Category: Social Media

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I must seem like I’m filled with disdain for Twitter, Facebook, or any of these other jewels of social graphing, or whatever it’s called this week. However, I really don’t have anything against the tools, as much as I can’t stand the hyperbole.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using, and enjoying, Twitter, Facebook, GMail, or any other new darlings. But there’s a lemming like quality to the discussions surrounding these tools that brings out the Critic, the Cynic, and the Curmudgeon in me, almost as a counter balance to weigh down the mountains of fluff.

One would think that being a tech, I would be all over these new ‘forms’ of technology. However, as a tech, I recognize that there really isn’t anything particularly innovative about the technologies behind Twitter, Facebook, and the like. They’re more good examples of dealing with performance issues, and excellent marketing, more than something truly new in the field of technology. They enable social networking? We’ve had social networking through the internet for a half century forty years.

In the meantime, when something new, really new, does come along within the technology field, it’s lost in all of the fooflah about Facebook, Twitter, and so on. I worry, sometimes, that we’re at the end of innovation; that we’re caught up in a cycle of Silicon Valley marketspeak that will never allow anything exciting through.

Jeneane Sessum was interviewed for ComputerWorld for the problems with missing GMail email. I find it fascinating when Google is asked about any problem with its services, it always states it can’t respond fully because of ‘privacy’ concerns.

I don’t use GMail or Yahoo mail or any centralized email service for my email, primarily because, as happened with Facebook, you never know when your interactions with your friends suddenly become marketing fodder. It’s one thing to subject yourself to stealth ads, quite another to do so to your mates.

Centralized data aside, I think the issues with Jeneane’s email, and especially Google’s non-response, demonstrates an increasing problem with Google: it’s spread too thin. If Google doesn’t have its hands in television, it has its hands now in cellphones, closed social networks–increasingly throwing out tendrils into virtually every known, and possibly unknown, form of internet-based interaction. All, of course, with the undercurrent that some day the ‘somethings’ Google puts out will eventually become ‘somethings-with-ads’.

Yahoo’s desperate explorations into the hip (last year, internet operating systems, this year social graph) in order to maintain it’s implicit coolness have been overshadowed by the Peanut Butter Manifesto, a company communication by a senior Yahoo executive worried that the company was spreading itself too thin.

If, however, Yahoo’s rather timid explorations are seen as spreading the company thin, like peanut butter, than Google’s own explorations must be seen as the Vegemite of the internets, as it seeks to scrape smears of itself on everything we touch.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The New York Times has an article about an incident that happened some time back: A young man Twitters he’s going to commit suicide. The article features our old friend, ambient intimacy. It also features quotes by yours truly, and about half a dozen other folks you probably know.

I was a little surprised to read some of the quotes from folks. People breaking up with their mates via Twitter? Posting everything online before talking to each other directly? It’s almost as if the only intimacy these people share, is the ‘ambient.’ There’s nothing real.

I’d rather be alone. I really would, rather be alone.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The world is happily building away their new vision of a utopia based on social networking and an open OpenSocial API, which is going to link just everything together.

Perhaps the world will read the terms of use of the API, and realize this is not an open API; this is a free API, owned and controlled by one company only: Google. Hopefully, the world will remember another time when Google offered a free API and then pulled it. Maybe the world will also take a deeper look and realize that the functionality is dependent on Google hosted technology, which has its own terms of service (including adding ads at the discretion of Google), and that building an OpenSocial application ties Google into your application, and Google into every social networking site that buys into the Dream. Hopefully the world will remember. Unlikely, though, as such memories are typically filtered in the Great Noise.

Via a Wired article comes Anil Dash:

Regardless, Google’s move is a big bet on interoperability — and against the “winner take all” philosophy of social networking, according to Six Apart’s Dash.

“The market has already decided that there’s going to be a long tail of social networks, and that people are going to belong to more than one. As soon as you belong to more than one, this kind of interoperability is critical,” Dash says. “Open standards win every time.”

A lot of people have a different idea of what ‘open’ means than I do. Is this a Silicon Valley interpretation? Do we need Silicon Valley dictionaries that have entries such as:

o·pen (ō’pən)
adj.

Defined and controlled by Google.

From Russell Beattie, who took the red pill. Or is it the blue pill?

Would people be jumping on this bandwagon so readily if it was Microsoft unilaterally coming up with an API, holding secret meetings geared towards undercutting the market leader, and then making sure that only those anointed partners get a head start on launch day by making sure a key part of the API isn’t released – even in alpha. (It obviously exists already, all the partners have that spec and even sample code, I’m sure. The rest of us don’t get access yet, until the GOOG says otherwise).

Silly boy. Looks like he doesn’t use the Silicon Valley dictionary, either. If he did he would know that Microsoft is synonymous for doing evil while Google is synonymous for…well, you know.

But yes, I also looked for the RESTful part of the equation. It wasn’t there. One would think that OpenSocial was rushed out the door quickly, for some reason.

Open standards are not built in secret, with copyright and control owned by one, and only one, company. Open standards belong to the people, and though the standard development process may seem overly political at times–full of anger, rhetoric, accusations small and large, pissing contests, not to mention mind numbing discussions over the smallest points of disagreement–in the end you have a truly open standard that everyone owns a tiny piece of.

But hey! Why am I always so gloomy and paranoid! This is the future of the web, boys and girls. Jump in!

PS This is not a specification whose focus is to import or export your contacts and other relevant information between tools. This is meant for application developers; to create applications like Scrabulous (which is quite fun, btw) that work in social networks other than just Facebook. Until we see more of the RESTful portion of the API, we won’t know if an export/import is feasible.

Final thoughts on Leopard:

I’ve not seen universal happiness with the Leopard UI. Barely visible icons and menu bars, and excessive CPU required for unnecessary reflection/3D geegaws figures at the top of the list. Compatibility with applications, including ones like Apple’s own Aperture is spotty. The Ars Technica review was, hands down, the best. Though the language is *little used, support for Java is missing (Java 1.6) or broken (Java 1.5). Problems with installation, but liking some of the new features, such as web widget thing. The new Safari has irritated me, and I haven’t even moved to Leopard.

Since two of my three computers are outside of the minimum required for Leopard, and the other is currently configured just right, I don’t see an upgrade in my future for months, perhaps longer. I may way until I can afford an Intel-based Mac, and get the OS already installed. After all my applications have been ported to Leopard.

On the new OpenSocial initiative:

I find it humorous that a lot of people are jumping up and down on this, without really knowing what OpenSocial is or does. Marc Andreessen, whose company, Ning, is participating in this initiative, probably has the best hyperbole cutting take.

OpenSocial is a defined set of APIs, agreed upon by a consortium of companies with Google being the major instigator.

Google is not serving as a gatekeeper for this capability, other than its role in defining the API, providing preliminary libraries, and a sandbox.

The OpenSocial does not enable ‘the social graph’. This API is meant to be hosted in different social network applications, using a combination of HTML and JavaScript. This is not a web services API, which is what you would need with the so-called ‘open social graph’.

This is a way for 3rd party application developers to create an application and only have to worry about integrating it with a couple of different platform APIs, such as Facebook’s and OpenSocial. One social platform can develop widgets to another social platform, but that’s nothing more than a direct link between two applications–it’s not ‘open’, there is no universal pool of data goodness from which to suck, like bees and nectar.

This. Is. Not. An. Operating. System.

This is a way of combining several smaller (or less US-centric) social platforms in such a way that developers will find it worthwhile to port their Facebook apps over to the new platform, and Google can then sell ads.

It’s a dumb-as-rocks API: not a whiff of the semantic.

The upside to OpenSocial is that 3rd party application developers don’t have to develop for a bunch of individual platforms. Of course, most are developing now for Facebook, and the other platforms want you to play in their playgrounds.

The downside? Who controls the API? It’s not ‘open’. Currently, it’s vendor controlled and closed. Will this change? Hard to say. The other downside is that this will start another round of dueling specifications. Flickr is not part of the original list of companies supporting OpenSocial, and being part of Yahoo, this isn’t surprising. Will Yahoo then group with Microsoft and Facebook to create a competing “open API”? Or perhaps, create a third? Are we looking at the beginning of Social Font?

Hyperbole cutting facts: OpenSocial is not being released yet, does not enable the ‘social graph’, isn’t necessarily ‘open’, and only adds to that part of the web that is utilized for social networking. It doesn’t provide a thing for the overall web. Anyone using ‘Balkanization’, ‘Facebook’, and ‘walled garden’ in the same sentence should be beaten with Peeps. Especially when one considers that the instigator behind Open Social is Google.

Most significantly: Thursday is just an announcement of the OpenSocial effort. The API isn’t scheduled to go live until November. Only Orkut supports the functionality at this time. Other partners are ‘in development’. Stop peeing your pants.

*Joking! Don’t hit me.