Social Networking and Open Source: Cut From the Same Cloth

Social networking and open source are two concepts that fit well together, says Bob Bickel, cofounder of Ringside Networks. With the opening of Facebook's application programming interface and the OpenSocial initiative spearheaded by Google, users should soon be able to port their information between social networks.

The ideas blend together so well. Open source has been around for a long time and is built on the concept of developers working together and sharing software . Social networking has broken into the headlines as a new generation uses MySpace and Facebook as a whole new means of sharing their life experiences.

Open source developers are passionate about the software, frequently spending much of their own personal time working online with others they rarely meet in the flesh. Social networking users are passionate about their lives and interests and how they intersect with others, and spend a lot of time polishing their profiles and commenting on each other's walls.

However, social and open source are starting to actually blend -- where social networking is beginning to help open source developers, and open source is coming into being a critical enabler of the evolving social networking era of the Internet .

It could be said that the Internet would not exist without open source. Certainly, Linux has become the standard deployment platform for most Web site companies with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) , MySpace and others deploying tens of thousands of systems to serve users. MySQL has become the standard database for the Web site, and open languages like PHP, Ruby and Java dominate the infrastructure. Despite Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) best efforts, Apache still rules as the Web site server of choice.

Social networking has grabbed the headlines from open source over the past two years. Facebook had over 65 million registered users averaging over 1,000 page views per user in the in March. MySpace is even larger -- and the growth is huge.

Walled Gardens

While social networking is taking off, it is flying in the face of traditional open source philosophies in terms of openness. This was recently highlighted in a March 19 article in The Economist: "The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside Web site."

Walled gardens are nothing new to the computer industry, and open source has proven a useful way to blast through the walls of proprietary vendors -- JBoss to the app server, MySQL to the database and, of course, Linux to the operating system. A number of open source alternatives are emerging to bring similar changes to social networking.

Open Source Comes to Social Networking

E-mail could be thought of as one of the first mechanisms for social networking, and could well emerge to be an important piece of the social scene. Thunderbird and Zimbra are two popular open source e-mail clients that will over time incorporate more social features. The very fact that they are open source gives their communities the ability to integrate with other systems and services.

Facebook took a big first step in opening up social networking by publishing an open API (application programming interface) for developers to add applications to its platform. In less than a year, more than 22,000 applications have been developed and deployed. Many of the early applications were simple extensions of pokes, but more recently more sophisticated applications have begun to emerge.

Three different open source efforts have emerged to take the Facebook platform to the next level of openness: DiSo, Apache Shindig and Ringside Networks. In typical open source fashion, the projects are starting to collaborate (Ringside and DiSo share similar ideas, while Shindig will be used within Ringside).

There are two standards that have evolved in the early days of social networking -- the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API. Today, Facebook dominates in terms of applications built for that platform; however, OpenSocial is supported by Google, MySpace and others. The various open source projects offer ways to interface with these standards so that developers can have freedom when implementing new applications. The fact that these projects are free also helps unlock the innovation that is important in these early days of social applications.

Solving Problems

Two of the emerging areas of social applications are solving the problems of data portability and identity mapping. Data portability is the solution to the problem of putting a lot of profile and social data into a particular social network and not being able to get it out. It's similar to early cell phone plans that did not let you switch carriers and transfer your cell phone number with you. A consortium has banded together, created from market forces to form the DataPortability Project. The idea is that all social networks comply with a common mechanism for letting users take information with them easily.

Identity Mapping is a new approach that has been enabled by the Facebook API and OpenSocial. This lets an application use information from a user's profile in their social network. This allows users to give a Web site site supporting this capability to use information from their Facebook profiles, for example, rather than re-entering it. The Web site uses an identity map and gets certain data from Facebook, like the person's profile picture, and certain information like the person's credit card number from its own database to create an integrated user experience.

Open source will help crack open the walls of the big social networks and give the Internet a new revolution that extends far beyond the current impact of Facebook and MySpace.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/62786.html

Video: Social Networking in Plain English

Video: Social Networking in Plain English

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking

Google Reader Gets Way More Social With New Sharing Features

This story is near and dear to my heart: Google Reader has added a bunch of features to make sharing items more social and much easier.

The biggest addition, which makes Google Reader sharing a lot more like saving something to del.icio.us or submitting it to Digg, is a new bookmarklet so you can share any web page in Google Reader. This isn’t actually completely new – I’ve previously described a third-party bookmarklet that does something similar – but now that it’s being officially offered by Google Reader, adoption is going to surge. This bookmarket is also a lot easier to use than the third-party app, which required some knowledge of Google Reader’s interface. Also, the Google Reader bookmarklet lets you add any web page to your shared items, not just items with an RSS feed. This means Google Reader sharing can now include a lot more than just news sites and blogs, and makes the act of sharing items even more similar to submitting something to a social news site.

Another new feature you’ll notice when sharing an item with the new bookmarklet is the ability to attach a note to your shared items. This allows you to tell your Google contacts why you find the story interesting. This feature can also be accessed within Google Reader, via a “Share With Note” link that appears next to the traditional “share” link with each item. You can also post notes that aren’t associated with any item at all - somewhat akin to posting a message on FriendFeed.

One other welcome change is that shared items now have a distinctive look inside Google Reader. This alleviates at least some of the duplicate items problem, in that you can now see that an item isn’t just showing up repeatedly, but rather, it’s being shared by your friends. A few other small upgrades are noted on the Google Reader team blog.

One big disclosure here: as you might know, my side project ReadBurner is based on aggregating data from Google Reader shared items. Combined with my passion for RSS and feed reading, I’m probably a bit more excited about these features than the average user, but I think they’re a sign that the Google Reader team is truly paying attention to what user’s want and building out sharing items into a robust system.

http://mashable.com/2008/05/05/google-reader-shared-items-upgrades/

Sconex: Social Networking Designed for High School Students

Although Xanga and myspace have a lot of high school students as users, and facebook recently launched a separate site for high schools, Sconex is actually designed for high school students, with functionality that lets students enter their classes and show their schedule on their profile page. They can also enter teachers. And students from each active school actually serve as Sconex appointed high school advisors. They even say that it is something worthy of putting on a resume:

Reps get special privileges on the Sconex web site and are first in line for free Sconex gear. Plus, taking on the position and responsibility of managing your school's community is something that college admission officers love to see in an application.

Sconex, if I had children, would certainly be a site that I would allow them to use. That's a bit more than I could say about some other sites. Maybe even encourage them. And that's a lot more than I could say about some other sites.