So I seemed to find a free evening and somehow ended up thinking about all the hype last year around social networks, the rather amazing valuations around Facebook and the headline grabbing by Google saying they were getting into the fray with Open Social since which not a lot seems to have happened in the category. In fact, the only news I heard was that the new year brought an end to the explosive growth with the category being stagnant.
This stagnation ties with the anecdotal experience of various friends who all tell me that they are now bored of Facebook, while still not quite being able to stop logging on to check if anyone has done anything interesting. And into this messy situation comes Open Social. So, with an evening free I set out to find out if this really could be a category saver. And what did I find? Well, the jury is definitely out.
Here’s the problem: we all know that maintaining multiple online personas in different social networking sites is a pain. Personally I have Linked In, Facebooked up and WordPressed my words (plus I have my own website, but not sure if that counts any more!). And getting the information / updates to the right set of people at the right time takes far too long. So, for another social networking entrant there is simply no point being yet another place where I have to keep my data up to date. However, Google at this stage don’t seem to have the answer. They seem to believe that the problem is that application writers who develop apps for social network platforms don’t like spending their time building on different API’s on each site. And they are right. So, Open Social aims to create a common set of API’s that any social networking site can sign up to and then applications written in that framework will work on the site.
Great.
Really.
However, it doesn’t actually help me, the end user. Or does it?
I came across a great little app earlier in the week call OutSync. It basically matches up my contacts in outlook with my Facebook friends and where there is a match downloads their Facebook photo to their contact data. Then, when I sync my mobile with outlook all of a sudden every time a friend phones I now get their picture. This functionality has been in phones for ages but I have never had the time to actually assign photo’s to my friends numbers. This app has done it for me and I love it. They say in the next release it will be able to sync birthday reminders into outlooks calendars.
Now, if as a result of Open Social being widely accepted we end up with applications that keep everything in sync for me, making sure that my photo’s in Facebook match the ones in my Flickr account, my WordPress entries can be found on my Linked In profile, etc, then I think we could see real category growth once more, although undoubtedly there would be significant fragmentation. However, before we all get excited about apps that mean when a friend changes their email address all they need to do is change it on an Open Social site and your contact data on your phone is updated, there is one very big issue to resolve: privacy.
For all this data to be shared in a way that prevents identity theft and users to remain in control while not making the preferences section of any site unbearably complicated is going to be a tough challenge. Just go ask the federated identity crowd who have been grappling with this issue for much of this decade without yet achieving a system everyone signs up to. Although Google might have the answer there as well, if a Google account becomes the foundation for Open Social’s intersite authentication…
Tags: social networks
