metarand

Google set to outopen in face/space race

Application developers are the clear winners of Google’s pending release of Open Social.

Richard MacManus explains:

Open Social is a distributed social network framework…a ‘third place’ of social networks…a set of three common APIs that allow developer to access the following core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (News Feed).

 The following companies/social networks have apparently signed up to be a part of Open Social – Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce and Viadeo.

So far a bunch of  Facebook app developers, including Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide, have also signed up.

Richard rightly points out that this is an example of Google playing to its strengths – namely creating a distributed system and owning a chunk of a space through its own platform. It will be interesting to see how Facebook and MySpace react.

While some commentators are expressing doubt that they will come to the party, it is possible that this move by Google will lead to some de facto standardization across open APIs. Standards would assist app developers greatly by reducing the friction inherent in mastering the intricacies of every set of open APIs and should lead to a much wider distribution of apps across various social networks.

Om Malik feels that Open Social is attacking Facebooks achilles heel – its quintessential closed nature. A standardised Social Networking Markup Language far outweighs a closed Facebook-only ML.

Do You Have a Facebook Strategy?

Used to be a time, not that long ago (pre May 25th – the launch date of the Facebook platform), when the most frequently asked question in VC pitch meetings was, “What’s your China strategy?”

Today, topping the faqs has to be, “What’s your Facebook strategy?”

For CxOs who have not yet cottoned on to the viral coefficient and engagement aspects of Facebook, here are a few metrics worth digesting:

* in the first 20 weeks 366 million applications were installed from the Facebook platform.

* this growth is continuing unabated and is set to track past 1 billion in the first year.

* in August – there were 14 million unique app users (this equated to 33% of all Facebook members)

* in August – there were 88 million app visits

* in August – average dwell time per visit was 4:30 minutes.

Asking whether a company has a Facebook strategy is also shorthand for asking whether its executives have embraced the open architecture model. Facebook is the tip of the iceberg, with many more opportunities to leverage deeply engaged user communities on the horizon.

[Stats courtesy of Justin Smith of InsideFacebook @ Graphing Social Patterns, picture courtesy of BeFitt]

Viral Video Internet Style

The folks at Cakke have created a compilation of recent viral Internet hits.

Awesome stuff. Thanks Laurel for the tip off.

The Arcade Called You

Rex Sorgatz has written a must read about reality as game.

Awesome imagery – welcome to the arcade called you… gaming mindset is pervasive…gaming the system …

        We’ve moved from a society that creates goods to one that solves puzzles.

Rex explains his motivation for writing the piece on his blog:

The whole idea started by noticing how several of my daily interactions — watching TV, reading RSS, dating — have become very game-like. At first, I didn’t know what to call these instances, but I eventually started using the term gaming moments. And then soon enough, a definition arose: “competitive interactions in daily life that involve play.” Sometimes the interactions are social, sometimes they are you versus a computer algorithm. But once you’ve noticed them, they suddenly become ubiquitous.

“Gaming the system,” it seems, has become standard operating procedure for everything from booking an airline ticket to battling your TiVo’s automated recommendations.

[Photo courtesy of ue06]

International market for social networks remains wide open

With social networks like Myspace and Facebook coming under the umbrella of global corporates like Newscorp and Microsoft, respectively, you may be thinking that it’s game over. The following stats from Jeff Pulver show just how wrong that assumption would be.

I’ve highlighted the US and Australia to show that they are relatively saturated, but just take a look at the countries with a really high number of people – China and India. Facebook is a mere blip on their radar screens.

Besides what this highlights in terms of international growth opportunities for the incumbents, there is still a lot of potential for new arrivals to grab market share globally.

In addition, with mobile phones globally standing at around 3 to 1 computer – the opportunities within the mobile social networking arena are wide open.

I am currently scouting for entrepreneurially minded mobile developers who are keen to play in this space. Ping me on Facebook.

No friendcaps: “Bluepulse rocks” says Scoble

Bluepulse founder Ben Keighran talks with Robert Scoble about their plans to build the killer app mobile social network in this video interview.

Ben gave an interesting insight into why he moved Bluepulse from Sydney to Silicon Valley:

1. Bluepulse intends running with an ad-supported service model and given that half the world’s media spend is in the US it made sense to “follow the money”.

2. Ben rightly feels that attracting top talent can be a gamechanger. Bluepulse really understands mobile, but he wanted to attract on board the right backend talent and felt the Valley is the best place to do this.

3. His vision is to build a really big company and, realising he would need venture funding to do so, he wanted to get VCs on board who could provide strategic help – he moved to the Valley to source a venture partner who could assist with Bluepulse’s hypergrowth.

Sound reasoning from an exciting company. As you’ll hear in the video, they’ll be making some announcements at CTIA in San Francisco this week.

Facesoft at $15bn

When I first started playing around with social networks almost a decade ago I never in my wildest dreams expected I’d see the day one of them would be valued at $15 billion. Facebook, which already had deep ties with Micrsosoft through their ad serving solution, has agreed to take $240m in funding from them. In return, Microsoft will own less than 2% of Facebook, giving the fledgling social networking venture a valuation of $15bn. I’m sure the guys at Accel must be over the moon – their $13m investment in Facebook at a valuation of less than $100m seems like a really good deal.

According to the press conference the deal was inked today and for both companies they felt they had a good relationship in place already, this investment was simply an extension of it. They wanted to put together a deal that was “truly accretive for everybody”.

This new infusion of capital will be used to expand the Facebook platform – their userbase is doubling every two months. It will also be used to fund innovation and growth – expect to see the job boards clogged up by Facebook and not just Google .

Innovation will focus on how Facebook targets ads. They have explicitly said they are not looking at search right now — I interpolate a possible stand off agreement with Google here, given that it has been suggested Google was also in the running to become a strategic investor in Facebook.

APML Gets Attention: Newsgator Signs On

It’s a big day in the early life of the Attention Profiling Markup Language and while still a few inflection points short of being a standard, APML is gaining rapid traction: FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Newsgator Inbox are implementing APML.

A number of other players in the attention profiling arena have also joined the APML working group – Bloglines, Ma.gnolia, Me.dium, Peepel and Talis.

There has been some good coverage of the APML goings on:
Daniela Barbosa
Marjolein Hoekstra
Elias Bizannes
Ross Dawson
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Untethered Avatars Take Their First Steps

The NY Times has already covered IBM and Second Life’s announcement at last week’s Virtual Worlds Conference to untether avatars from specific worlds, but it bears further mention.

As with other forms of social media, I am a firm believer in open systems and interoperability and this move by some of the key players in the emerging virtual world arena, is great to see. It is one giant, albeit baby, step forward and points to a  much higher likelihood that virtual worlds will become a key part of the social fabric, unlike their hapless cousin virtual reality.

Tim O’Reilly makes some excellent points regarding the path forward:

* Just as the web put an end to the competition between early online communities to the one-size-fits-all destination, an interoperable 3D web will allow vertical 3D application niches and platforms to flourish [I agree, it will also allow for greater depth of horizontal, meta layers as they will be able to achieve greater carry].

* Virtual worlds are far more than a game. They are ultimately a simulation layer that can be overlaid on the real world, as well as creating new purely virtual “real estate”.

* We shouldn’t think of this interoperability as being just for virtual worlds. Ultimately, virtual is just another layer on top of physical [Yes, but we should not only think in terms of layers, there is embedding, additional dimensioning and geometric tagging that can take us way beyond our current mental lines, squares, walls and barriers].

I applaud the thought leadership and initiative taken by Colin Parris and his team at IBM and totally agree with TimO’Reilly’s prognosis:

There’s quite a future ahead of us here. It’s silly to try and recreate the wheel when by working together we can build something that is so much bigger.

Virtual worlds go meta

Next week San Jose will be abuzz with virtual worlders. The big question is what to focus on if you are attending VWFall2007.

In my view, since the demise of the virtual world I was working on, the most interesting one to watch is Areae‘s Metaplace. Raph Koster has pulled together a great combination of web meets virtual world components, including an open standard markup language.

One thing I find curious though, is that Metaplace will apparently not have digital asset sale facilities. As Raph says in an interview with Virtual World News:

Our virtual currency is a network level currency. It’s mostly for network usage. We don’t have anything planned for asset sales in a world. The thing we’re thinking of are upsell costs for aspects of the service. I’m not a fan of the gameplay-affecting transactions anyway. It is important for the game to have a level playing field.

Personally, I think this is a blind spot, and I cannot believe that with backing from one of the biggest virtual goods evangelists, Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures, Metaplace will not introduce some form of digital assets sales either directly or through an external application.

UPDATE: Raph has clarified the situation. Metaplace has a virtual currency; which can be used for virtual goods sales by anyone. They have digital asset sales at the network level. What they are not doing is making a whole bunch of digital asset sales worlds however. This is a good thing : Metaplace is not  Metamall.