Cliqset Sets the Stage for a New Kind of Social Platform
Over the last six months, Florida-based Cliqset has been steadily building a new platform for a more transparent social networking experience on the web.
Right now, Cliqset is primarily a social identity provider, a service for managing a profile and the contact details of the people you interact with inside social applications. There are tools for managing that data from the desktop as well as from your smartphone. But the company’s ultimate goal is larger than that.
“We’re not really trying to build another Facebook or Plaxo,” says co-founder and president Darren Bounds. Instead, Cliqset wants to build a platform for social apps — a playground where you can put those profiles and contact lists to use.
The company launched in August of 2008 and entered the private beta phase in October. Just last month, it went into public beta phase, allowing anyone to sign up and build a public profile that can double as an OpenID. It also released a mobile app in March, and a new update for the iPhone just arrived last week.
Over the past year or so, the explosive growth of the social web has spawned dozens of sites and services dedicated to identity management. These destinations serve as social hubs — a place to manage your contacts as well as a place to aggregate the streams of data coming out of Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and all the various nodes on your own social map.
Most of them are uni-directional, in that they funnel all your data from outside services, creating a single, filtered stream.
Cliqset is different in that the company has created a set of APIs which are truly bi-directional. It’s similar to what Facebook has done with Facebook Connect, but it goes deeper than that. As a Cliqset user, you’re able to create a social profile and manage it from anywhere even as your presence get distributed across the web. Any changes or updates you make to your profile or your social graph (either in Cliqset or within a supported app) will be pushed out to all the other Cliqset-enabled applications you use.
That’s the theory anyway. So far, the company has built a social networking platform and set of APIs so people can start creating apps and building an ecosystem. But there isn’t much in the wild yet. Cliqset has definitely taken the right steps to attract developers — the APIs use open standards like OAuth and Portable Contacts, and the company is releasing the bulk of its work under open-source licenses at Google Code.
The company sees the mobile space as one of the best targets for its social platform, and to that end, it has released a new version of Cliqset for the iPhone. Since there aren’t many apps built on top of Cliqset yet, at this point, the app is just a glorified contact manager.
I’ve been using the latest version of the iPhone app (version 1.2) for about a week now. I easily imported all of my contacts from Google (using OAuth, nice) and found that separating contacts into groups like friends, family and co-workers to be pretty easy. As a mobile contact manager, it’s a nice replacement for Google’s Sync servers.
Now all we need are some powerful apps built on this platform to make it truly useful.
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