Webmonkey » Socialgraph

Google’s ‘Friend Connect’ Offers a Way to Bring the Social Web Together [Updated]

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:53:50 +0000

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.”

Although there aren’t many details at the moment, the press release claims that Friend Connect will work with existing open data tools like OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as proprietary APIs like those from Facebook and MySpace. [Update: Google has released some more details, see below.]

Obviously, since Friend Connect is a full set of APIs, Google has been working on it for some time, so it isn’t strictly a “me too” response to MySpace or Facebook. In fact Friend Connect looks infinitely more useful than either of the toolsets that MySpace and Facebook are talking about releasing, but it still doesn’t solve all the concerns of data portability. With the limited information that’s available, Friend Connect looks to be primarily of interest to other websites that want develop social tools — not something that will allow users to have more control over their data.

Dave Winer, a long time observer of the social web, wrote in response to the MySpace announcement last week:

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what the big players do here, they will be too constrained by BigCo thought processes, and a desire to appear to be giving stuff away without actually giving anything away.

Which is precisely why you see, for instance, that the bigger names in this space will embrace OpenID from the provider end, but not the consumer end. However, given that Google’s Blogger service is a notable exception to that trend, the Friend Connect tools may end up being more useful than they appear on the surface. Another thing that isn’t clear is how Friend Connect fits with Google’s existing Social Graph API which covers some of the same ground. It would appear that thus far the two services remain separate.

Not to pick on iLike, but I find their blurb in Google’s press release particularly telling. It reads: “‘We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us,’ said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike.”

Now what’s your vision of an open social web? Are you looking forward to a set of tools that allows iLike to easily expose itself to you on a variety of sites? Or do you generally think of yourself more as a person? A person who wants to interact and keep in touch with your friends without ever bothering to figure out how iLike, Facebook, MySpace or any other company fits into the picture.

But that’s precisely the problem as Winer sees it, the existing social networks are too blinded by their own aims to see what people actually want.

BigCo’s can’t afford to do what it takes to coalesce a popular maturing technology around their own platform. It won’t happen in BigCoLand. Only a little dude with nothing to lose can choose to build around something truly open.

We’ll get you more info as details of Friend Connect are made public, but if you’re looking for the truly open social web, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for Google, Facebook or MySpace to create it.

Update: Google has revealed a few more details on how Friend Connect works:

Essentially there’s nothing here you couldn’t have already done on your own using the same tools, like OpenID, oAuth and FOAF (and indeed what projects like DiSo are already doing). However, for those that don’t want to dig into the actual code, Friend Connect handles the heavy lifting.

The Friend Connect tools are designed such that there’s no need to do any actual coding, just plug in your site’s info and copy and paste the code into your page.

That means that the actual social capabilities you add will likely load into an iFrame, so it doesn’t appear that there’s any way for users to move any of the “shared” information. In other words, the originating site doesn’t actually share your data, it temporarily loans it out.

From a user point of view, when you head to a Friend Connect site you get to decide who to bring into the new site. For instance, you can select to import all your Facebook friends, or just some of them. Once you’re logged in and in touch with your friends, what you can do is up to the site you’re visiting.

As an example Google’s is touting musician Ingrid Michaelson’s site which uses Friend Connect to include an iLike application so fans can see comments by their friends, add music to their profiles or see who is attending concerts, all without leaving the site.

Also interesting is the ability to send your activities on the site you’re visiting back to the site whose credentials you signed in with. For instance, if you stop by say, my blog, and post some comments by logging via Friend Connect using your Plaxo Pulse ID, you could choose to send your comments back to Plaxo’s Pulse so that they’re visible there as well.

Keep in mind that this is a preview release and you won’t be able to play with anything just yet. Interested developers can sign up for the wait list at the Friend Connect site, which will live later tonight. Google also says that in the next few days a dozen or so sites will be live using the new tools which should help you get a better sense of what’s possible with Friend Connect.

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How MySpace Plans to Become Everybody’s Space

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:18:37 +0000

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.

For example, if you were to log in to Twitter via your MySpace credentials, Twitter could then scan your MySpace friend networks and find those same people on Twitter. You wouldn’t need to worry about knowing their Twitter usernames, since the connection would already be established through MySpace.

Another interesting part of MySpace’s plan is that the third-party sites using the new tools are not allowed to store any of your data.

On one hand, the no storage policy gives you more control over where your data ends up. It ensures that if you share your MySpace data with another site, but then change your mind and decide to stop sharing it, that data will instantly disappear from the outside site. However, it also means that your data is ultimately still stuck on MySpace.

While MySpace’s new features cover about half of the goals outlined by the Data Portability Workgroup (which MySpace joined Thursday), it doesn’t offer true portability. One the bright side MySpace seems aware of the difference. The company is even using the term Data Availability rather than Data Portability.

What’s the difference? Well, think of your personal data as your life savings. MySpace’s new tools are an ATM card. Sites using the new tools are like ATM machines and you can have access to your cash from just about anywhere and enjoy using it all over the web.

However, you still can’t withdraw all your money and put it in another bank.

True data portability would mean having an ATM card that works everywhere, and allows you to move your money to another bank account without having to get a new ATM card. In other words, where the actual data resides should be irrelevant, but it’s not. Yet.

A broader vision of data portability would mean you could use MySpace as a host for your personal data and then one day decide you want to hand that duty over to Facebook. In such an ideal world, all you would need to do is login to Facebook, sync your MySpace data over and then disallow MySpace any future access to that data.

For now, that remains a difficult and ephemeral goal.

There are two basic problems with the data portability scenario. First, no site — MySpace, Facebook or anyone else — wants to make it that easy for you to turn your back on it. So, there’s very little incentive for them to embrace a plan like that. The second problem is how to get rid of the data on the original host when you move to another host. In other words, when you switch from MySpace to Facebook, how do you get rid of the information on MySpace’s servers?

These hang-ups make true Data Portability difficult to sort out, and there isn’t going to be a complete workable solution for some time.

That said, MySpace’s announcement is big. While the site might not be the choice of the online hipster crowd, it has a massive mainstream user base. By opting for the pragmatic solution – make data available to outside sites – MySpace is effectively exposing some of the benefits of data portability to a much wider audience. Whether or not that audience gets excited about the new features remains to be seen.

For the launch, MySpace has partnered with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and its own Photobucket service. As far as I can tell, however, the plan is to eventually make the API available to everyone. The press release isn’t clear on when the actual APIs will be publicly available, though Data Portability co-founder Ben Metcalfe says the tools will be open to everyone.

Some other key parts of MySpace’s plan remain unclear as well. For example, what sort of data formats and APIs will be used? Authentication will be handled through oAuth, an emerging standard for logging into websites, but the APIs and other tools are thus far a mystery.

In the end, the real winner in MySpace’s plan may well be Twitter. Although none of the partners have any tools developed at the moment, if Twitter implements something like the mockup seen on the right (which comes from TechCrunch — click on it for the larger version) the service is poised to jump from a toy of the tech-savvy elite to a mainstream audience. Hopefully, Twitter’s servers are up to the challenge.

While it may not be the end-all data portability solution that some have been hoping for, turning MySpace into an ATM card for your personal data is certainly a huge step in the right direction.

[Illustration from TechCrunch]

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Yahoo Connects the Dots with New ‘Open Strategy’

Michael Calore — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:33:44 +0000

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.

Right now, Yahoo as a whole is made up of a virtual archipelago of sites and services. There are smaller, more esoteric services like bookmark management (del.icio.us), event management (Upcoming) and photo sharing (Flickr). Then there are the bigger islands, the lush behemoths like search, mail, news, finance and maps. As a Yahoo user, you can log in with one ID and "island hop," checking your Yahoo Mail, tagging your Flickr photos and reading Yahoo News without having to log in to each site as you move around.

Even though the single sign-on system makes the experience pretty smooth, it’s far from seamless. Very few sites within Yahoo feel inherently connected to their neighboring sites in any meaningful way.

With this new Open Strategy, one gets the sense that Yahoo is essentially — to extend my cheap metaphor — draining the water separating the system of islands, exposing the earth underneath and giving us all the freedom to pitch our tents (or set up shop) wherever we want.

Ari didn’t offer a formal launch date, but Yahoo usually rolls out such features iteratively over a few months, so we should expect to start seeing pieces of it soon.

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Six Apart’s ‘Blog It’ Turns Facebook Into a Fire Hose

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:53:08 +0000

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.

FriendFeed is also toying with similar, though much more limited cross-posting features, like the ability to send comments to Twitter. Blog It, however, offers far more complete updating capabilities.

Which isn’t to say that Blog It is feature complete just yet. For now, you’ll miss niceties like a rich text editor or the ability to upload and include pictures in your posts. In the video below, Six Apart’s David Recordon makes it clear that the company is aware of the application’s short-comings and promises feature upgrades in the near future.

But while Blog It may be a work in progress, even in limited form, it’s the easiest way I’ve seen to broadcast posts across platforms. It offers the ability to pick and choose which posts go where on a per-post basis so you’re always in control of who sees what. Every time you add a new service to update, Blog It offers the option to automatically post to that service, though you can always uncheck any of the services when you actually post something.

Blog It is a pretty slick Facebook app, perhaps the best I’ve used. And while it still lacks a few features (OAuth support is reportedly in the works, but for now you’ll have to give Blog It all of your passwords) it definitely makes it easier to broadcast your life to multiple locations. It’s a nice cure for the fatigue of having to keep up with all of your data streams by logging into each service separately.

Recordan has hinted elsewhere that Six Apart may expand Blog It to work from other platforms – like Plaxo’s Pulse, or perhaps even as standalone AIR application like Twhirl – but for now Blog It is tied to Facebook.

To get an idea of what Blog It looks like in action, check out the video below where Recordon walks you through the process of setting up and using Blog It (and also offers the best OAuth metaphor I’ve heard: “it’s like a valet key for the web”). If you’d like to jump in with both feet, you can go ahead and add Blog It to your Facebook account.

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Mark Zuckerberg on Privacy and the Future of Facebook News Feeds

Michael Calore — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:00:17 +0000

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.

Zuckerberg says that while Facebook is “philosophically aligned with data portability,” the company is also concerned with the privacy issues that surround opening up Facebook to the larger world.

The example he offers is the Facebook news feed. As it stands if you publish something to your news feed and then decide that you want to limit who can see it by changing the privacy settings, that information is removed from your friend’s updates (assuming they no longer have the privileges necessary to access it).

However, were the Facebook news feed offered as an RSS feed available outside Facebook (as we’ve often argued it should be), it would, because of the nature of RSS, no longer be retractable. Even if you changed the privacy settings and removed it from the feed, many RSS readers would already have cached or otherwise stored the post you’d like to retract.

In some sense that’s the nature of the larger web — once something is out, there’s no taking it back. Many would argue that this is exactly why you should think before you post, but that’s precisely why Facebook is so popular, it offers the kind of tight privacy controls that allow users to recover from hasty publishing decisions. Facebook is providing something that the web lacks — an undo button (taking a broader view of privacy, Facebook’s record a la Beacon may not be so hot, but when it comes to controlling who sees what and allowing you to change your mind, the site is admittedly quite good).

As anyone whose ever regretted a drunken or otherwise accidental e-mail can attest, an undo button would be a handy thing to have.

The question is what do you value more: the ability to access your data outside any single silo like Facebook, or the ability to control who sees what, and even more importantly, change your mind later?

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FriendFeed Lifestreaming Service Now Open to Everyone

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:37:48 +0000

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.

Of course the idea behind FriendFeed — collecting all your disparate social network content in one place — isn’t exactly new, in fact it’s what we’ve seen many people do with their personal sites and blogs.

For those already using a dedicated URL to create a lifestream, FriendFeed can be yet another source — the site offers an API that allows you to scrape comments on your posts. Just send in your various feeds and pull out any friend’s comments. At the moment the API is a little limited, but FriendFeed says it’s looking to expand it in the near future.

The site is well designed and easy to use and one of the oft overlooked aspects of FriendFeed is the very nice collection of graphs and charts that track your (and your friends) activity and interactions.

FriendFeed isn’t exactly a novelty, Iminta, which we looked at recently, Plaxo’s Pulse network and others all do roughly the same thing.

Even Facebook seems to taking the so-called lifestreaming game more seriously. The rumor mill claims the site is planning to soon allow users to add content from outside sites into the Facebook news feed.

But FriendFeed is significantly different from your Facebook news feed. For instance, where the Facebook news feed lets you know about all kinds of onsite info — like when a friend adds a new friend or joins a new group — FriendFeed is primarily about the various online posts/links/movies/music/etc you and your friends find interesting.

In other words, FriendFeed is about content and the conversation around content. As someone who couldn’t care less about the groups you join on Facebook or who you’re friends with, FriendFeed is a much more compelling service.

There’s also quite a bit more you can do with FriendFeed that may not be obvious at first glance. The Google Blogscoped blog has a nice post highlighting some other ways to use FriendFeed, like subscribing to any RSS feed, adding comments from forums or blogs, adding a Google News alert feed and more.

[image from the FriendFeed blog]

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Video: Data Portability and What it Means for You

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:55:34 +0000

Every time we use the phrase “data portability” here on Compiler inevitably some people misunderstand what we mean by it. And those folks are not alone it would seem, which has prompted Michael Pick of Smashcut Media to create the above video explaining what your data is and what it means to make it portable.

First there’s the data — the information you give to a website about yourself, be it a username, e-mail, who your friends are, what you like to read, listen to, watch and more.

Then there’s the portability element, the notion that you shouldn’t have to give this information to every site, the sites should be able to get it from each other or a centralized location.

A first glance that seems like a no brainer, but then again this is potentially a lot of personal information. While we’re of the opinion that you should never give a site information you aren’t comfortable seeing in public, data portability isn’t just about portability. And I think that is the key take-away point that the above video — portability without control is exploitation.

The good news, as the video proudly trumpets, is that “some of the biggest companies in the world” are have agreed to take part in the discussion regarding how to give you that control.

The bad news is that some of the biggest companies in the world are part of the discussion about how you should control your data.

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Creating Proprietary Content is Like ‘Writing in Sand’

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:06:58 +0000

We’ve written a lot lately about data portability and content ownership and how these debates relate to the open web. The issues are complex and thorny, but there is a simple way to solve them — put all your data in the public domain.

The video above is an interview from Open Media Web with Tantek ???elik, the man behind Microformats and a host of other great ideas, in which he touts the Digg content model as a way of circumventing content ownership issues.

???elik starts off by defining the open web as consisting of two components — access to your data in both directions (reading and writing) and portability. He then goes on to argue that proprietary services, which are more concerned with content ownership, are ultimately, “like writing in sand — you might as well be building sandcastles… the sandcastles get wiped out by the next wave and that’s exactly what will happen to your content.”

Digg, on the other hand, puts all your submissions, your Digg created content, comments etc, under a Creative Commons public domain declaration, which means anyone is free to do anything they want with what you post.

That’s the ultimate in portability — it’s there for anyone to take and share and move and I really like that model because it basically says if you want to play on the open web you have to contribute your snippets — things like comments and tags and stuff — you have to contribute to the open domain.

And ???elik isn’t just talking, he’s putting these ideas into motion like on the made mandatory microformats wiki which now, much like the Digg example, requires that all contributed content be placed in the public domain.

Other highlights from the video include ???elik’s observation that proprietary tools/formats almost always precede open formats, but in doing so serve as a nice way of mapping out what aspects of the format are useful and which aren’t. Market pressure then eventually forces an open alternative that gets to skip the R&d stage and head right to the aspects that the market has already determined are most important. In other words, proprietary tools tend to pave the way for open tools.

On the whole a great interview and a number of interesting ways to move toward creating a more open web.

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Google and Facebook to Join the Data Portability Debate

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:12:22 +0000

Google, Plaxo and Facebook announced yesterday that all three companies will be sending representatives to the DataPortability Workgroup, an organization designed to create a means of easily sharing content between social networks.

Many of the people upset by Facebook’s recent refusal to allow outside applications to scrape address book data, have hailed the announcement as proof that the open social web is inevitable. But despite the optimistic headlines surrounding Google and Facebook’s announcement, so far the move is little more than lip service and there are a variety of complex privacy issues that still need to be sorted out before any data portability scenario will be workable.

Much of the recent uproar about scraping e-mail addresses out of Facebook revolved around that fact that the tool in question moved those addresses to another company (Plaxo in this case, but the particular company is irrelevant) rather than simply a personal address book, which highlights yet another problem with data portability — many of those in favor of data portability are startups gunning for Facebook’s market share.

Not only does that make Facebook reluctant to open up, but it complicates the issue since personal backups are only one small part of the data portability equation. It’s easy to say Facebook needs to open up if you’re talking about scraping out your own data to display it on another site, but the situation becomes much less appealing when you consider that any number of companies might scrape the same data and do who knows what with it.

The essential dilemma of data portability revolves around privacy. When Facebook refused to allow Plaxo’s data scraper to harvest e-mail addresses, the company was standing by its terms of service, which, Facebook argues, are designed to protect user privacy. Furthermore users felt violated when told that their personal data was moved to another company’s service — a company they potentially know nothing about and therefore don’t trust.

For these users Facebook’s status as a walled garden is part of its charm — they can control who sees their information.

The other side of the argument claims that Facebook does not own that data and Facebook users have every right to extract the data they’ve collected. But the situation is actually somewhat more complicated and to frame the argument in terms of data ownership is, as TechDirt’s Tim Lee points out, somewhat misleading since ownership is a bad metaphor for privacy.

Yet, at the end of the day, no one wants to lose access to all their Facebook posts, Flickr images or Twitter messages should any of those services disappear and data portability would help ensure that doesn’t happen.

Theoretically this is where the DataPortability Workgroup comes in — to hash out these debates and ensure that not only is data portable, but the suitable access controls exist so you can regulate what gets ported and what does not.

So while Google, Plaxo and Facebook have joined the discussion about data portability, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get access to all your data tomorrow, nor does it mean all your personal data is suddenly fair game for screen scrapers.

True data portability, which addresses the concerns on both sides of the argument, still has a long ways to go.

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Facebook Makes us all Look Like Suckers

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:22:43 +0000

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.

Or you could learn from Scoble and others like David McKellar who built a friend organizer using the Facebook Platform only to see that functionality rolled into the main Facebook feature set without so much as a nod of acknowledgement.

As McKellar mentions in an e-mail to Wired News, “since Facebook is worth $15 billion they could afford to buy out the developers they expropriate [or] alternately they could post a warning of new areas where they plan to expand so developers stay away.”

Or they could simply do what they did — create a closed proprietary system, call it open, wait for enthusiastic developers to come up with some good ideas and then roll them into the core feature set without spending a penny. It’s not a new idea, just ask the folks behind Konfabulator who saw their application’s core functionality appropriated into Apple’s Dashboard app.

So long as we store data in and build applications for closed systems and give up all form of control, what befalls McKellar and Scoble will befall the rest of us as well. As McKellar says, “it appears that social networking is here to stay, I’d like to see an open platform that isn’t controlled by one company.” Wouldn’t we all.

Scoble seem to feel the same way and has thrown his hat behind Data Portability.

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