Web 3.0? MySpace, Facebook, and Google Show Their Cards for Open Social Networking
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
The face of social media as we know it is about to change. Within the past week MySpace, Facebook and Google all announced plans to make social media more portable by opening it up to third parties. So what does that mean exactly? Great question Kat! (why thank you)
I had to dig a little deeper myself to find out how each of these giants planned on taking my profile information and share it with the greater world wide web. The underlying theory is this: You use one social network as your “main” Profile, connect this profile to other third party sites, and when you update your “main” profile, it updates the info on the third party sites too. Presumably all profile privacy preferences (say that three times!) will transfer to the third party sites as well. Since I’m a visual person I thought this mockup of a Twitter/MySpace profile (provided by Tech Crunch) would be a useful illustration for you as well.
So what are MySpace, Facebook, and Google offering? Well let’s start with a brief recap of each program and go from there.
First up: MySpace Data Availability
Before I begin, what marketing guru thought that the name “Data Availability” was going to be a winner? But I digress. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners (Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and Photobucket, so far) via their (previously internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth. See above mock up to make sense of the previous sentence.
Next up: Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect will allow members to use/connect their profile information - including profile pictures, names, photos, friends, groups, events and other information - on external websites and other social networking sites, such as Digg. Additionally, Facebook Connect will let members put feeds from other sites onto their Facebook profiles.
And Lastly: Google Friend Connect
Again – what marketing guru came up with this name?? It is not very “google-ly.” Google Friend Connect is a tool set or application, for lack of a better explanation, that allows a website owner to turn any static page into an interactive or social site by adding simple social features to the
website. For a demo, check out this YouTube video tutorial.
And done… well almost.
What does all this mean for us? Are any of these solutions really going to simplify our social networking? If MySpace is partners with Twitter and Photobucket, but not Digg, won’t I have to simultaneously update both my Facebook and MySpace pages? The only way I can see this working, or at least working well enough to make it worthwhile, is if we can get these social network giants (Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, MyYearbook) to play nice. But is that even what we want? Do we want one universal social networking site? Or would we rather compartmentalize our social media footprint – one network for my love of dogs, another for my love of baking, and another to network with other internet marketers, and so on? Isn’t this latter model what Ning is banking on? So many questions, so little time!
That being said, who are you putting your money on? Do you think data portability will one day rule the social media landscape? Or will users keep their profiles private?
