For Users: Flexible Queries

One of the most interesting aspects of this library is that it gives users a lot of flexibility when they structure their queries. Ident Engine will happily accept full URLs like http://www.twitter.com/rww or just simply 'twitter.com rww' or the Webfinger email structure ('rww@twitter.com').

Not a Developer? Try these Demos

While Ident Engine is mainly aimed at developers, the team has made a number of cool demos available on its server. The Combined Profile Demo, for example, looks at a user's profiles on multiple services and then builds an aggregate profile for the user, based on commonalities it finds in these profiles. The Lifestream demo goes a step further and discovers a user's profiles on a variety of services and pulls in the latest updates. The project's homepage also features a number of additional demos.

Glenn Jones also recently released a Firefox plugin, Identify (our review), which builds on the same premises and allows users to quickly bring up the aggregate profile of any user while looking at one of their regular social network profiles.

All iGoogle users in the U.S. will get access to these gadgets over the course of this week and Google plans to expand the reach of these social gadgets beyond the U.S. and Australia in the near future.

iGoogle as Google's Social Hub?

On the surface, this doesn't seem like a major announcement. However, while Google is slowly building out its repertoire of services that leverage the OpenSocial platform, the company never really tied all of these services together. With this announcement, though, it looks like iGoogle could become the central hub for social activities on Google's ecosystem. After all, iGoogle already knows who your friends are because it can tap into your Google Contacts, where you can manage your friends by adding them to the "Friends" group.

Keeping Up With Your Friends

iGoogle currently offers two interesting ways to keep up with your friends' activity: a timeline and an 'updates' feed. The timeline even allows users to post Facebook-like status updates. The good thing about the update stream is that users can see their friends' activity on iGoogle, even if they don't have a specific gadget installed themselves.

Social Gadgets

The current crop of gadgets is interesting in its own right. The ToDo gadget, for example, allows you to share a list of chores with your family members. Electronic Arts developed a nice version of Scrabble for iGoogle and the NPR gadget allows you to share news stories with your friends.

Another outstanding gadget is the YouTube gadget, which allows you to easily share interesting video clips with your friends. The problem here, though, is that the gadget doesn't directly tie in to your activity on YouTube itself. When you share something on the actual YouTube website, it doesn't automatically appear in your iGoogle gadget. This seems like a missed opportunity and exemplifies the problems Google still faces as it tries to centralize its users' social activities across the large variety of services it offers.

The fact that there is no social Google Reader gadget for iGoogle so far also feels like a missed opportunity. While the Google Reader team has been adding more social features to its product, a stronger integration with iGoogle would really take this to the next level. We can only hope that an enterprising gadget developer will soon create this link between iGoogle and Google Reader.

Lots of Potential

Overall, we get the feeling that these social gadgets have a lot of potential, but it will take some work from third-party developers to really make the most out of this opportunity. The 18 social gadgets Google released today definitely make iGoogle a more attractive start page and it will be interesting to see what gadgets developers will come up with. Google itself, however, still has to work on creating a more integrated experience.

A directory of OpenSocial Apps launched today and the reality is even further from that goal than we expected. Out of 12,456 apps listed, only 83 are running on two or more "containers." That's 0.7% or one out of every 1500. Update: See this reply below from Google's Kevin Marks. Marks says that cross-network presence was counted manually and is actually larger than it appears in the directory.

OpenSocial was intended to help everyone else keep up with the huge success of the Facebook platform. If there's one clear market leader, everyone else has a common interest in creating a standard that will help scale the market opportunity on their platforms vs. what Facebook can offer. It hasn't worked out that way, though.

Outside observers hoped that OpenSocial would allow for user data to be transmitted from one site to another. People thought this was the coming of Data Portability, though OpenSocial advocates quickly said that wasn't the intent. It was just for apps to port, not user data. There is a lot of innovation going on in OpenSocial - it's a shame the platform isn't better appreciated.

Below: I discuss OpenSocial in March of last year on G4TV, forced to break the host's heart about data portability!

Why hasn't cross-network development happened though? There are a few theories. The most common is that though there is a common bed of code across all the different social network containers, each of them is also tweaked just enough that it's not that easy to "write once." When that became apparent, OpenSocial advocates started saying that the standard still made it a lot easier to develop for multiple networks. So if not "write once, deploy everywhere" then perhaps it was "write once and then take a lot less time to write for elsewhere than you'd have to otherwise."

Clearly developers haven't taken advantage of that opportunity.

Google's Kevin Marks, one of the leading public faces for OpenSocial, told us today that there are serious cultural differences between the networks and that this could help explain why there hasn't been more cross pollination. One look through the directory makes it clear though that while the countless "hot bikini girl" apps may not translate from MySpace to LinkedIn well, all the other networks have their own isolated versions of many of the same insipid apps.

The most viable explanation could be that Facebook is in fact the only game in town for the most sophisticated developers. That's a real shame, because it's never good for innovation for there to be only one game in town.

Details on how Sprout's foray into social media campaigns will work on a technical level are not outlined in the provided documentation. But, if it is telling us that a marketer or advertiser can use their product and deploy it cross-platform without any coding skills, it could potentially add up to a big cost savings overall and may make the difference between Sprout and one of its competitors. Plus, one of those platforms is Facebook, which means instant viral exposure to millions of active user accounts.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

The Future of MySpace is Mobile

MySpace, according to its own data, currently has about 20 million worldwide mobile users, and it offers mobile applications for all the major smart phone platforms, including the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows Mobile.

We know that MySpace, which has recently been overtaken by Facebook as the leading social networking site in the U.S., considers mobile social networking applications to be the next battleground, and this is definitely one of the reasons why the company is trying to get a foothold on all the major mobile platforms now. Whether this will be enough to hold back Facebook's current march towards dominating the social networking space remains to be seen, however.

What's interesting about these numbers is that the single largest number of registered users isn't coming from MySpace, hi5 or even Orkut. The largest user base appears to be from 51.com, which as we've reported before is one of China's largest social networks with 130M registered users.

Here are the other stats that Google mentioned:

• 315M+ app installs
• 85M+ daily canvas page views
• 7,500+ applications
• 20+ live containers

2,100 of the 7,500 apps are attributed to hi5.

As we noted in our previous post, for the first year OpenSocial has seen tremendous uptake in the online community. The list of organizations developing apps includes AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft.

Perhaps with MySpace covering the key U.S. base and the Chinese social networks coming on board OpenSocial, Facebook will find itself on the outer. Google looks to be well on its way to defining the "new open stack" and populating it with large social networks - so we have to wonder how long Facebook can hold out, even despite its recent moves to expand Facebook Connect. Check out the full OpenSocial slides here.

Amit Agarwal has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new YouTube video geared towards users and now the support site for Friend Connect is available as well.

Google Profiles Meets MyBlogLog

Lately, Google has started to put a lot more emphasis on its own user profiles, and Friend Connect makes good use of them. Once you join a Friend Connect enabled site, other users will be able to see information from your profile, though you can set your privacy settings to disallow others from seeing your profile pages as well. In many ways, this is quite similar to MyBlogLog.

It's Social, But is it Open?

When Friend Connect was first announced, we were concerned about the direction Google was taking with this implementation of the OpenSocial standards. Also, as we noted in our earlier posts, the Friend Connect apps are displayed in an iframe, which is basically a separate web page inside another web page. Because of this, these apps are black boxes that live on your site, but don't allow the site owners to really leverage the data from these apps on their own sites.

It is interesting to note that the latest Google video about Friend Connect still prominently features Facebook as a supported service, even though Facebook has decided to eschew OpenSocial in favor of its own platform. The help pages for Friend Connect don't feature a list of supported services yet.

Benefits

There are, however, also some clear benefits to using Friend Connect. Through this service, a site owner might be able to create more user loyalty and enthusiastic readers can evangelize your site by publishing their activity on it to their own social network. Visitors will also be able to invite their friends on social networks to join your site.

In an early press release about Friend Connect, Google stated that this initiative was about helping the 'long tail' of sites to become more social. While we might worry about  some of the details of Google's implementation, this by itself is a worthy cause, and it will be interesting to see how site owners will implement Friend Connect once it becomes publically available.

To commemorate the first year, OpenSocial fans recently gathered at MySpace for a celebration and an update on the progress over the past 12 months. The verdict? The concept of OpenSocial has traction - and hundreds of millions of users currently benefiting from it.

A Good Start

At the time of launch, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick was cautiously optimistic about the potential for the new offering, but ultimately skeptical about the proprietary nature of the introduction, stating:

"Perhaps the culture of control and mega-corporate blessing is the only thing that the big players participating could comprehend. In that case, it's probable that OpenSocial will likely be more closed and more anti-social than many of us would like."

But that corporate blessing - while ripe for cynicism - has had some positive impact, as well.

For the development community, Google's initiative to embrace the concept of the open Web marked a turning point for distributed social media technologies, like OAuth. What once was the bailiwick of a small cadre of loosely assembled developers suddenly became technology that was more accessible to a wide variety of developers. And that availability brought the concept of "opening the social Web" to a more mainstream - albeit still leading-edge - audience.

For the first year, OpenSocial has seen tremendous uptake in the online community. The list of organizations developing apps reads like a who's who of social sites: AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!... even Friendster.

With the heft of those sites, OpenSocial is currently projecting a total reach of more than 600 million users, worldwide. That includes more than 300 million apps. But it's not always obvious as to what's built on OpenSocial and what's not. It's somewhat hidden as underlying technology - and that may be working in its favor by allowing developers to deliver social functionality as if it were their own.

Not bad for the first year.

Gorillas in the Mist

But for all the positive uptake of OpenSocial, there are two very obvious names - application development gorillas in their own right - currently missing from that list of early adopters. Facebook is still a question. As is Microsoft. Obviously, those two companies have both the open Web and a relationship of their own with which to deal. In any case, both Facebook and Microsoft are purported to be involved in the OpenSocial discussion, but it's still not clear where they will land as time goes on.

Whatever happens in this dance, it's hard to fathom that the open Web will truly reach its potential without the active participation of Facebook and Microsoft. And that - ironically - makes the pursuit of "openness" very strategic and very proprietary for all of the companies involved.

But what's the Web without a little drama?

What's Next?

Last month, LinkedIn launched a series of partner-built applications that leveraged OpenSocial. This release is a perfect example of the types of collaboration that the APIs are designed to facilitate, and we're only likely to see more in the coming months.

In terms of organization, the OpenSocial Foundation, the group designed to help manage the development community around these APIs, has recently solidified its leadership for the coming year. No doubt, we will begin to see more from the Foundation as these Directors begin working together.

But the real question for the next year is: will it be more of the same or will other players continue to adopt OpenSocial? Will we get a step closer to the "anything, anyone, anywhere" goal or will it be another year of destination sites leveraging OpenSocial to extend existing functionality?

It's hard to say. OpenSocial has momentum and some demonstrable results - not to mention a little drama to keep things interesting. That bodes well for the open Web - and for users. We'll just have to wait and see how we will benefit from OpenSocial in the coming year - and remain hopeful that the "open" continues to get more open.

The votes have been tallied and the results are in. OpenSocial Foundation members have selected Jay Parikh of Ning and Joseph Smarr of Plaxo as their community representatives.

Sixty-eight percent of the OpenSocial Foundation membership voted in the election. Parikh and Smarr were selected by members from 13 nominees. Each will serve a one-year term on the OpenSocial Foundation Board.

Thirteen candidates have been nominated to fill two "Community Director" Board seats. Among the nominees are several familiar names including Chris Messina, Krishna Sankar, and Joseph Smarr. (For more information on each of these candidates and the other 10 nominees, visit the OpenSocial Foundation.)

Only members of the OpenSocial Foundation are permitted to vote. If you're not currently a member of the Foundation, you may apply for membership. In order to participate in the election, however, your application for membership must be received by 11:59 PM PDT, October 29. The polls for the election close at 11:59 PM PDT on November 3.

The OpenSocial Foundation was created earlier this year through a partnership among Google, News Corp., and Yahoo! with the express purpose of "creating the structure necessary to facilitate open technical development, developing governance and review procedures for maintaining an open source project, protecting and enforcing IP, trademark, and copyrights."

The OpenSocial Foundation has a great deal of potential to influence "the Web that is to be." And the two Community Directors, once elected, will likely have a significant impact on the future direction of this still formative organization. It will be interesting to see who the members of the Foundation choose to guide this development.

While some of the press pack that was delivered to us along with CokeTag is a little over the top (i.e., "The Coca-Cola Company aligns itself with delivering the promise of a cross-platform Web experience, consistent with Coke's brand value of bringing people together for social connections across cultures."), launching a social media application is a smart move. If there's one thing that Coca-Cola understands, it's branding -- they didn't become Millward Brown's #4 brand in the world by accident. And CokeTag is all a about branding.

Though the branding on CokeTag is subtle -- "We made a distinct decision not to overly brand this application," according to Michael Donnelly, Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing, at Coca-Cola -- this is an exercise in smart branding. Coca-Cola has created something that is useful, simple, and easily spread. Even though it has nothing to do with Coke's core beverage business, all roads lead back to the brand.

CokeTag currently only works on Facebook, but an OpenSocial version is planned, to be followed by standalone versions for bloggers and other web publishers. The beauty of building a social networking application for branding purposes is that if it fails to catch on, you're very likely only out a minimal sum. There is nothing about CokeTag that suggests that it cost very much to create (in fact, it was built on top of an already existing Flash advertising format from Linkstorms). Coke is also smart to create an widget that users should actually find useful, and not something that feels like advertising.

With the top social networks having 183 million users, 70% of them being 15-34 year olds, Bizzlr realized there was a real need to provide tools to businesses that wouldn't otherwise have the ability to reach their customers on these platforms.

To aid these businesses in expanding their reach, Bizzlr has just launched their turnkey solution, which comes  in the form of an social network application and is currently available on Facebook, MySpace, and Hi5. Support for Bebo, LinkedIn, and Ning is said to be coming soon. The application supports both the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API, so it will work on most of the major social networks.

With Bizzlr, companies, even small ones that don't have their own web site, can connect with their customers quickly and easily on the social networks where their customers spend their time. The fee for doing so is an affordable $19.95/month (or $199/year), so it's not out of the reach of any mom-and-pop shop.

How It Works

Bizzlr uses proprietary algorithms to target customers based on their tastes and preferences. These customers can then easily share the business with their friends, via a modern-day word-of-mouth referral.

For the company using Bizzlr, the app can be a promotional tool used post specials and coupons for their customers to enjoy, as well as a way to maintain a profile page listing their information, phone number, and other news about their company.

Bizzlr in Action

For customers, there's no need to worry about unwanted spam or tracking from these Bizzlr or the companies using it - you have the choice to install the Bizzlr app or not, just like you do with anything else on a social network.

The New Word-of-Mouth

At the moment, Bizzlr focuses on the food and restaurant industry, but will soon be expanding into healthcare, childcare, nightlife, and more.

When trying the tool today, I actually found that it could be pretty useful. I added it on Facebook and entered in my city in the Location box. I could then search for restaurants and add them to "My Restaurants." When adding a new restaurant, you're prompted to tag it, but suggested tags are displayed and pre-checked for you. (Nice!)

On the next screen that appears, you can then see the restaurant's current popularity (both on Bizzlr and with your friends), see it on the map, read news & find coupons (if available), follow the restaurant's activity on Bizzlr, rate the restaurant, add your own comments, and discover similar restaurants. As a final, and optional, step, you can choose to tell a friend about the restaurant. Heck, this is a whole Web 2.0 app built within a social network!

Of course, like so many things, the value in Bizzlr will be directly related to how many people start using it, but if the company can break through that barrier and get enough customers and businesses on board, this could certainly take off.

You were sick of throwing sheep at each other on Facebook anyway, weren't you?

It's possible for a malicious Facebook application, like the one used in the news story, to masquerade as a game or a quiz. And unlike protecting yourself from phishing emails, it's not simply good enough for you to "know better" yourself - if even one of your friends installs the app, your details get stolen too.

Despite the severity of this potential hack, stories like this one are old news in the realm of those who follow social network hacking trends.

For example, white hat hacker "theharmonyguy," wrote on his blog Social Hacking back in March about an app he submitted to social media instructor, Lee Aase's, $100 hacking challenge. His app, once installed, would grab any available information from a private Facebook group. The app didn't win the challenge, however, since it required action on the part of the user to be successful.

However, theharmonyguy points out that although Facebook has a Terms of Use that restricts applications from storing most user data, "there is not a practical way for Facebook to enforce or even completely audit this requirement." And since these applications are third party code, they are essentially running on the honor system.

Facebook, especially, has been plagued by security lapses as of late, with the AP reporting news about a security exploit that exposed private photos on the site back in March. However as one of our own commenters pointed out, this hack was known as early as February, it just took the AP's coverage to bring attention to the matter.

Then there was a story in January about Facebook app Secret Crush that downloaded and installed spyware to your computer. However, it's not just Facebook under the gun - back in November, TechCrunch reported on an OpenSocial hack, this one involving the RockYou and Plaxo.

Reading these types of stories remind us that our security on these networks are in the hands of unknown developers, not just the sites themselves - developers who may be more concerned with getting their apps completed and installed than they are with security.

Facebook's response to this latest BBC story is that they have "an entire investigations team that watches the site and removes content and third-party applications that violate Facebook's Terms of Use." However, they advise users to "employ the same precautions while downloading software from Facebook applications that they use when downloading software on their desktop."

In other words, your security is left to the tech-savviness of you and your friends. (Considering my years in I.T./end user support, that's a frightening concept. Many users aren't smart, savvy, or careful when online.)

Even worse, if you do become a victim of an attack, good luck getting support from Facebook on dealing with it. As Lauren Cooney reports after her account was compromised to send out spam, she emailed the Facebook team several times, and spent the better part of an hour trying to track down a customer service number to no avail, noting "you would think that a company that collects that much data on their users would consider having a customer service number." In the end, it was nine hours before she received an email response.

What this means for the average social networker is that we need to be very careful on these networks, and should not entirely rely on them to keep us safe. If there's really a photo you don't want certain people to see, maybe it's best to keep it offline forever. We also need to be vigilante about the applications we install, on Facebook and elsewhere, and take the time to educate our friends to do the same.

We have no idea what the "final network" will be, but it certainly seems to hint at the further social networkification of iGoogle. We think that's smart. In May of last year we theorized that start pages were very well suited to take on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. "Whereas Facebook is just launching their platform," we wrote at the time, "Netvibes and Pageflakes each already have an evolved and popular platform ecosystem in place. What they lack is the social scene." We called adding social interactivity features to start pages the "next logical step" for those companies.

A couple of months later, it appeared that taking on social networks was exactly what Pageflakes and Netvibes were planning to do. "Start pages will challenge the existing social networks - it's almost evolutionary for them to become social networks," wrote Richard MacManus.

In July, we laid out a plan to fix Yahoo! that revolved around building out a developer platform for their web-leading start page, MyYahoo! The final step of our plan was to make the platform social.

And just last week, Pageflakes was acquired by LiveUniverse, a move that we saw as a step toward the further socialization of Pageflakes. "Along with [MySpace founder Brad] Greenspan, LiveUniverse has original MySpace engineer Toan Nguyen on its management team. That's some serious chops in the area of social networking, which is where Pageflakes has been heading since ... last July," we wrote.

Google's announcement today may just kick off an industry wide trend toward turning start page properties into social networks -- often, as Google goes, so goes the web. That makes a lot of sense. Start pages generally already have rich developer ecosystems with many useful apps, and because they act as "first stops" for many users, they're already sticky. Adding in social networking functions just increases utility for users.

"Integrating with Frengo was a breeze and we really appreciate their experience and expertise in mobile. With Frengo we can extend our social experiences to people on mobile phones around the world," said Jia Shen, CTO of RockYou, a launch partner with Frengo on the toolkit. RockYou's "Horoscopes" application is available to mobile users via the Frengo toolkit. Other customers of Frengo include Slide, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Serious Business, and Frozen Bear.

Lance Takuda of RockYou recently confirmed to us that there are slight differences in the Open Social deployments on MySpace and Hi5, and the Facebook platform deployments on Faceook and Bebo. He told us there's about a "20% overhead in supporting" the different deployments of each platform (though going platform-to-platform basically requires a rewrite). It seems likely that because of these differences, the Frengo toolkit includes slightly different bits of code for working with each social network.

It is, of course, not out of the realm of possibility that social networks could build mobile functionality directly into their platforms. Both Facebook and MySpace have been pushing their mobile versions hard recently -- MySpace just partnered with Sprint and Verizon and RIM just announced a million Facebook users on Blackberry -- and it is plausible that they could push developers to the mobile space themselves. Facebook especially has some serious mobile chops with Joe Hewitt on staff, whose iUI is already one of the most popular iPhone frameworks.