mobile geo social

In 2006, a certain old-media tycoon reportedly asked Mark Zuckerberg, the 20-something founder of Facebook, “how can I build a social network like Facebook?”

Zuckerberg replied “You can’t!”

What Zuckerberg meant was that Facebook hadn’t set out to ‘build’ a social network. His billion dollar insight was that Facebook would instead provide online social tools to help existing friends and existing social groups to communicate easily, share photos, stalk, and poke each other.

Then in 2007, Facebook opened its app platform for third party developers to add additional social stuff to keep users on the site. Soon we were all happily throwing sheep at each other and spamming our friends with app invites.

App fatigue arrived in 2008. A redesign of the Facebook site removed some of the weeds, but the metrics spoke loudly, or rather their unit of measurement did; popular apps began to be listed according to ‘monthly active users’ rather than ‘daily active users’.

Slide, RockYou and iLike had been quick enough to make some money, however there was a long tail of apps without enough active users to generate a decent return on investment. The app gold rush was over.

It become apparent that there was less value in creating new social activities inside of a social site such as Facebook, and more value in socializing, or adding social data and context to, the existing sites that people are already using out there in the big wide web.

In other words, social data portability has arrived, and extends Zuckerberg’s earlier “You can’t!” insight; you can’t ‘build’ the platform because the web is the platform.

We are told that data portability is for people who want more control over their data and do not want to be locked in to any particular social network. In 2008, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect and MySpaceID have emerged as the big solutions from those wanting to port your social data, and profitably.

Facebook makes money from people viewing and clicking on ads on their website. Facebook Connect therefore allows you to export your Facebook profile and friend list to external sites, but really is intended to increase activity back on the Facebook website, by importing social information from those connected external sites back into your Facebook Feed for your friends to see. MySpaceID ditto.

Google however makes money from people clicking on ads anywhere, so Google Friend Connect can afford to remain socially agnostic, allowing users to identify themselves and their friends according to any network they belong to, and feed their external site activity into the social sites of their choice.

Being socially agnostic is more useful to more users in theory, but not yet in practice for Google Friend Connect. Even though it would be technically simple for Google to access your profile and friend lists using the Facebook Platform, what happened when Google submitted its Friend Connect app to Facebook for approval earlier in 2008?

Zuckerberg replied “You can’t!”, then added some fud about privacy.

This week however Google was able to make some progress on the theory of Friend Connect by launching an integration with Twitter. It’s now possible for you to use your Twitter identity and friends list on external sites powered by Friend Connect, which significantly increases the chances of spotting someone you know on those sites.

What’s interesting about this recent development to me is the apparent haste, including Google asking for my Twitter username and password directly, rather than waiting for Twitter to complete its long-awaited OAuth implementation. I’ve also seen more than the usual number of server errors and teething problems in this latest build of Friend Connect.

Maybe this is an indication that OAuth will be coming soon from Twitter, which would be fantastic.

Or maybe this is an indication that Twitter will be coming soon from Google; some visibility into Twitter data would be useful for Google in working out an acquisition price.

Or maybe this haste reveals how social data is such a hugely valuable chunk of information for Google to organize, and monetize, if ways can be found to use external social data to improve ad targetting without abusing the privacy of users and the privacy policies of their social networks.

In any event, there are interesting times ahead for social data portability. Users stand to benefit from a richer, more social, internet experience, as long as their privacy is not abused. And stay tuned on the social data portability battle between Facebook and Google and MySpace: who will work out how to best monetize external social data in 2009?

Google today launched a rather massive change to its core search product.

SearchWiki adds some innocuous buttons to your search results page, enabling Digg -style voting and Friendfeed -style commenting on each result.

I think this feature might prove valuable for some users, at least the bad spellers among us and those who prefer to repeatedly type the same search term into Google rather than use bookmarks or their memory.

However this feature becomes massively valuable for Google if enough people bother to vote for their favourite sites and add comments. Harnessing the collective wisdom of all those users is a great way for Google to improve upon its not-so-secret-anymore search algorithm.

Currently your own SearchWiki wisdom impacts only your own search results, nobody else’s. But the words chosen to explain SearchWiki do leave the door open for Google to evolve into a social search engine; “Customize your search results with your rankings, deletions, and notes — plus, see how other people using Google have tailored their searches.”

Personally, I’m not sure how much I want strangers (or bots) to influence (or game) my search results.

But I might want my friends and social networks to influence some of my search results.

If only Google could somehow identify all my friends in all my social networks, and keep track of their searching activity. Wait a minute…

SearchWiki + OpenSocial = mainstream social search.

The web is the their platform.

Here’s a video interview recorded a few months ago with Sally and Steve from LaVolta, and brought to you by Viocorp.

If I look younger, it’s because it was pre-Xumii!

http://play.viostream.com/?play=7EF806B6-EDE1-441D-967B-0D8D20550D22

Thanks to the wonderful MoFuse I have been able to launch two mobile websites while sitting in bed tonight; iphone.hitching.net if you are one of the 1,000,000 people who bought a shiny new iPhone 3G over the weekend, and m.hitching.net if you are still waiting in line.

Clicking on those links from your web browser will launch a handy emulator if you want to pretend that you have an iPhone 3G.

MoFuse also makes it easy to migrate your audience from web to mobile; here’s the SMS widget (US cellphones only) and QR code:

qik is live video streaming from your mobile phone; perhaps the next killer mobile app? Certainly the data charges would be near fatal in Australia, at 3Mb per minute for a 320 x 240 x 15 fps stream.

Here’s looking forward to mobile data plans that encourage mobile user generated content rather than mobile user generated discontent, and here’s Jack & Luke streaming via N95:

Today we launched Xumii in private beta.

Xumii is an open mobile social messaging platform. More soon..!

Here’s the Logitech Harmony 1000, a universal remote control with something for everyone:

Rita will enjoy the usability which is task-centric, rather than being organised around different components. You tell it you want to watch a DVD in the rumpus, or listen to the radio in the lounge, and it works out what it has to do with each of your components to achieve that. Like when MS-DOS grew into MacOS I mean Windows.

Jack and Luke will not enjoy that it does infra-red and also radio frequency (RF), meaning that all of the components can be hidden away in the cupboard under the stairs. Or at least the US version does RF. In Australian, Logitech hasn’t yet secured the licensing for the right bit of radio spectrum. eBay sellers in the US will happily provide an international solution to that one.

And finally… my neighbours: here’s offering my blanket apology to my neighbours for whenever their RF garage door opens randomly in the middle of the night.

For a while I’ve had a niggling problem with social networking sites.

I’ve already set up my LinkedIn network and my Facebook friends, so why should I have to do it all again on every other site that has decided to go social on me?

When I heard the OpenSocial announcement last year, while I was F5ing the API URL, waiting to see the campfire video, I was imagining that the problem had been solved, by allowing any social networking site to share its social data with any other.

But the first incarnation of OpenSocial, actually the 0.7th as I write this, is more aimed at developers re-using code to make applications more portable, rather than data portability.

Then Plaxo released a LinkedIn sync feature which looked promising, but that was just two social sites, what about all the others?

Now it looks like Google has provided the solution, not as part of OpenSocial but with its new Social Graph API. Social data becomes portable simply by adding some XFN tags to the hyperlinks between your pages and your friends’ pages and your other pages (view the source of this page and search for rel=”me” to get the idea), then letting the Googlebot spider those links to work out the connections. Very simple and powerful. The internet is the platform.

This must upset Facebook, because the social data representing all those friend connections is a big part of their crown jewels. If Facebook changes profile pages to become publically available (or less revealing profile summaries, as LinkedIn has done), and adds some XFN tags, then that social data and the ad revenue extracted from it will start to trickle out onto the wider web. How long can Facebook resist?

Anyone could start to work out who knows who by using the Social Graph API. Reputable sites will put the decision of how to use that social data in the hands of the user. But there’s also a privacy risk here. Perhaps the answer to that is something along the lines of OpenId which puts the user firmly in control of how portable their identity data is.

My mind spins with the opportunities and challenges created by this great innovation. My favourite: combine social graph data portability with always-connected location-aware mobile devices (“phone”), and you can mashup the social landscape with the physical landscape you’re walking through.

Maybe that’s what Judge Dread’s helmet did.

Okay so we all know about digital photo frames by now. But this is the next gen.

This wonderful thing includes a wi-fi connection so it can connect to your home or office network.

Why would that be useful? So it can receive photos sent to it by email or MMS, using a special email address.

Why a ’special’ email address? Because you should only reveal it to trusted friends and family! Definitely not an email address to publish on your blog and attract Viagra spam.

And it does RSS, so you can subscribe to your favorite Flickr feed for a regular supply of fresh photos.

Just swap all those cables for a decent rechargeable battery and slim down the form factor (maybe we need to wait until Apple launches the iFrame…) and I’m in.

And video streaming would be good too so I can watch my new and excellent YouTube Radiohead subscription. Check out Jigsaw Falling Into Place: