I’m finding myself falling more and more behind on my blogging. Apologies to all these posts and things I wanted to say.

But I gotta just keep moving forward….

HOLD THE PRESSES!  MySpaces’ Aber Whitcomb claims that the MySpace APIs will

the platform is made up of three APIs — primarily Open Social and extensions we’ve added to make applications standardize inside MySpace, access friends lists and get data that’s available on public profiles if users gave permission to share that data.

!!! Fucking Hell YES! Seems that Dan Gould has been at work and they actually LISTENED to him! Congrats to Chris DeWolfe and anyone smart enough to DO THE RIGHT THING!

Now lets see if the other OpenSocial ‘containers’ match them!

Arrington is reporting that Flux is taking off.  And I bet all those eyeballs ain’t looking at p0rn!  But in all fairness MTVN has MORE than poor Ning’s measly $44M to spend. This is their - like 5th attempt at social networking or social media.  Good luck to all. Just support OpenID, OpenThis and OpenThat - please.

All sorts of opinions on the MicroHoo deal.  Some people are pretty pissed they won’t have anybody to sell companies to - anymore.  I agree that anything is better than nothing.  Yahoo has BLOWN IT as far as execution is concerned - and that’s all that matters.  I think I prefer some money grubbing Investment Bankers to Micrisoft - though.

“The guiding principle here is one that Brad Fitzpatrick and many others have relied on many times: The Principle of Least Surprise.” David Recordon expresses concern at the Google Social Graph APIs - written by his buddy Brad Fitzpatrick.

Marshall Kirkpatrck expresses similar concerns about privacy and the Google Social Graph APIs 

Great post about Microsoft, Yahoo and OpenID by Josh Catone of Read/Write web

I’m speaking at Northern Voice - Feb. 23rd

Why Yahoo should say yes to Microsoft - by Mark Cuban

TypePad Action Streams

Kaliya Hamlin reports (as most of us were holding our breath) on the ID Commons Q4 Report! Its DONE!

You think Larry, Sergey or Eric care about Google’s stock price?  I doubt it.  I pity the poor investor.

NVidia to acquire Ageia

Videos are starting to appear from the exclusive sharng-a-thon that I wasn’t invited to.  Gee maybe I should call Tim O’REilly?  Fuck that - Tim should call me@!!!&%$%

Denise Howell reports that docstoc.com - has a whole lot of legal docs that are in Creative Commons license. Thanks Denise!

EconSM (Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer’s conference) is partnering with Ed Sussman and Fast Company. They have a social network - right? 

DataProperty rights, not portability (I actually disagree with this guy - but…….)

Relevance Engines and the friendly shopkeeper

Mom’s merging 

I agree with CMDR Taco - a whole lot of stupid kids’ opinions means nothing to me.

KickApps 3.0, SeenThis?, HeyNielson, xcerion, Sprout, Votigo, Iterasi, Clickability, Nexopia, Lymabean,

How Facebook could make Billions - by Hooman Radfar

Well you can just imagine what Google has to say about Microsoft ‘hostile’ takeover of Yahoo.

This is evidence that such a ‘consolidation’ would rattle Google at its core and create a formidable competitor - ’cause neither Microsoft or Yahoo by itself can do that alone.

I’d argue if the Microsoft offer was a takeover attempt. Microsoft knows they need to have Yahoo’s cooperation and buy-in for the deal to have any merit. If a bunch of folks leave Yahoo or if the old guard is jettisoned, then that’s a good thing anyway.

Google’s argument about a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would

exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

But you have to remember that much of what is Google today, is made up of ex-Microsofters - who were the ones’ who implemented those monopolistic actions. So which pot is calling the kettle black?

You gotta think that this deal has freaked out Google by posting these sort of statements sure as hell is leaving a paper trail to adhere to - for future Google actions.

Like my friend Steve Gillmor says: “Why should we trust Google, after what they did with Google Reader ‘raiding’ GMail contacts and using those contacts to expose recent feeds being read in Reader?”

I agree with Steve.

We think that Google needs to adhere to a higher ideal - before they can start calling anyone “illegal”.

Kelli Fox is a dear friend and Astrologer extraordinare. She and her husband - David Fox - founded Astrology.com and sold it to iVillage back in the day. Now they have a state-of-the-art Astrology site - with APIs and a web service for developers who wish to offer astrological matchings to their customers.

Their site KT, the Astrologer is where their own customer facing offering is housed.

But Kelli also had an active Facebook account - which was recently suspended cause - guess why? She wasn’t an individual, she was an entity and company.

So that’s what Facebook Pages are for - correct?

So Kelli goes to Facebook and says “OK - I’d like a Facebook page and can you move all those friends I had asemebled over to my new page?”

Well dear readers - you can imagine the answer they got back from Facebook.

Uh uh - nope. No way. Here’s what they said:

“Unfortunately we do not currently have the ability to move the individuals that are friends with your organization’s profile over to be fans of your new Facebook Page.”

Kelli does have a Facebook ‘Group’ now - but that’s it. She’s having to start from scratch.

So here I am dear readers, hoping that some Facebook guy can step in and do the right thing.

Please.

Kelli and David are good folks and they deserve the best that Fawbook can offer. I’m sure they’d pay for the cost in moving their old account info into their new Facebook Page. Think of it as a new revenue channel!

And afterall - isn’t this what Facebook pages area ll about? To represent entities - not individuals?

When I first met Dan Brickley and the various folks from the FOAF community - my life was immediately changed.  The notion of a format that held (what we now call) a social graph - was exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t care about triples, or all the other stuff FOAF was attempting to solve, but we DID need a way fo storing, exchanging and inter-mixing one’s friends - and FOAF was it.

I had just met Jonathan Abrams at a party (danah boyd was there too) and he was bragging about how he’d “exploit’ and “monetize” all the people he had captured inside of Friendster.

First I tried to convince him how wrong he was, but eventually when I realized he was a true asshole - I just told him “dude - I’m gonna dedicate myself to your demise” - and sure enough the Fakesters scandal happened soon after.  Event though Friendster’s rise and VC funding was ahead of it, those of uw who understood how onerous the Fakesters expulsions fortold - knew that Friendster was toast.

I first met Matt Mullenweg when I called him up to evangelise FOAF to him.  But instead - all he wanted to talk about was XFN.  It was the first time I had heard about microformats - and the doubles versus triples battles that we about to erupt.  I tried to stay out of that debate - and XFN continued to grow as did other forms of microformats.

Now we have an important milestone in the evolution of this world.

Brad Fitzpatrick and Google have announced that they’re spidering the web for any XFN and FOAF tags and files and making them all available via an API they call the Social Graph API.

No - it’s not Brad’s fully visionized Open Social Graph - but it’s pretty coolio on it’s own.  These APIs give social media and social networking apps and services the ability to immediately give a new member their list of friends they’ve alreadfy declared.

Now of course - that user needs to have declared something, somewhere via FOAF or XFN - but it’s a first step.  Tribe.net has had all it’s members profile and list of friends in FOAF form - since 2005.  Lots of applications use XFN.  That’s what open standards are all about.

So now we’re all looking to see what the Social Graph APIs have to do with OpenSocial APIs (if any) and what happens NEXT in the evolution of this world.

I for one - am excited as hell!

And thanks to Brad!  He’s got a great post called “URLs are people - too!” and a great introductory geek video to the APIs.

Isn’t this fun?

Or perhaps Google is down because they admitted that social networking sites don’t payoff in ad revenues as well a sthey’d “hoped”.

Oh Gee - yah gotta feel sorry for Google.  Right?

And how will the Borg dissemniate Yahoo?

I just hope they trim the fat and only keep people who do things.  But I bet Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie will look good in Purple.

I also hope they put Dare Obasanjo in charge of Open. 

BTW I just love the line “Join us or DIE!” 

And it’s good to hear that Facebook will LOSE $150M next year.  Just to keep things sane,

I did this Perspectives piece for CNet.

Enjoy

Perspective: When Google announced OpenSocial a few months ago, it was welcomed as an effort to standardize the world around the notion of open social networking. But the announcement also was viewed as an attack on Facebook’s closed platform and data silo approach–one which limited users’ ability to export their data.

As MySpace.com, Friendster, Bebo, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Plaxo, and many others lined up to support OpenSocial, we all became almost giddy in our excitement. The anticipation was for a world where users could move their data anywhere they wished and vendors allowed this all to happen.

But oops, it only took one week for backroom politics to emerge.

Turns out that Google’s altruistic motives were supplemented by a desire to occlude Facebook’s ad announcements. OpenSocial got announced too soon, and many of the technical details and logistics (issues like security) had not been worked out. And worst of all, many–if not all–of the OpenSocial participants did not intend to open up their networks at all. They simply wished to bring in as many OpenSocial “gadgets” as possible in an attempt to counterstrike Facebook’s successful platform of applications.

For all its promises, OpenSocial really only appears to be “OpenGadgets.”

In December, I moderated a panel at LeWeb3 in Paris called “Bringing social to software.” Google’s Patrick Chanezon, who participated in the panel, volunteered that Google would help to provide a “testing lab” for OpenSocial gadget interoperability testing. He also acknowledged it would take until February 2008 for the development work on OpenSocial’s APIs to freeze.

But another of Patrick’s comments previewed what the battlefield in the upcoming war over open social networking might look like. He suggested it will be up to each social-network software vendor to decide whether to allow access and control over their members’ profile data. It didn’t take too long for us to get an idea of MySpace’s intentions.

The very next day, the guy representing MySpace at the conference refused to say whether his company would provide access to any member’s profile data. What this tells me is the company won’t. Despite its stated support for OpenSocial, it’s clear that MySpace sees OpenSocial as simply an OpenGadgets standard. What’s more, it will continue to prevent any MySpace member from exporting profile data or connecting to any other social network.

Now the question is how Bebo, Friendster, and Hi5 will approach this touchy subject. LinkedIn has shown a willingness to let users export their social graphs–though they don’t necessarily automatically connect to any other service. Plaxo has been leading the way in this area, but is this only a bid to dress up the company in preparation for a future sale?

As cynical or optimistic as you want to be, politics has to be considered in light of efforts by a group called DataPortability.org, as well as those carried out by some hackers, like Chris Messina’s Diso. Then there’s the private FooCamp, which takes place Super Bowl weekend up in O’Reilly-land (Sebastapol, Calif.) by invitation only. How ironic that a conference on open social networking would be held behind closed doors, preventing some (including your humble author) from attending.

The idea is that independent groups of people can exert influence on the big platforms to do the right thing. Much noise was made recently when Facebook, Google, and others joined the DataPortability effort. Still, it’s just not clear what will become of any mail list consisting of hyperbole and wiki postings.

Why all this sudden interest and concern over open social networking? Has its day come? Is it time that users will be able to freely move their data between social networks? We all hope that MySpace, Bebo, and others will open up and go beyond the original scope of OpenSocial to lay the groundwork for a truly open world of social networking.

But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I included Dave McClure in my post on Facebook’s close platform - and he commented back, asking me to do my research.

So I did.

I looked at the agendas of the two conferences where Dave either has founded and/or Chairs and is intimately involved in. What I was looking for was evidence of Dave ‘helping us out’- participating in the process of educating and moving the world forward towards open social networking and open standards.

Web 2.0 Expo

- Has the obligatory session by David Recordon - one of the creators of OpenID. That’s great and important. David is a concise and articulate speaker.

- That’s it. No session on OpenSocial (Oh that’s right - Google isn’t a sponsor.) Nothing on User’s rights, new EULAs, privacy concerns, interoperability or DataPortability - nothing.

- This is a conference that features - over 50 sessions. I guess letting David Recordon give his OpenID rap is enough. Huh?

- Of course they’ll have a Web2Open kind of a diversionary tactic - so they can claim that the ‘Citizens’ are involved - but I don’t buy that bullshit.

- This is a conference entirely designed to exploit and monetize the trademark that O’Reilly has over the term ‘Web 2.0′. Lots of exhibitors, 30,000 sq ft of trade show space.

- And Dave McClure is listed as one of a conference Co-Chairs.

Graphing Social Patterns

Then there’s the conference which Dave founded - Graphing Social Patterns (great name BTW!) He’s listed as the conference chair - and after close examination Ive found the ONLY panel I’d bother to go see - featuring Dan Farber - who is one of the only journalists in our industry with any integrity and experience.

Dan will hopefully blow away the smoke surrounding the DataPortability effort and find some meat to talk about. That won’t be hard, as OpenSocial ‘containers’ will be given plenty of chance to turn on their FUD machiens and ignore all the important issues.

I’m hoping Dan will bring some light to a dark scenario - where money and exploitation ring more important then user’s rights and open social networking. Oh yah, in typical fashion - the only good panel is left til the end of the day, when everyone has either gone home or is exhausted. That happens all the time.

And as far as Patrick Chanezon’s session on OpenSocial - from earlier OpenSocial sessions I’ve been to or heard about Google ignores the fact that there is no real commitment from any vendor to allow access to anything - except to perpetuate more closed ‘widget platforms’. Its amazing to me that something called ‘Open’ can be so closed. And nobody bitches about it. Certainly NOT Dave McClure!

Steve Gillmor is asking Google to give us a reason why they’re wholesale exploiting GMail contacts - before he’d ever believe them about OpenSocial and I wanna know the specific policies regarding access to social graphs from OpenSocial containers.

But do you think Google will answer these questions?

Why don’t they just call it OpenGadget - or even better ‘ClosedGadget’ - cause where’s the open? Where are the commitments from ‘containers’ to allow controlled access to these social graphs?

What I’m talking about here are the policies of MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster. They have 100,000,000s of users locked up in their platforms - and what are their policies (vis a vis support for OpenSocial) in regards to letting their users export their profiles and social graphs? Yes or No?

There are plenty of opportunities to have engaging discussions at a conference such as ‘Graphing Social Patterns’ - but I don’t see any interest or desire on the side of Dave McClure to cause that to happen. He seems interested in teh topics of monetizing people, getting funded and selling out. And one thing I can tell you - I won’t be there to call him on this bullshit.

I’m also particularly interested in the EFF Awards - cause I don’t see them talking about data portability, interoperability, privacy rights, user’s rights to their data, etc. I often wondered where the EFF is in all this?

So I have little faith that anything substantive will get covered at any of these sessions at these conferences (and the same at SXSW for that matter.) It seems that fiefdoms, power games and exclusionary politics are the buzzword du jour in this space. And why not? There’s MONEY to be made - right?

Lets all go off, start a movement, trademark the term and then you can have a conference of your OWN! Youc na convince analysts to track you, VCs to start funds and maybe one day - you can retire and become a VC yourself (liek Dave McClure.) Oh Goodey.

So in repsonse to Dave asking me to do some research - I have Dave - and I’m still convinced you aren’t necessarily helping us in our fight, that you’re profiting and exploiting the situation and…..

Well that’s it - I guess.

Business as usual.

In this podcast with Steve Gillmor I explain some promotions we’re working on in inter-connecting social networks together - that will enable folks to move between social networks based upon incentives, prizes, real-world objects, etc. - when importing their friends into these new networks.

The trick is how to provide benefits to end-users - at the same time - as providing benefits to Vendors.

Once we pull off this sort of promotion - between our own customers - then hopefully we’ll be able to do it with other vertical networks or meta-networks such as Ning or Flux. And others will follow and then we’ll have definitive proof that open social networking can benefit ALL!

Because as we all know - the future is about 10,000s of niche, vertical, localized networks - rather than a world of giant centralized data lock-in silos. Right?

Enjoy the show!

Part 1 of the News Gang - Jan. 25th, 2008

Part 2

BTW In this show - Steve asks me to approach Patrick Chanezon of Google and get an explanation from Google on why we should support or agree with OpenSocial - as long as Google is exploiting the GMail contacts. Patrick - please respond.

Its great to see Mark Zuckerberg getting cozy with Robert Scoble - acting all human and such, but that doesn’t mean that their latest move - in offering up client side javascript libraries to enable developers to access their closed platform - from within external applications or services - is anything more than just an extension of the same game of lock-in.

Now instead of having to come to Facebook to interact with one’s Facebook social graph, apps or other Facebook services - developers will be able to have their users (or call them customers) stay outside of Facebook - yet access all that stuff FROM Facebook. Its a coolio move and one that continues to move the world of open, distributed computing - forward.

But it still assumes that the web is Facebook.

And it’s not.

Facebook is just ONE platform - in a world of platforms.

Folks like Henry Blodgett - an investment banker - think this is a brilliant move. To quote Henry:

For obvious reasons, Facebook wants to resist going completely “open” and allowing members to export their information and relationships at will, as Facebook might lose its control over its core asset (the billions of relationships among its millions of members, a.k.a., the social graph). This move seems another smart step toward a hybrid strategy: Allow app makers (and Facebook) to extend social-graph functionality to the web, gather more app users, and recruit more members–but retain full control over the social graph itself.

But Yo Hank! In case you haven’t been paying attention - there really ARE other platforms out there and Facebook’s continued insistence that it is the ONLY platform - kind of, well let me say this politely Hank “it’s great for capitalists to exploit users and customers and make money for themselves - but Hank I believe Facebook has already signed up their investment bankers for their IPO.”

Sorry there’s no money it it for YOU Hank - until they’re public - and then you can run up their stock, just like Google.

So Hank- there’s no reason for you to suck up to Zuckerberg et al - you’re NOT gonna get the business. The absurd valuatoon has been set and now all they have to do is generate REVENUES to justify it. You know - we’re NOT letting companies go public WITHOUT revenues - in this bubble.

So anyone else who supports Facebook or justifies this latest move clearly as something to prove in alligning themelves with Facebook - right? Everyone understands that?

We know why Dave McClure alligns himself with Facebook - right? He puts on conferences and invests in companies that benefit from Facebook. He’s one of those O’Reilly confidants that LOVE to play exclusive games and play kingmaker.

And we know why Bebo supports Facebook’s APIs - right? Cause they’re ALSO supporting OpenSocial - and will serve as aplatform to connect the two worlds together.

And LORD KNOWS we know why Scoble supports Facebook - he’s used Facebook brilliantly to extend his brand and now EVERYONE will want to watch his exclusive video interviews of ‘the shy one’.

But why would your or I support Facebook?

They actually think they’re the web - and sorry - they’re just PART of the web. So beware of platforms bearing gifts.

HypeMeters, comments and good wishes all agree that DataPortability.org needs some meat. Now where was that nicely marbled rib-eye when we need it?

Poor Mike Arrington. Didn’t get a ride on the Google plane back from Davos. Waaaaah!

I’m really getting into TheFunded - more and more everyday. The VCs need somebody to call them on their bullshit and comparing term sheets is one way to do it. The fact that we’re starting to look for money makes this even more important to us. Do we even talk to VCs? Which ones? Just rich folks? Private equity firms? Hmmmm??? The VCs I thought I respected and I was willing to deal with have each given me more reason to believe that they think they’re ‘above us all’ and are smarter than us. Too bad.

Robert Scoble got some quality time with Mark Zuckerberg. I hope he convinced him to build in “Opt-in” into relationships which will give users control over who can export their data. That’s that’s granularity we need.

Of course Robert took the money - who else was gonna pay for it? Seagate? No wait! They WERE paying for it!

I’m now a Contra Costa County blogger. Coolio.

Apple adverse to blogging and social media apps - NO! Say it ain’t true!

United State of Pop

SpiralFrog rocking

Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL) on being bought by Sun

B-17G Flying Fortress flights - out of OshKosh, WI

User generated Telecom, Media and Technology predictions

How to successfully launch a social network - this is actually what we’re paid to do. Allot. But most don’t listen. Oh well. At least their checks don’t bounce.