, but seeing reader comments above the fold on the Home page was still startling. Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move !

(No, it won't save the company's dying print business. But it shows an impressive ability to adapt to the new conversational/interactive media reality. And it will help increase user loyalty, and, with it,the site's popularity.)


UPDATE: A reader suggests that this was merely a test, as his screen wasn't showing the comments. (Good thing we got the screen shot below). We hope the NYT concludes the test was successful.


Picture_6_3

On That Apple (AAPL) iPhone Open-API Rumor

This afternoon's rumor-mill (MarketingVox, Mac Rumors) is spitting out an interesting tidbit about Apple opening APIs for the iPhone to third-party developers.

Is it true? Probably not: Our Apple analyst, Dan Frommer, says that, for now, Apple wants to control the whole iPhone value-chain, the way it does with iPods, and suggests that, in any case, Apple might wait until the next version of Mac OS comes out. Frommer also suggests that people don't buy BlackBerries, etc., because of the third-party apps, so these apps wouldn't be a big selling point. Lastly, he observes that, as an iPhone user, he would want to be assured that third-party apps wouldn't brick his phone the way a third-party email app has crippled his Treo--and he knows that no one understands this risk better than Steve Jobs.

All that said... As Facebook is demonstrating now, and Microsoft demonstrated in the 1990s, the value that can be created by owning the "platform" that becomes the industry standard is mind-boggling. And given that Mr. Jobs was on the losing end of that platform battle in the PC wars, we're confident he understands the value that could be created if Apple could make the iPhone the industry-standard mobile development platform.

AOL (TWX): Some Firings Delayed Until Dec 16? Bad Idea

Aol_logo We have heard that some folks slated for termination at AOL next week will be granted a 60-day reprieve (until December 16), with the aim of reducing the number of people let go next week--and, thus, the media attention around the layoffs.


We can't confirm this, and it is such a bad idea that it just doesn't sound right to us:



  • Layoffs are painful for all involved, but they are far less damaging to a company's reputation when taken in one lump. AOL already has a reputation for "death by a thousand cuts." Adding another cut here won't help. It will also be yet another round of "holiday layoffs."
  • Delaying some layoffs will not reduce media attention about "AOL Layoffs"--it will prolong it. It will also keep remaining employees in a state of gallows-desperation for the next two months, which is not conducive to work required to get AOL back on track.
  • The layoffs have already received considerable media attention. Whether they end up being 500, 1000, 2000, or 3000 won't change the coverage much. A second round, moreover, will just thrust AOL Layoffs into the headlines again.

We imagine this logic is obvious within AOL and Time Warner, too.

Google's Zeitgeist Speakers Even Wowed Googlers

Algore Miguel Helft of the NYT has already detailed some of the speakers who headlined Google's Zeitgeist conference this week: Bill Clinton (teleconference), Al Gore, David Cameron (Britain's Conservative Party leader), Dick Parsons, Fred Smith, Tom Brokaw, and the decidedly un-digital Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia). What Miguel didn't mention was how impressed even dynastically wealthy Googlers in attendance were by this line-up. The admiration, by the way, extended to Google's own Eric Schmidt, who is a shoo-in to be the next billionaire-turned-national-politician.

One interesting tidbit: A conference attendee says that Bill Clinton was full of praise for Al Gore (who deserves it), and even went out of his way to mention Gore several times in a short presentation. Gore, meanwhile, whose celebrity (and influence?) arguably now exceeds that his former boss, did not mention fellow-speaker Clinton once.


We're interpreting here, but we assume that Gore is still ripped about the Monica incident. If so, we have some advice for the Nobel winner: Let it go, Al, let it go! (And some more: Run for president!)



The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are

584157771_7638522e70 The Web 2.0 Summit kicks off next week here in San Francisco. Epicenter's Julie Sloane and I will be there, blogging and passing out cards (and just plain passing out).

The official theme this year is "The Web's Edge," whatever that means. But based on murmurings I've read recently, I'd like to propose a less official theme: "The Socialization of Presence."

I got to thinking about this after reading Chris Messina's thought-provoking blog post riffing on Google's acquisition of the social messaging service Jaiku. If you're not familiar with the news, see our coverage on Compiler.

Chris' post refers to a meme started earlier this year by Web 2.0 conference co-chair Tim O'Reilly called the "Web 2.0 Address Book," a nebulous product (yet to be invented) that's basically a location-aware contact list. The idea is that all of our real social apps already exist in the form of e-mail, your phone, IM and Twitter. We just need some glue to make everything work together.

Messina extends the idea to a possible scenario: Rather than calling somebody or sending an e-mail or a Twitter or an IM, you just open up your contact list and click on their name. Wherever they are, your communication reaches them via the most convenient and appropriate means. So, they're walking on the beach, their iPhone rings. If they're in a meeting, they get a text message. If they're at their desk, they get an e-mail. If they're in Asia, they're probably asleep, so they get a voicemail.

Another name for it is the "presence-enabled phone book."



Last month, Jaiku's Jyri Engeström argued that this location-aware utility is the key piece of functionality missing from the iPhone. Not a surprising point of view considering it's pretty close to where his company is headed. Jyri points to O'Reilly's post which makes the same point.

Messina, however, argues on the iPhone's behalf. He asserts that Apple's browser-centered "dumb device" is the perfect tool with which to surf the social presence web. He brands the iPhone the Sputnik of this new frontier, the first of many devices to come. Logically then, since Google bought Jaiku and since the company is rumored to be building its own mobile platform, this is one of the holes we can expect the so-called GPhone to fill.

And for anyone weary of joining yet another social networking platform in order to participate, worry not. You're already a member. This new presence-aware social network is the web.

In Messina's vision of the future, your "presence" doesn't just exist on Facebook or Google. Rather, it lives in that layer of information which can be assembled from the pieces stored on every service you're a part of. Obviously, microformats would play a key part in such a scenario. Standards like hCard and hCalendar can be used to track where you are and what you're up to. OpenID can verify your identity, making your location data accessible to you and your group of friends. Instantly, anyone who wanted to get in touch with you could just look you up in their contact list and see where you are, what you're doing, what you'll be doing this afternoon and the best way to get in touch with you right now.

Actually, I should amend that last sentence -- anyone you trust would be able to get in touch with you. That's one of the complicated caveats here, and one that Messina touches on in his post. In order for this presence network to properly blossom, we need to overcome the hurdle of privacy. Not only do we need more secure and innovative ways of safely establishing and maintaining our identities, but we all need to get more comfortable with putting our information out there in the first place.

More importantly, we also need to free up all of our personal data that's already out there, languishing in closed networks like Facebook. Sadly, that might prove to be the most difficult hurdle.

Photo: Heyjules via Flickr

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