It seems inevitable at this point that the Web itself will eventually become a broad, interconnected social network like MySpace or Facebook, but without your data being stuck in a corporate garden.

Even the existing corporate gardens seem to recognize that an “open” social network is coming. First MySpace announced its “Data Availability” tools, which allow you use your MySpace profile info on other sites, and then Facebook announced more or less the same thing a day later.

Not to be outdone, Google is announcing a new set of tools known as “Friend Connect” (note that the second link isn’t live yet). Using Friend Connect, any website owner can, according to the press release, “add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming.”

Among the things you get for your snippet of code are basic social site functionality like “user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.”

Continue Reading “Google’s ‘Friend Connect’ Offers a Way to Bring the Social Web Together [Updated]” »

MySpace has unveiled a new plan to turn the site into a central storage hub for your personal data and profile information by allowing you to access and use that information when you visit other websites.

The idea is to make a good portion of your MySpace data available to you when you’re out exploring the larger web. While not all MySpace data will be available, four popular aspects of your MySpace profile will be potentially available to outside sites: profile information, photos, videos, and friend networks.

The new tools will be opt-in, so if you never want to share any of your MySpace info outside of MySpace, there’s nothing to worry about. However, there are some compelling reasons you might want to, like taking advantage of your MySpace friends list to easily find those same people on other sites.

Continue Reading “How MySpace Plans to Become Everybody’s Space” »

Yahoo is about to become, quite literally, whatever you want it to be.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh announced a new initiative his company is calling Yahoo Open Strategy. Under this new plan, third-party developers will be able to create applications that can access every property within Yahoo’s empire — from search, chat and mail to fantasy sports, photo sharing and social event planning. These custom apps will run anywhere on Yahoo a user wants to place them. If you want to plop a third-party news application on the Yahoo front door, you’ll be able to. Or if you want to manage your fantasy baseball team on the page directly next to your custom sports news feeds, that will be an option as well.

Balogh also discussed making user profiles a more central part of the Yahoo experience. While he was slim on details, one gets the impression that Yahoo will be giving users the ability to create a Facebook-style page from which they can access and control all of their apps, get all of their information and manage their social networking assets. It will be interesting to see if last year’s profile-based Mash experiment carries over into this new strategy at all.

But this announcement isn’t about Yahoo launching a new social network, as the company’s chief platforms architect Neal Sample writes on the Yahoo corporate blog Thursday:

"There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it."

This strategy, whatever you want to call it — unification, re-wiring, platformization — will be a good thing for the company. Along with recently announced support for OpenID and OpenSocial, it’s clearly the next logical development for the open data web Yahoo has been so vocal about recently.

It’s also exactly what’s missing from the Yahoo experience.

Continue Reading “Yahoo Connects the Dots with New ‘Open Strategy’” »

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, Typepad and other popular blogging services, has launched a new Facebook application designed to broadcast your posts to several of the most popular external publishing systems at once.

Blog It allows you to compose and post updates within the Facebook interface and have them simultaneously appear on any one of the ten supported services, including Movable Type, TypePad, Pownce, Twitter, Blogger and WordPress.

The idea behind Blog It is to simplify the process of updating all the various sites and services you use, offering a single interface for updating all your sites. It’s a bit like turning Facebook into a fire hose that sprays your thoughts across the web.

Continue Reading “Six Apart’s ‘Blog It’ Turns Facebook Into a Fire Hose” »

Amidst the incredible hoopla surround the Mark Zuckerberg keynote at this year’s SXSW (see Underwire’s earlier coverage) there’s been on key missing element — what Zuckerberg said.

Getting Zuckerberg to talk in anything but pre-scripted sound bites is notoriously difficult job, but he actually did answer a number of questions at a SXSW developer breakout session. In the video above, shot by Matt Browne, Zuckerberg addresses two of the hottest and most contested issues on the web today — data portability and privacy.

Zuckerberg argues that Facebook provides something the larger web doesn’t — an undo button — which he feels is more important than data portability.

Continue Reading “Mark Zuckerberg on Privacy and the Future of Facebook News Feeds” »

FriendFeed, a social network aggregator from a group of former Google employees, has tossed off the beta shackles and opened its door to the public. FriendFeed works something like your Facebook news feed, but instead of being limited to items in Facebook, FriendFeed can grab content from just about anywhere on the web.

The idea behind FriendFeed is to make it easy for you to organize all your “social web” content in one spot — Facebook updates, Digg posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, Last.fm music, Twitter posts or Tumblr blogs.

FriendFeed enables users to comment on feed items (keeping the conversation centralized) and you can mark friend’s items as favorites. Any time someone comments or favorites an item it moves back up in the feed, which helps keep the conversation going.

If you’re looking for something to read, FriendFeed offers recommendations — just head to Friend Settings >> Recommended. Naturally there are JavaScript widgets available if you’d like to embed your FriendFeed activity on another page.

Continue Reading “FriendFeed Lifestreaming Service Now Open to Everyone” »

As you may have read elsewhere, Facebook has suspended the account of prominent blogger Robert Scoble because he violated the site’s TOS by running some sort of data harvesting script. Scoble says the script was designed to “move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service.”

In other words Scoble wanted his data back and got a taste of how Facebook treats your data — it’s their data and you can’t have it.

Facebook has yet to issue any sort of statement, but we suspect its rather clever PR folks will be able to get Scoble his account back and still play the rest of us for suckers (Scoble for his part is following the usual appeal methods and says he won’t resort to taking advantage of his own PR contacts).

Naturally there’s already a Facebook group calling for Scoble’s re-instatement, which is, we suspect, what Facebook was waiting for before making its move. If it’s smart, Facebook will re-instate Scoble’s account and do its usual move of appearing to bow to user pressure since that continues to give users the illusion that they have some control over the site and their data.

But of course much like your privacy is an illusion, your control over Facebook is equally an illusion. Scoble says that when the dust settles he’ll give some more details about the script at which point we suggest you try running it and see where it gets you.

Continue Reading “Facebook Makes us all Look Like Suckers” »