No Social Graph
Ceglowski on social networks: The social graph is neither a graph, nor is it social; http://eicker.at/NoSocialGraph
Tagged: Facebook Open Graph API Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Platform
Facebook F8 amplifies the Facebook Platform: Like, Timeline, News Feed, API; http://eicker.at/FacebookPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “[T]here’s no question – Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced [at F8] were as big as anything the company has ever done – to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now… The changes are all big, but perhaps the most interesting is that Facebook is becoming a real-time communication service. … Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the ‘semantic Web’ without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. … In order to launch these real-time features for its platform, Facebook needed a way for users to access them. That’s why it launched the ticker earlier this week. … The best way to think of Facebook is as infrastructure – the social infrastructure of the Internet. Zuckerberg believes Facebook has far more to gain over the long term by reinforcing itself as a universal platform than by any other means. … Granted, it is potentially problematic for one company to own an essential piece of Net infrastructure.”
SG: “Without a doubt, [the] major keynote at f8 2011 showed Facebook to be making some major changes in the very near future. Starting with a whole new layout and set of functions they’re calling ‘Timeline‘ and moving through app enhancements that have the potential to change the way we use apps on all platforms, we’ve got a guide here for you, the Facebook user, to easily understand what you’ve got in store. This is Facebook as it will exist starting at the tail end of 2011. … There is a new class of application on Facebook now called Open Graph. This class is defined by three principles: Frictionless experiences, Realtime serendipity, and Finding patterns. The goal here is to have subject matter (games, music, video, social apps) spread to friends via friends in as enjoyable a manner as possible.”
AF: “According to Zuck[erberg]… ‘A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections. … But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your Facebook experience.’ … Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience. … Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on, and the activity shows up in the news feed. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections in the social graph. … GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in the news feed versus someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently – work friends versus family, for example. And this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.”
Guardian: “While Facebook is keen for its users to stay on the site for as long as possible, Zuckerberg has consistently emphasised that the site is a ‘distribution platform’ to other media companies. – The social network has moved to strengthen its ties with media partners in recent months as it moves closer to its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook was recently valued at $66.5bn on secondary markets. Its global revenues are expected to reach $4.3bn in 2011, up from $2bn in 2010, according to the research firm eMarketer. … [Zuckerberg] wants Facebook to be the centre of your web experience. That’s the purpose of the redesign of the ‘timeline’ – the river of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a river, he’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos. … The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web.”
Green, TC: “I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced…, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity. … I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.”
RWW: “Facebook significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 6 types of ‘life events.’ You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. … Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed: A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends. Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated ‘smart lists.’ A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar). A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage. Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch. A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your ‘life events’).”
Gerrit Eicker
Yammer Goes Salesforce
WSJ: Yammer and Salesforce start collaborating regarding activity streams; http://eicker.at/YammerSalesforce
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “Today Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com, Salesforce’s development platform, and Yammer’s own API, to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream. … In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. ‘A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,’ he says. … The comparison to Facebook is no accident: Yammer’s technology is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.“
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Gerrit Eicker
RWW: “Yammer combined its APIs and Force.com to grab the activity stream information from within Salesforce, so that these objects can now be a part of the Yammer activity stream. … Now, those astute readers may realize that Salesforce has its own activity stream microblogging thing called Chatter, doesn’t this duplicate the function? Yes it does. But the bigger issue here is that Yammer is integrating things like crazy, before other software tools put their own activity streams inside their apps, just as Salesforce has done. Yammer is adding 200,000 customers a month, according to some press sources, and now stands at three million total customers, with half a million paid ones.”
VB: “Yammer is taking a shotgun approach to gathering data through partnerships instead of building up internal tools. Box.net, another enterprise 2.0 company, fleshes out its cloud storage product by integrating applications from the likes of Salesforce.com and Google to make its software more useful for enterprise companies. Yammer still intends to integrate with other enterprise companies that also have open APIs. …Yammer, which has 3 million verified corporate users. Around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space – along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net – that are taking lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Privacy III.
Daitch: Facebook can not be trusted. Orwellian takeover of a single platform is a dystopian future; http://j.mp/b9EFBm
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Gerrit Eicker
Daitch: “In a landscape of nomadic, transient social-media users, Facebook could be supplanted if they don’t change for the good of the people who use their services. Who knows, some bloggers have already taken a stand by making radical suggestions on how old media can take the mantle back. But that’s not all. The fight for social networking and privacy has picked up momentum within the developer community. Though just a blip the size of the tip of a needle, a start-up called Diaspora, founded by a group of college-aged developers, is thinking ambitiously enough to take Facebook on, using privacy as the centerpiece of their endeavor. Now, if only Mark Zuckerberg could identify with that.“
Gerrit Eicker
XML vs. APIs
Winer: History has shown that being a hotbed does not scale. Facebook needs XML, not APIs; http://j.mp/bQimZU
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: The New Internet?
Facebook: the new Internet? The Open Graph and the meaning of open; http://j.mp/c0mGdr Details: http://j.mp/f8OpenGraph
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Gerrit Eicker
pC: “A question for you. When was the last time you surfed the net? Can you remember when you just clicked around looking to discover new sites or a site to occupy your time? Now ask yourself when was the last time you sat on your couch or laid in bed clicking the remote looking for something to watch on TV. Finally, how long do you regularly spend on Facebook? How much time do you spend checking out your Wall, your friends’ Wall and hopping from profile to profile checking people out? … Everything that the net was 5 or more years ago, Facebook is today. … Facebook is putting out trojan horse after trojan horse and no one seems to care. The only thing FB has not done is create a mobile operating system ala Android/iPhone as a platform for applications. … There is no doubt that this is NOT the direction that Facebook wants to go. They want to remain independent. But just as Apple and Google quickly turned from friend to foes, Facebook will soon be the object that both of those companies see in the rearview mirror. I don’t see either Apple or Google as being suitors to buy Facebook. That isnt their style. On the other hand, its straight out of the Microsoft playbook. If you cant beat them or outlast them, buy them.”
TC: “The fact of the matter is that Facebook is one of the most powerful forces on the web and they’re now using that position to introduce a new platform that will yes, help them. Shocking, really. A company that wants to do something that will benefit itself. But I do believe that Facebook, at least in part, believes this will also make the larger web better too. But that’s not going to be good enough for some, because it’s not fully open. Nevermind that plenty of these fully open solutions always being advocated never make it off the ground for one reason or another. … Of course, then publishers don’t have to use Facebook’s Like button. But they will — I can think of nearly 500 million reasons why. Love it or hate it, that’s the way it is. It’s not good versus evil. It’s not black versus white. It’s a million shades of gray, as always.”
VB: “Concerns are already rising among users around overly sharing of personal information. ComputerWorld’s IT Blogwatch bloggers spotlight several concerjs, including the automatic opt-in to share your information when visiting websites through Facebooks new open graph feature.”
TNW: “There has been a lot of chatter, since Facebook’s F8 announcements, about how the company will be the downfall of Google. Or, in some cases, the chatter is about how it will push Google to do what it does in a different manner. … Face it, you wouldn’t dream of doing investigation for a research project using Facebook search. That is of course, unless that research were more appropriate to what Facebook does. … The question that arises, though (especially given the power behind the social graph API), is how long this situation will remain as it is. Will Google eventually have to step up its game directly to combat Facebook? It’s possible. Not likely, but possible.”
RWW: “Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors. … The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook’s vision is both minimalistic and encompassing – but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web. – Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. … With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will. … So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? … This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook – and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. … Technically speaking, what Facebook has done is elegant and correct. From markup, to plugins, to API, all of it is modern and awesome. The missing bit is that Facebook appears to be the only repository of data in this equation – and that makes the whole offering seriously closed. … One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. … Facebook made a major chess move. It might have checkmated its competitors, or perhaps it might have to lose another piece like it lost Beacon. Whichever is the case, right now there are deep implications for Facebook and its competitors, publishers, users and the Web at large. What Facebook has announced cannot be ignored and can not be undone. Everyone needs to figure out the next steps and understand what to do.“
Gerrit Eicker
OAuth 2.0
The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out: stated goal of IETF is to maintain backwards compatibility; http://j.mp/bjjw4Y
Gerrit Eicker
F8: Facebook to Become the Social Net?
Facebook F8, where the default is social: Open Graph, Social Plugins, Docs, Credits, Insights; http://j.mp/f8OpenGraph
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Gerrit Eicker
NYT: “On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, lifted the curtain on the company’s plan to spread itself across the Web. I previewed much of the company’s plan in a New York Times article on Monday. It includes a number of new features for users and developers that will make it easy for Web sites to provide ‘social experiences.’ And it will allow users to bring some of their interactions with Facebook friends to the sites they visit. … ‘We are making it so all Web sites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone,’ Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post introducing the new features. … In a news conference after the speech, Mr. Zuckerberg said the new features would not change Facebook’s fundamental business model, which is based on revenue from ads on the company’s faceboook.com site. He said the plug-ins would not carry advertisements. But he said that as Facebook features spread across the Web, people’s connection to Facebook would strengthen, making the site, which has more than 400 million users, even more popular.”
TC: “Today at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plan to turn the Web into ‘instantly social experiences.’ – The building blocks to this super-social Web are Facebook’s new Open Graph and Social Plugins, which include new ‘like’ buttons everywhere on sites outside Facebook.com, auto-login capabilities for those sites without clicking on Facebook Connect, and even a Facebook social bar which includes several of these plugins plus Facebook chat (goodbye, Meebo).”
VB: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized a different philosophy for how the Web should be organized today at the f8 conference in San Francisco. – ‘The Web is made of unstructured pages linked together. The open graph puts people at the center of the Web. It puts personal and semantic meaning behind the Web – I like this band. I am attending this event,’ he said. ‘We think what we will show you today is the most transformative thing we’ve done for the Web.’ … The company said it had rearchitected its entire structure around this strategy and was releasing a graph application programming interface. – With the new open graph approach, Facebook is launching a series of social plugins. Zuckerberg showed a demo of a CNN-Facebook integration. When a user logs on, they can see other friends or people who enjoyed the same content. There will also be a plug-in that shows the activity of friends on CNN’s website.”
VB: “These ideas are pieces of what Facebook says is a fundamentally different thesis about how the web should operate. – ‘The web is at a really important turning point right now. Up until recently, the default on the web has been that most things aren’t social and most things don’t use your real identity,’ said chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. ‘We’re building toward a web where the default is social. Every application will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.‘”
RWW: “Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil? – Facebook blew peoples’ minds today at its F8 developer conference but one sentiment that keeps coming up is: this is scary. … This is so much new technology and it’s tied in so closely with one very powerful company that there is big reason to stop and consider the possible implications. There are reasons to be scared. The bargain Facebook offers is very, very compelling – but it’s not a clear win for the web. … This is why Facebook did a 180 degree shift on privacy last December: because it wanted to use that formerly private user data to make the web social. Privacy remains a major concern in the new scenario, but it also got a couple of nods in the use of iFrames on 3rd party sites and the big support for the OAuth password-free log-in system. … At first blush, it’s hard from a user’s perspective to find anything to criticize Facebook for in today’s announcements. Those criticisms will no doubt start to form once people wrap their heads around all the particulars. On principal, though, there’s going to be so much more Facebook around the internet that it feels like a real cause for concern. Centralization is a dangerous thing and Facebook is a young company that’s proven willing to break its contract with users in the past (see Facebook’s Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users).”
TC: “I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet. … In my opinion, Facebook still has a ways to go towards improving its actual site if it’s really going to be the long-term center of the web. (As in, the place you go to rather than Google.com.) But its claws for pulling in outside content are now razor-sharp. It’s going to be very hard for anyone to escape. – Over the next several days and weeks, we’ll undoubtedly hear why that’s a bad thing. Maybe it is. But maybe, if Facebook plays its cards right, the web will be a bit better because it will be more connected. Of course, that’s a lot of power for a still-private company to have. Let’s hope they know what they’re doing, and aren’t evil.“
Gerrit Eicker
Microsoft Docs for Facebook
Microsoft Docs is an early user of the Facebook Open Graph: new Facebook app, attacking Google Docs; http://j.mp/8XAalS
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Gerrit Eicker
MS: “Built on Microsoft Office 2010, the Docs app enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know. – It’s been quite a sprint for the FUSE team to deliver this beta – from concept to its initial implementation in less than four months. The FUSE Labs mission is to explore a range of ‘Future Social Experiences’. In this exploration it’s our belief that we may increase the value of Office ‘docs’ by giving everyone the ability to seamlessly take their friends and connections with them from Facebook to docs.com.”
RWW: “With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn’t working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. … There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs. Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service’s collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft’s products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software.”
TC: “Docs.com can be shared with your Facebook friends, and the documents can be switched back and forth between the Web and the desktop. Microsoft, of course, is also moving Office online, but I have a feeling Docs is going to take off faster just through Facebook. Microsoft partnered with Facebook to build Docs.com to show what could be done with Facebook’s new Open Graph API and Social plugins. For instance, Docs.com will begin using Facebook’s new auto-login feature it announced earlier today so that users won’t even need to click on a Facebook Connect button to get started.”
Gerrit Eicker 10:21 on 11. November 2011 Permalink |
Ceglowski, Pinboard: “The Social Graph is Neither – Last week Forbes even went to the extent of calling the social graph an exploitable resource comprarable to crude oil, with riches to those who figure out how to mine it and refine it. I think this is a fascinating metaphor. If the social graph is crude oil, doesn’t that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground? But right now I would like to take issue with the underlying concept, which I think has two flaws: I. It’s not a graph – This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails. Personally, I think finding an adequate data model for the totality of interpersonal connections is an AI-hard problem. But even if you disagree, it’s clear that a plain old graph is not going to cut it. – II. It’s Not Social – We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life. … My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.”
GigaOM: “If you’ve ever gotten a little creeped out by the way social networks have invaded our lives, then you aren’t alone. There are a lot of people who enjoy using the social web, but struggle with it too. … The real problem with the social graph, he argues, is that it’s based around a series of troubling assumptions – including the idea that we can and should model human relationships, and for profit. As he says, ‘Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that’s the social graph.‘ – This is partly because the social web has really been spun off from the idea of the semantic web, and ways of describing connections between data that require all kinds of sleight-of-hand to work. How do you interpret messy relationships into things computers can understand, or translate meanings that are complex and constantly moving? … But he’s certainly right that mapping this stuff is very difficult, and perhaps impossible. … The real difference, however, is that while sociologists try to come up with ways to define interaction, technologists end up building systems that define the interactions that can happen. That means the processes behind today’s biggest social networks actually place themselves as a layer over human activity, as much as they help that activity exist. … This conflict is, I think, why Facebook is constantly struggling with privacy issues, or why the real names controversy on Google+ exploded. The social graph, to them, is an attempt to codify what people do rather than act as midwife to their ideas.”
Marks: “People choose to model different relationships on different sites and applications, but being able to avoid re-entering them anew each time by importing some or all from another source makes this easier. The Social Graph API may return results that are a little frayed or out of date, but humans can cope with that and smart social sites will let them edit the lists and selectively connect the new account to the web. Having a common data representation doesn’t mean that all data is revealed to all who ask; we have OAuth to reveal different subsets to different apps, if need be. – The real value comes from combining these imperfect, scrappy computerized representations of relationships with the rich, nuanced understandings we have stored away in our cerebella. With the face of your friend, acquaintance or crush next to what they are saying, your brain is instantly engaged and can decide whether they are joking, flirting or just being a grumpy poet again, and choose whether to signal that you have seen it or not.”
ORR: “It’s hardly surprising that the founder of a ‘bookmarking site for introverts’ would have something to say about the ‘social graph.’ But what Pinboard’s Maciej Ceglowski has penned in a blog post titled ‘The Social Graph Is Neither’ is arguably the must-read article of the week. – The social graph is neither a graph, nor is it social, Ceglowski posits. … But if today’s social networks are troublesome, they’re also doomed, Ceglowski contends, much as the CompuServes and the Prodigys of an earlier era were undone. It’s not so much a question of their being out-innovated, but rather they were out-democratized. As the global network spread, the mass marketing has given way to grassroots efforts.“