To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.

Because the promise of social network integration with search is a current favorite topic, we'll focus in this post on that: a class of social search. This is also a response to the ideas brought up by Alex Iskold in his post on the future of search.

Alex proposes that we rank search results by a kind of Social Relevancy Rank, first displaying results from friends and people whom we follow and later displaying results from "taste neighbors" and influencers, etc. FriendFeed already filters results by your friends' content first. Twitter's Trending Topics, by contrast, shows the crowd's perspective. While one's personal social circle could improve the relevance of some search results (and I noted some months back that this is a promising model), this type of filtering is more challenging than it sounds.

First, as Alex points out, "trusted opinions are scarce." Our friends couldn't possibly know everything we're interested in, and the smaller our social circle, the worse the problem becomes. Even with large social graphs, sooner or later we will undoubtedly search for a topic that hasn't been indexed in our friends' activity streams, and then we'll get few to no results and suffer an inferior user experience. We'd be better off turning to good ol' Google... the very thing we're trying to best!

Secondly, getting Social Relevancy Rank right involves a lot of insight into what users care about. Alex comments that, "This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because... it knows who you care about." But does it? On FriendFeed, I follow only a limited number of the people I actually care about. Do those people alone account for the things I care about? And when I perform a search, does the engine know what I'm caring about at that moment? True, we have to start somewhere -- as PageRank did -- and tweak the algorithm over time. But suggesting that even a smart Social Relevancy Ranking is clued in to what we care about at any given moment is presumptuous at best given the state of the art.

Yet, having different levels of social relevance is a good theory, and Alex's demarcations are sound, in essence. But each level more likely indicates degrees of social proximity than relevance per se; although in some cases closer proximity may very well indicate greater relevance. The problem is that relevance is highly contextual. It depends on many factors, such as your profession, your search query, your friends, your friends' knowledge about those topics, and the information that is publicly recorded in their activity streams.

For example, a financial analyst (i.e. an expert) wouldn't care if her closest circle of friends was Twittering about how complicated a new tax code is. As an expert, she'd rather know exactly how the new policies affect an edge-case client of hers. Filtering search results by "friends and following" at one end and "the crowd in aggregate" at the other may fail equally in uncovering the right piece of information for her.

For general users, the "it depends" factor may be the urgency with which information is needed. When the need is urgent, people will actively search for the information (in any number of ways); other times, information may be welcome but only encountered serendipitously or consumed passively. Browsing feeds, Twitter posts, and Facebook streams are all passive ways of discovering information. Putting these activities on a continuum in which information search is active but information discovery is passive could look like this:

But to actually achieve a "Social Relevancy Rank," we have to consider how layers of social proximity map onto this search-discovery continuum.

When people actively look for a piece of information (e.g. the best Barbary Coast Trail guide for tomorrow's hike), they likely require trustworthy, high-quality information that could at least inform their decision. "Friends and following" could serve as a reliable social filter at this stage. But as the urgency subsides (e.g. just poking around for a mint julep recipe a week before a get-together), we relax our requirements and even welcome a wider set of results. At this stage, filtering results by friends of friends, influencers, experts, and even crowds in aggregate is appropriate.

Of course, serendipitously discovering information from "friends and following" would be welcome in other instances. So, to actually improve social relevancy in search engines and discovery services, there would have to be a distribution of acceptable social filters whose levels depend on how active the user is and what the user is searching for:

What this still fails to address, though, is how to assess the urgency of a user's needs or how to derive that level of urgency from the user's known behavior. This is a problem that engineers, designers, and HCI researchers have been struggling to solve for a long time (and a million dollars will get you only so far).

The problem of effective search runs deep. You can have all the flavors you want -- social, real-time, semantic -- and tomorrow's flavor will be merely another riff on the same tune. Yes, social networks and the social graph have the potential to meaningfully filter millions of otherwise undifferentiated pages of results. But words like "meaningful" and "relevance" are so contextualized -- varying as they do from user to user and usage case to usage case -- that they can't be expected to mean anything unless they are anchored by context. Mapping social proximity to users' active and passive information consumption could help us create more contextualized user experiences on the social Web, resulting in less time spent naming the latest flavor of search and more time spent actually improving search.

Guest author: Brynn Evans is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

And now, as always, please tell us what you think? What would you expect from a search engine with Social Relevancy Rank built in?

You can also interact with the items being tracked via the Glue plugin which features a "like" button and another "2 Cents" button which lets you leave a comment about whatever it is you're viewing.

As with the previously released Firefox plugin, the Glue IE plugin also delivers the same type of interactions as you would expect: the connected conversations around everyday things, recommendations, and web-wide "top lists" that include the top items across the entire Glue network.

You can grab the Glue IE plugin from the main page of the Glue web site here. Note: the "Download" button still features the Firefox logo only at this time, but clicking the button reveals the IE download is available as well.

Disclosure: Alex Iskold (@alexiskold) is the founder of AdaptiveBlue, the company behind Glue, and occasional RWW feature writer.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.

We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.

Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.

You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer

A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

It's notable as well that Hulu didn't build its own social network from scratch. That would have been a waste of resources. Instead it is leveraging already established social networks elsewhere.

The most important consequence of the announcement may be that the OAuth protocol used to securely access social networking data without requesting a user's password is now being placed in front of millions more people than it has been before. That's good news.

Concerns About Hulu Friends

On the other hand, it's sad that the OpenID community remains small enough to be left out in the cold by Hulu. In theory the site should be able to add an OpenID login button to its list and pull in standard Friend of a Friend data from any identity provider at all.

Barb Dybwad at Obsessable wonders whether Hulu Friends is actually a reason for Hulu to be less "friendly" with other social video platforms that want to play Hulu content in their communities - specifically Boxee.

Finally, we're concerned that Hulu Friends isn't being featured very prominently on the site. It takes a few too many clicks to get to the friend syncing page on Hulu. We're not seeing Hulu activity pushed out to social network activity streams, either. In fact, it looks like Hulu is using the legacy Facebook API, not the fancy new Facebook Connect. Is the company being overly cautious about Hulu Friends? If they are, its limited adoption could become a self fulfilling prophecy.

All in all, though, we feel positive about Hulu Friends. We hope the company innovates on top of the idea and makes more moves towards integration with the open web.

So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

Marc Canter believes that the "dashboard" is the best metaphor to manage all this activity through. Millions of people are already familiar with this basic idea, having used My.Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Jive Software or other services like this. (We like dashboards here at ReadWriteWeb a lot and recommend checking out this post on traits of a successful dashboard for tips on setting one up for yourself.)

Your DiSO dashboard might serve as a new interface for your blog, your social networking account, or be a stand alone service itself. The parts of your dashboard that you made public would be discoverable and viewable by other people. What would it bring together for you to access all in one place? This is the meat of Canter's proposal. (Update: Actually, Canter stopped by in comments below to clarify that it's the outline structure of these data collected in a dashboard that's really the meat of his proposal. He says he's working on an editor to edit such outlines, in fact. See his comment below for clarification.)

• Your status and availability, see and change these from your dashboard.
• Widgets and gadgets for doing various things, just like people add to dashboards now.
• Your incoming subscriptions (RSS, friends' new media published, perhaps some email).
• Your published media and content going out, manageable in the dashboard. Not just blog posts, microblogging messages and media - this could include your comments from around the web, reviews you've posted of products, testimonials people have written about you, music playlists - you name it.
• Access controls to all your content, determine what's public, what's private, what's viewable by friends, family, co-workers or members of another group. This is a very important part of the distributed social networking vision.
• Your various accounts and identification. Think of this as a virtual wallet, though Canter makes no mention of commercial activities we can assume that payment methods like your PayPal balance or online banking updates would ideally be included in your private dashboard.
• Your "social graph" aggregated. See all your contact lists in one place, including links to the dashboards and various social networking accounts that each contact has given you permission to view. Ask from your dashboard for permission to connect with those contacts in new places.

DiSo Dashboard Outline

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: outline diso)

The idea is that the DiSO Dashboard would be a place to read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalize the data for all your activities around the web. The data standards aren't figured out yet, but major social networking vendors are meeting now to work them out.

How would it look? What would be surfaced to users at various levels of the interface? We hope that vendors make that highly customizable but default settings are something that needs to be figured out.

What do you think? Would you like a dashboard like this? What else would you like in it? Speak up now, these services could be a big part of your experience on the web soon and they are being planned and built as we speak.

Highlighted changes include reputation, designation of "top contributors," standards-based profiles that extend across Google products and the web, and the ability for Google staff and top contributors to mark some questions as answered.

In initial testing of the forums, we wish there was more AJAX, but otherwise we think it looks good. The Google Profiles are both good because of their awesome standards-based extensibility (they are marked up with the Social Graph API and hCard) and a potential privacy concern because the limits of that Social Graph API are not firmly defined. Your profile is here.

Much of the user experience here is reminiscent of GetSatisfaction, a still clearly superior help-forum service. Another example of a really good forum for a large number of people can be found in the Spiceworks developer forum.

We hope that all Google Groups will soon include the new features that the Help Forums now do and we hope that the improvement will continue. Google products evolve so much slower than many of us expect that every announcement like this is a very big deal.

What's Glue?

Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.

As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.

Glue Is Not Co-browsing

Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.

How It Works

In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.

To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.

While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.

Making The Social Web Relevant

By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.

In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.

Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.

Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php Products Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez this February, Google released its Social Graph API, which allows developers to give users the option to easily find data on their social connections around the web. Google itself, however, hasn't really implemented any of this technology yet. Starting today, however, it seems Google is starting to surface some of this information from your Social Graph in your Google Profile, which might be a first sign that Google is planning to do more with these profiles than it has done so far. Google has also started implementing the hCard microformat there. The first person to noticed this was Chris Messina.

Once you open your Google Profile, you might start seeing some suggested links at the bottom of the page (as usual, it seems Google is rolling this out slowly) and, as far as we can see, these links are pulled from your Social Graph. If you don't see anything there, you can help your profile along by, for example, adding a link to your FriendFeed account at the bottom of the page. After you do that, Google will suggest adding the feeds you import into FriendFeed to your profile and, from there, it draw even more conclusions about your online habits.

hCard

Also, as Chris Messina points out in this video, the profiles now also support the hCard microformat, which makes importing them into other products a lot easier.

Privacy

When Google first announced the Social Graph API, we had some concerns about the privacy implications of this. After all, nobody on the net knows more about your behaviors than Google. For now, Google seems to be moving slowly and by just rolling out suggested pages for your profile, it doesn't startle users with too much information.

The Grand Google Profile?

Google, so far, never really pushed the profile. Right now, it is only exposed in Google Maps. However, if Google starts pushing it a bit more, especially now that it is linked to you social graph, it could potentially start marketing the profile as 'the' central repository for your online identity.

Google is already a member of the DataPortability workgroup, which also advocates the use of microformats like hCard and XFN. These additions to the Google Profile could suggest that Google does indeed have greater plans for it has let us to believe so far.

If you are not quite clear about how the Social Graph API works, here is a short video of a Google engineer explaining how it works:

As Facebook Connect grows and is adopted by more sites, it will push your social graph to the far corners of the web, out to places where it doesn't even exist today - that is, places like the corporate web sites whose own attempts at creating social networks of their own were a waste of money. These businesses never needed a social network - they need to tap into your social graph and Facebook Connect gives them the power to do so.

Through the seamless Facebook Connect integration, sites can access your Facebook account details and friend graph and move that data back and forth between their site and Facebook. For example, people commenting on a blog using the Moveable Type platform will be able to login via Facebook Connect. Their comment will link to their Facebook profile and the commenting activity itself will make its way back into your activity feed. On Digg, another site adopting Facebook Connect, you can login with your Facebook ID and your digging activity is returned to Facebook, too.

Why Facebook Connect Could Win This

A large majority of today's more mainstream users have a Facebook account and still, the site grows. Although MySpace still remains king in the U.S., Facebook is quickly closing that gap, having grown 40% over the last year. But worldwide, Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in April 2008 in terms of monthly worldwide visitors - around 115 million per site per month (source: Comscore).

Although Facebook Connect is just one example of this new trend involving the portability of our social graphs, it already has a leg up on both Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's implementation of OpenID.

With Google's Friend Connect - not even fully launched yet - they're relying on the power of their brand. But although the site is a household name now, that doesn't mean that everyone has a Google account or a friend graph there. Like Microsoft and their "Passport" (now Live ID) initiative, the largest source for collecting user accounts is via their webmail offerings. For those that don't use Gmail or any of Google's other customized services requiring a login, there's no value to Google's Friend Connect because there's no friend graph there. You would be creating an account to have the sake of the account. This doesn't appeal to anyone.

As for OpenID, as much as we're thrilled to see it finally making its way onto huge web sites like MySpace, it will still have to overcome the "user education" issue. A mainstream web user will not know what an OpenID is (and will often not take the initiative to find out). But they will be able to wrap their heads around Facebook Connect. "Login with your Facebook ID" - that's pretty much as straightforward as it comes. It's unfortunate, but you have to acknowledge the fact that if OpenID can't dumb down their concept enough for the "everyman," it may not be able to reign dominant across the web. Like Dick says on the Identity 2.0 blog: "...frankly -- typing in a URL is pretty geeky to most users."

Why Facebook Connect Could Be Dangerous

Unlike with OpenID, Facebook Connect put the power of the social web into the hands of one company. One private company. Not only that, but a company that's known for rolling out changes without so much as a warning to its users then having to react to the ensuing uproar.

Even the introduction of the Mini-Feed was protested upon launch. And Beacon - the advertisement system that sent data from external web sites back to Facebook, telling your friends about your purchases on 40+ partner sites - was literally a fiasco. It launched before there was a way to even opt-out.

In the past, user privacy on Facebook seemed always seemed to be an afterthought. Although their direction appears to be changing a bit now - recent updates to Facebook today make sure to cover how your privacy is going to be affected - it's only because they've learned to cater to their users' demands. It's harder to believe that it's because they genuinely care.

Facebook has always known that their value - that is, their monetary value - is selling off bits and pieces of your privacy to advertisers. The "real you" on Facebook is a holy grail for marketers. Now, with the power to spread that to sites across the entire web, Facebook will need to figure out how to cash in. In the process, they may again make another misstep. The problem is that this time it might not be something as innocuous as the video you rented at Blockbuster that finds its way back to your Facebook profile. As more of the corporate and business-oriented web adopts Friend Connect, the greater the chance for privacy intrusion.

Conclusion

What do you think about this new social web? Do you see Facebook Connect as having a chance to win this all? Or will it be Google Friend Connect or OpenID? Or perhaps all three can co-exist peacefully?

We told you about the new social search engine Delver earlier this year (see: "Delver Reinvents Search"), but at that time, the site was still under development. Today, Delver has finally launched their service.

When you do a search on Delver, the service taps into your social graph to return its search results. It organizes and ranks publicly displayed content that comes from various online services like social networks, web sites, blogs, bookmarking services, and photo and video sharing sites that your friends belong to. A 'breadcrumb' is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, so you can see how it's relevant to you. What Summize is to Twitter, Delver is for your entire social graph.

At the moment, Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious. Other sources, like Facebook as well as other blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months. Facebook is harder to tap into because of their privacy controls, so to add Facebook content to Delver they're building a Facebook app. The app will permit you to explicitly share select items from Facebook - like photo albums, for example - with Delver's service.

Some Search Results on Delver

Search Buddies

A feature makes Delver even more useful, though, is the "search buddies" feature. This option lets you add certain friends as search buddies which will prioritize results from their networks higher than others. This way, you can give information sources you trust and value more weight than others. In addition, those you add don't have to be friends you're connected with on social networks - you can add anyone as a search buddy and they don't need to confirm the addition - it's not a "friending" feature, exactly, just a way to see more personalized results to your queries.

This feature is also useful for those people who aren't as active on social networks themselves, but have friends who are - they don't need to rely on their particular social graph per se, but can tap into sources (people) whose content is relevant to them.

Add Search Buddies To Make Search Results More Relevant and Personal

Save Your Stuff

Delver lets you save items you find interesting or informative to a sidebar of "Kept Items." The system automatically categorizes them as web items, images, music, videos, or people. In a month or so, Delver will allow for sharing these items more publicly through the addition of a Kept Items widget which could highlight findings on your own web site or blog.

Saved Items

Partner Program

Along with the launch of the search service, Delver is also launching a partner program that will allow sites that host user generated content to integrate Delver's technology into their web site.

Social Graphs - Social Media's Next Frontier

While the big networks like Facebook, Google, and MySpace all fight for control of your social graph, services like Delver provide an easy workaround to tapping into the power of your social network. In addition, you can also use Delver to discover interesting "friend-of-a friends" that you may want to follow, as Delver digs deeper than just who you are connected to yourself.

Your Social Graph on Delver

Delver is still at a very early age of development, but even so, the service demonstrates a lot of potential to become the next step in the social web's evolution.

But Isn't Facebook Is For "Real" Connections?

What was great about Facebook, at least back in the beginning, was that it grew out of real-life relationships. College students, then high schools students, and eventually everyone else were able to enhance their real life connections through this social network. Unlike MySpace, where many people got into the habit of collecting friends, Facebook became a more private and more accurate reflection of a person's social connections. Even today, many Facebook users turn down friend requests of people they don't know - especially if they're not even accompanied by a note explaining the add.

Those who have been on Facebook since high school (or younger!) also often speak of needing to clean out their friends list to remove those people who aren't in their lives anymore. For them, Facebook is an online reflection of the people they are really keeping in touch with and not a way to amass the most friends in order to appear popular. While this is obviously not true for everyone, in general this is, in fact, one of the big differences between the ways that many use or have used these networks.

Perhaps it's just growing awareness of how much personal information is revealed online or perhaps people just became tired of adding friends just for the sake of adding friends or maybe it's that people finally saw the value in just having their real friends connected online, but whatever the reason, fewer people today are looking to find and add strangers to their friends' lists - in fact, this behavior tends to be associated with "sort of creepy" behavior, as one Gen Y'er recently told me.

Do We Need Personality Matching Tests?

So where does that leave an app like Signal Patterns? At best, it's the most scientific personality quiz you've ever shared with friends. It goes beyond personality tests like the Myers-Briggs that divides the population into a small number of personality types. With a matching score with MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), 1 in 16 of all people would be "like you," but with Signal Patterns you find others who are more similar to your than over 99% of the population.

In addition, there's also a "music personality" survey available where you can apply this same type of detailed scientific discovery to finding others who have the same musical preferences as you do.

While it's true that a certain segment of the online population loves quizzes, the question still remains - are you interested in finding new friends like this?

Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed today. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. Here's a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.

It's all about the platforms and conference organizer Brady Forrest was kind enough to reference our post yesterday on what comes next after APIs and platforms are ubiquitous in his introduction of the Yahoo! CTO. Sure enough, Yahoo! has its own vision for what comes next and it's a pretty good looking plan.

Yahoo! will soon allow developers to write apps that work easily across every property in the company. Hosting will be offered or the apps can live off-site. When a user ads an application, they'll be asked which of the Yahoo! sites they want that app to be installed on. This will include the front page of Yahoo! - which will soon host 3rd party apps. Look out Facebook.

Those apps will include an event stream (ala FriendFeed/Facebook Newsfeed/MySpace friend activity feed) that's prioritized by topic area and social graph. The activities of your sports friends will appear on the Yahoo Sports page, your closest email buds will be surfaced on Yahoo! Mail.

You might not feel like you have a well developed social graph across Yahoo! but think about Flickr, Upcoming.org and Del.icio.us. Let's see Yahoo! acquire Twitter or FriendFeed and then we'll really be talking.

Continued below adorable Search Monkey preview splash screen shot.

The Social

Social graph data, or prioritized friends lists, will serve as the relevance filter for the apps that operate across Yahoo. Back in November we discussed this strategy in a post about the Inbox 2.0 strategy titled Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook.

While Facebook stagnates, struggles with app spam and looks more like MySpace every day though - FriendFeed has taken center stage in experimenting with friend activity data, friend of a friend conversations, friend recommendation and prevention of information overload.

Yahoo will do that type of work, but will also leverage its work with in the Identity and Data Portability communities. Users will be given extensive control over where they share their data, something Facebook for example says it is focusing on before it can make Data Portability real.

Yahoo! users will have a single unified identity across all Yahoo! properties. I was sitting next to Kaliya Hamlin, known as Identity Woman, when this was announced and asked her how that sounded. She said that if a unified identity was a requirement, that would be bad, if they were an option that would be ideal, and if they were "toggleable" (like multiple personas) that would be ideal. I agree.

There's a whole lot of potential here and Yahoo! has really been engaged in the Identity world in particular. If they can make a few radical steps and perhaps a few key acquisitions - then social graph + 3rd party apps + semantified search indexing could make the user experience at Yahoo! very, very compelling. Coincidentally, or not, these moves were very close to what our own super-prescient Josh Catone called on Yahoo! to do almost a year ago.

It is a really tall order to fill, but with the infusion of so many smart people into Yahoo! after years of acquisitions like Flickr - a company wide rewiring seems relatively plausible.

GSP kicked off with the Charlene Li keynote. Charlene talked about the social graphs provided by the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial as "the air of tomorrow's web." What she meant was that the social graph is going to be an essential piece of tomorrow's web, and the sites which don't embrace it will most probably become extinct.

The second keynote came from Amit Kapur of MySpace. Amit gave important insight about the monetization of their network, but admitted that "social networking is hard to monetize," which is something we have also heard from Google. Amit said that regular contextual advertising doesn't work well for social profiles and that's the reason why MySpace is focusing on their own monetization technologies, which they call, HyperTargeting. HyperTargeting is already in use by big clients such as EA, Microsoft, Taco Bell, Proctor & Gamble, and FOX. But he added that they are also planning to release a self-serve solution for long-tail advertisers. Presumably, it will be a social doppelghanger of Google AdSense.

The third keynote was given by Benjamin Ling of Facebook. He made some important announcements, including the new E-Commerce APIs that they are planning to release soon, as well as the new user-driven localization solutions that they will provide for app makers. Facebook Platform investors at the event were unanimous in their belief that the E-Commerce APIs are big news, because it means new business models and revenue sources for app producers. On the other hand, their localization solutions seem to be just another step in their recently debuted internationalization efforts. Indeed it would be inconsistent to offer a localized platform which barely has any localized apps on it. And the good thing is, since this is user-driven, the costs for app makers to get international is low and also linearly dependent on their merits.

Day One Announcements

Following the keynotes, there were a number of interesting announcements made, including:

• NetVibes introduced Ginger. Ginger is a social version of NetVibes that allows you to pull in friends from your existing social networks, share news with them and follow their reading activities. In other words, as NetVibes' Chris Damsen noted, Ginger makes Facebook, your private place on the web, a more public place.
• MyBlogLog introduced Bluetooth capabilities and a new FriendFeed-like feature. The Bluetooth feature allows you to see other MyBlogLog users who are close by. When we tested it with Ian Kennedy of MyBlogLog, at least 10 MyBlogLog users who were attending the conference showed up on our list. In some sense, this new feature brings MyBlogLog's distributed social networking into the real world.
• Bebo, Myspace, hi5, and Friendster are launching or have already launched their own OpenSocial-based platforms.
• Chris Messina of Citizen Agency introduced his distributed social network project, DiSo. DiSo's architecture depends on existing open standards such as OpenID, XRDS-Simple, and microformats. It sounds very geekish for now and is too-focused on technical aspects, instead of the social realities that actually make a network work. But it has the potential of becoming the "Linux" of social networks.

Day Two

Compared to day one, day two began with more technical topics. MySpace's Jim Benedetto gave some information on their new platform, which extends existing OpenSocial v0.6 standards with MySpace specific features like bulletin boards. The interesting point about the MySpace Platform is that it is going to launch very restricted. All app submissions will have to go through a safety review process by humans. Hence there is going to be an unavoidable lag between releasing an app and its availability on the network. But all these limitations will be slowly removed with a measured approach, according to Jim. He said that this is to prevent spam and protect the long-term value of the platform.

As most of the app developers in the conference noted, including representatives from RockYou! and Slide, restrictions by platform providers will definitely cut down their fast viral growth opportunities, but the applications that create a real value for the users will still be able grow virally, perhaps at a slower pace but stickier.

One of the shortest but definitely most informational sessions of the event came from Roger Magoulas of O'Reilly Media. He showcased some very interesting numbers and statistics that O'Reilly has collected from the Facebook appsphere. In summary, he showed that:

• installation numbers are no longer as big as they used to be
• active usage rates have dropped significantly too
• most of the apps are released under the "just for fun" category
• there is more adoption and engagement in "games"
• there is a tendency towards winner-takes-all; 1% of apps have 75% of app users, 20% have 99%

Later, in a session that brought together top Facebook game developers, including Mark Pincus of Zynga, there was agreement that social games will replace casual gaming, just like Facebook messages are replacing emails. Also Mark noted that live games don't work so well on Facebook, because once people leave the game, they don't come back; so in order to create real engagement, asynchronous models (as in Scramble) are far better, because people love to email their friends and call them back to the game.

Some other interesting notes we picked up during the course of the event:

• Facebook advertising is starting to get very profitable. Peanut Labs announced that they distributed $200K to their members just in the past 1 week.
• New advertising models (besides CPC and CPM) are emerging inside the Facebook Platform. The CPI (Cost Per Incentive) model of SocialMedia and the CPE (Cost Per Engagement) model of VideoEgg are just a couple of examples. With CPI, the user is invited to install other apps; with CPE, the user is shown a lightbox page which appears as a new layer on top the Facebook canvas page that he was actually looking at.
• Facebook called on people to produce productivity apps and focus on the long-term value, not viral growth.
• The OpenSocial crew presented Shindig, an open source, Apache-incubated OpenSocial framework for those who are interested in hosting OpenSocial apps inside their network. They have also introduced CAJA, a Javascript sanitization sandbox which allows Javascript code to be embedded into OpenSocial apps safely.
• Investors noted that app makers shouldn't expect to become instant millionaires with their applications. They also highlighted the importance of long-term value and stickiness.
• Facebook app makers are concerned about Facebook's moves to release their own apps; like Pages. They think that Facebook should just provide the platform and not be involved with new apps anymore.

A Brief Interview with Jia Shen

At the end of the day, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jia Shen, the CTO and co-founder of RockYou! and ask him a few questions. Jia acknowledged to me that his company has had a tremendous advantage over others by entering the field early, he also said that these platforms are becoming less permissive for viral growth because of their new safety restrictions - which is why those who plan to make a Facebook app are strongly encouraged act as quickly as possible.

I asked Jia about their ad network, how it was going, and what is the percentage of revenues from non-RockYou! inventory. He told me that it is going well and that the non-RockYou! inventory now accounts for a majority of the revenues generated on the network. He noted some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Sony. He also said they are not planning to enter the long-tail advertising race right now.

As for localization and the growing number of international social networks opening up new platforms; he said that they will look at the specific characters of the network that they are entering and make necessary changes to their apps if required. But he added most of their apps are generic so they don't expect big changes. I asked him whether they're planning to make acquisitions to get the leading app makers in outside markets, and he told this is not their primary strategy yet, but if they do, their first target will be big demographics such as apps for Spanish speaking countries.

Jia also said that they have no preference between the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial, they will embrace both, but they support standards and the idea of writing once, running everywhere.

Conclusion

All in all, GSP was a very useful event for anyone working in the social networking industry. There were a number of enlightening sessions and key people who drive the social future of the web were in attendance. As Charlene Li noted, users will get suffocated without the portable social graph; so as a web developer, you'd better catch up with these latest developments and get ready for the future of the web in order to keep your visitors happy. The move of Sheryl Sandberg from Google to Facebook is more than enough to tell you where we are headed.

• Profiles
• Relationships
• Activities
• Business Models

Profiles: A Universal Identity

Like most of us, Charlene has literally dozens of identities online (see slide below).

Moving forward she'd like to see a universal identity. Her specific proposal centers on either email and/or mobile phones, since this would be an identity she controls. Thankfully, Charlene also anticipates a federated approach (such as OpenID.) Also, she anticipates a few major players will probably serve as major federation focus points. We have already seen this happen begin to happen with both AOL and Yahoo! supporting OpenID.

Charlene also talked about the "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web," a document created by a number of thought leaders in the social web: Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble & Michael Arrington. The document states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
• their own profile data
• the list of people they are connected to
• the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

I imagine there will be more conversation on this in the afternoon panel Dan Farber is moderating on Data Portability.

Relationships: A Single Social Graph

Over the next few years, Charlene pointed out that a unified social graph will develop. She showed her current social graph as it exists inside Facebook, and then pointed out what it was missing: colleagues, parents, extended family, school parents, neighbors (see slide below). I think this is something we all realize intuitively - so the overriding point is that our real social graph is far more complex.

New 'Entrants' Will Be Portals

I actually found this one of the more interesting points from Charlene's presentation. She proposed that the a number of 'new entrants' will emerge, except that they won't be startups at all. Instead, she predicts that a number of the major portals (Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and AOL) will actually fill the the relationship mapping gap. She pointed to 4 reasons why they are natural entrants:

1. Millions of Regular Users
2. Search & Deep Content
3. Ad & Content Networks
4. Relationship Maps

Activities: Social Context for Activities

Going back to 'social networks being like air', not surprisingly Charlene projects that social context will be important for most online activities. As an example of how this might happen, she used shopping. She talked about Amazon integrating with Facebook (or any other repository of social graph info) such that they could highlight book reviews from her friends. Charlene also pointed out that any portal could easily incorporate social data into their site. She used Yahoo! as an example saying they could:

1. Search based on what my friends find relevant
2. Elevate stories tagged by my friends -- anywhere (maybe multiple social graphs web 2.0 & shopping)
3. Compare daily portfolio performance to friends
4. In terms of advertising, which of my friends owns a Focus & what do they think of it?

Business Models: Social Influence Defines Marketing Value

When talking about business models, her basic point was that we have yet to properly value networks based on their social value. She pointed to Marian Salzman's (of JWT) concept of personal CPMs. The basic idea being that an individual's authority on specific topics plus their network's interest and authority on the topic, results in a value of reaching that user. If this is true then "social networks will have to compete to have the best experience for high influence people."

Conclusion

Based on the vision she laid out, Charlene ended with a map of how open she anticipated these open platforms evolving.

To realize this vision of ubiquitous social networks, Charlene pointed out 2 things that must happen:

1. We need the technology to evolve, which she wasn't that worried about
2. We need to increase trust, which she challenged the industry to think about

You can view all of Charlene's Slides here.

| View | Upload your own