metarand

MySpace devJam wrapup

Yesterday I hosted a MySpace devJam day in Sydney. Despite the wintry weather we had an excellent turn out of switched on developers keen to get to grips with the MySpace Developer Platform.

Daniel Reyes, the local Head of Engineering for MySpace gave a detailed run through on building apps and did a blow by blow of his IOU app.

Jeremy Lebard spoke about his personal library app, Booktagger, and praised the MySpace dev team for their quick response time.

This was followed by Jodee Rich giving a demo of Peoplebrowsr – a far more visual meta aggregator than FriendFeed. I’ll bring you more on this great product in due course.

A big hat tip to the Australian MySpace team for making their assistance in making this event happen.  I can also highly recommend the Ideas Finder at Naked as a venue for brain storming – they have a great crew who are keen to make your experience special.

I’ll be hosting a few more devJams shortly, including a specific social gaming session. Stay tuned.

More coverage:

Kate Carruthers

MySpace To Roll Out devJams Downunder

Flushing The Data Portaloo: The Looming Portability Squareoff With Users

How close are we to true data portability? It depends who is asking the question as to how it gets answered.

As one of the chief catalysts for the current wave of discussion and (some) action, Chris Saad, points out none of the current high profile implementations are completely true to the overall understanding of portability.

Writing on his blog, Chris sees Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s Data Availability as important first steps. They are the first shots across the bow to the industry that a data portability battle is coming.

That battle will involve a squareoff between the user: me, you – and the networks collectively.

I like Chris’s address book analogy:

DataPortability is about a different social contract – a contract more closely resembling the one found in the email address book.

My address book is my own. When you email me, or when you communicate with me, you are revealing something about yourself. You define a social contract with me that means that I can use your information to contact you whenever and however I like – I could even re-purpose my address book for all manor of other things.

If, however, you violate that trust, either directly or indirectly, you break the social contract and I will tend to not deal with you again. We can not perfectly engineer these sorts of contracts into systems – we can try, but in the end social behavior will be the last mile in enforcing user rights.

Also, the dichotomy between who ‘owns’ the data is false. In my mind there is shared ownership. While you use a service, it is a shared custodianship of the data. By giving the service your data you’re getting something else in return – utility. In many cases free utility.

You personally, however, have shared (and overriding) ownership over your data. This has been declared as universally true by all the vendors I’ve spoken to.

The question is not one of ownership though, it’s one of control. If you own your data but can’t control it as you choose then ownership is a mute point. Further, the question is not one of if you own it, but rather how much of it you own.

For example, do you own your friends profile data since you have access to it via the social tool you are using? Or have they only granted you access within that social context and under that social contract. These considerations blur the analogy of the purely personal address book.

So where does this leave us. The industry continues to engage in discussion and analyse the meaning of both data portability and the current implementations. As long as this dialogue continues the looming squareoff will remain just that – looming. We are in a honeymoon period in which users are coming to grips with their rights and freedoms and comparing the various networks to determing whether and to what extent they are being violated.

For now, data portability continues to have relevancy and I do not believe our rights have been flushed away. However, I would encourage all players to listen very carefully to the conversation going on.

As I’ve said many times: the Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away – and it can do both with blinding speed. This is especially relevant for Facebook, given the current meme around its intentions started by Umair Haque.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble has a sound analysis of the situation, after an initial misunderstanding on his part. Have a read, the best part is him putting his participation on the Gillmor Gang on mute, having a shower and then coming back on the show. I know it’s been hot in the Bay area the last few days, but this is hilarious and about all the GG seems good for – cooling off.

[Picture courtesy of willgrant]

Appspace: Conde Nast Widens Net To Include MySpace

CondeNet, the online division of content provider Conde Nast Publications, has launched four applications on the MySpace Developer Platform.

Based around their portfolio, which includes Epicurious, Style and Wired, these apps are one of the first major forays by a big content provider onto the MySpace Developer Platform.

Fashion Flash, the Style app, offers an inside scoop on fashion, shopping, beauty and celebrity style.

For Epicurious, Recipe of the Day serves up a different food recipe every day and the Wired Gadget Lab app brings Wired gadget news directly to MySpacers.

The fourth app, flipbook creator, can be used to make and share online scrapbooks or flipbooks. Users can upload photos, video, music and rotate, resize, crop images, draw freestyle, write text and then share the flipbook with their friends.

[Disclosure: metarand’s Randal Leeb-du Toit is an advisor to MySpace’s parent company, Fox Interactive Media]

Appspace: $15M First Round Funding For Social Gaming Network

The creators of social network game apps like Warbook and Jetman, Social Gaming Network has raised a weighty $15M in first round funding. The previous highest first round in this category was $10M, which went to Mark Pincus’s Zynga Networks.

Spun out of Freewebs, SGN has located itself in Silicon Valley and is led by Shervin Pishevar. He’s secured this round from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

This funding comes on the back of some healthy installs and DAU rates across Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and hi5. To date, SGN has attracted over 1 billion page views, 54 million installs and almost 1.1 million daily active users.

Wagner James Au spoke with Shervin:

While Social Gaming Network’s low-graphics games aren’t likely to be confused with a next-gen title, he told me, they’re successful enough. “Small is the new big, right?” Games like Warbook can be made with a low budget, he noted. “Even having a 100,000 daily active users is good revenue.” (At peak usage with a sponsorship deal, he said, Warbook was making $100,000 a month.) “We’re much more about engagement and retentions than virality,” Pishevar told me.

Over the next few months, Shervin Pishevar and his small team will be working on several top secret games that’ll leverage advertising and virtual item sales for revenue. While still relatively low budget, he’s working with developers to give these new titles more polish. The goal, said Pishevar, is to transform Social Gaming Network into “the Pixar of social games.”

[Disclosure: metarand's Randal Leeb-du Toit is an advisor to MySpace’s parent company, Fox Interactive Media and Chairman of app developer, Creative Enclave, which has released the massively multiplayer game, Imperial Galaxy on Facebook]

And Coming In Third, Here Comes Google

TechCrunch has broken the news that Google intends following MySpace’s Data Availability and Facebook’s Connect with an Open Social product called Friend Connect.

Similarly this will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

Perhaps if Google had played nice with Open Social all along they would not be third to market and other players would’ve followed Open Social more closely.

[picture courtesy of squarewithin]

Has Facebook Slipped Into Fast Follower Mode

Somewhere in the last 24 hours it seems that the tables have turned in the social networking arena.

Over the past few months its been Facebook that strutted around with that smug look on its collective “face”, the look that said, “We are the thought leaders”.

Perhaps the glow they were basking in, courtesy of having released their developer platform before any other competitors, blinded them to the shift taking place in user perceptions. Perhaps their board was too busy focusing on trying to land some adult supervision. Either way, after yesterday’s Data Availability announcement by MySpace, Facebook has slid behind MySpace.

Facebook’s announcement of Facebook Connect ensures the company remains in MySpace’s slipstream, but they will need to lift their game if they want to keep up. Perhaps Dave Morin and the Facebook platform team should’ve been spending less time on the slopes over winter.

[Disclosure: I am an advisor to MySpace's parent, Fox Interactive Media, picture courtesy of Treforlutions]

Open Web One Giant Step Closer: MySpace Offers Data Availability With eBay, Photobucket, Twitter, Yahoo

In an auspicious move that has clearly leapfrogged MySpace ahead of its competition as the open web thought leader, the world’s largest social network and, to date, biggest implementation of Open Social, has launched a Data Availability initiative.

Launch partners include eBay, Photobucket, Twitter and Yahoo and as Ben Metcalfe points out, Data Availability is open to everyone.

Think of your MySpace profile augmenting your Twitter account. My take is that this is less about creating MySpace as a destination and more about personal data objects that can enrichen the web experience.

Here’s a bunch of good stuff to read:

* Ben’s take

* MySpace Press Release

* TechCrunch post

[Disclosure: I am an advisor to MySpace's parent company, Fox Interactive Media]

Appspace: MySpace Opens App Gallery, Zynga Opens API

The world’s largest social network, MySpace, has officially opened its Application Gallery.

Every application gets its own profile, from where its developers can directly interface with those users who friend the app.

Truth Box by Suren Markosian tops the app install leaderboard with over 560,000 installs. The app promises to let you find out the “truth about yourself” and discover what others really think about you.

Not far down the chart at No. 4 is Ace Texas Hold’em Poker with 86,000 installs. This app is part of the Zynga Game Network, which is one of the companies to have embraced the MySpace Developer Platform since it became available in February.

Zynga Game Network is named after CEO Mark Pincus’s favorite pooch – Zinga, whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently over at his favorite San Francisco kennel, ahem…office.

The company has launched a Game Center, an open API that will allow developers to connect into a network of game apps. This will effectively create a channel and enable a network effect or viral loop to grow.

What’s the meta take on these two moves? The appspace is a rapidly evolving environment and brand owners and developers are well advised to watch closely as both the MySpace platform matures and Zynga tests out various mechanisms like their Game Center and Social Bar.

[Disclosure: Randal Leeb-du Toit is an advisor to MySpace's parent company, Fox Interactive Media and Chairman of app developer, Creative Enclave]

Peersonalize Your Social Networking Experience: Connect Even While Offline

Computer science students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology want you to be able to connect with your social networking friends, play games and share photos and other files even while you are offline.

There are two parts to their solution. The first is called WiPeer and it enables direct computer to computer, peer to peer WiFi communication without the need for a router at distances of up to several hundred metres (900 ft.). As long as your computer has a network card or wireless card you are sweet. Currently the software only works with Windows XP, but the guys are working hard at bringing out Mac and iPhone versions.

The second thing you’ll need if you are planning on connecting on Facebook is their app, Peersonalizer. They plan on rolling this out on MySpace and other OpenSocial sites in due course. Here’s their app blurb:

Bringing the personal effect to social networks.

WiPeer’s Peersonalizer lets you know when your facebook friends, or potential friends, are nearby you. Once you discover each other, you can chat, share files, play multiplayer games, and best of all, talk to each other in person.