Leaders of the distributed social Web standards community, the effort to build interoperable competition for the big social networking silos, say that Cliqset's apparent demise is unfortunate, but that they look forward to seeing what Bounds and Cauthen do next.

Standards across sites for user activity data feeds are aimed to act as a common foundation to provide scale for innovation outside the big mainstream social networks. In other words, if all photos, friends and comments are marked up in a common standardized way, those activities can be viewed across all the small social networking startups - giving them more people and content to display than they would if it was just a random startup alone against the big guys like Facebook.

I've compared standards in social networking data to the historical rise of standardized railroad measurements - which allowed trains to ride across different networks and fostered a new era of nation-wide commerce in the United States.

Unfortunately, economic incentive hasn't driven people to engage with interoperable small networks instead of favoring the big players, Facebook and Twitter. Meanwhile, little Cliqset suffered from a substantially unappealing user experience, which it was never able to overcome.

"Darren and Charlie have done an amazing job taking open technologies and distilling them into a consumer experience," Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav said today.

"The problem is that social aggregation no longer offers any significant value with the Facebook/Twitter market consolidation. The biggest loser from the collapse of Cliqset is Google, as their world of potential social federation partners shrinks even further. Cliqset was a strong supporter and early adopter of many of the core social technologies such as Salmon, WebFinger, and PubSubHubbub."

Unfortunately, all those standards are feeling less viable today than they were in the heady times they were introduced. Independent social Web technical leaders have largely joined up with Google or Facebook and standards organizations have grown quieter. Cauthen and Bounds have not announced what they will do next, but it's probably safe to assume that it will include working to move social Web data standards forward.

Startup Challenges

Not everyone agrees that this has anything to do with challenges faced by the larger standards community. "I don't believe this really has anything to do with standards," Chris Saad of Echo and the Data Portability Working Group says. "Lifestreams in the b2c space has long been crowded and has now consolidated around the Facebook news feed."

Cliqset's Bounds appears to agree. "In order to build a community, you need massive differentiation today," Bounds told blogger Louis Gray this morning.

"It's fairly obvious in hindsight. Projects I would be working on in the future would be leveraging the existing social graph, and the need for success wouldn't be contingent on relationships and community within itself. In no means do I think Facebook is impenetrable and somebody can't build something to compete with it, but it's not an easy task."

Cliqset used to be a lonely place, displaying only content from other people you knew who had signed up for Cliqset (not many). Now you can read anyone's Tweets through the service, and the interface for sorting, replying and watching conversations may be the most sophisticated we've seen yet.

For example, if a well-known person throws out a Tweet (or if you do) and it gets a number of replies, you can view that Tweet alone on a page in Cliqset, with replies to it streaming in below it, pushed to your browser in real time.

Curation is beautifully implemented in Cliqset, it's easy to push any item into a curated stream that other people can subscribe to in real-time. That's really nice, and just cries out for iPad integration.

Right now the little company appears to be struggling under some launch-day traffic and its ambitious may never be realized if scalability remains a killer. There are also a number of little design considerations, though the site is very pretty, that seem unintuitive to this human user. Cliqset is warming up though, it feels less like the brilliant super-dork at a party that you can't have a conversation with every day.

The Future of Cliqset

Cross network, real-time streaming and curation? Sounds like something I want on my iPad. Sure enough, Cliqset says that's not a big stretch at all. An iPad style-sheet will be in place in a matter of weeks.

Likewise, the reason I stay with Tweetdeck for my work-Tweeting is because of the pop-up notifications for high-priority columns. Cliqset says the new Chrome HTML5 desktop notifications API is something it is working on and expects to implement soon.

Finally, how about some Facebook search? I don't understand why so few services have implemented search across not just Twitter but public Facebook messages as well. Neither does Cliqset, and the company says that's right around the corner as well.

Speaking of Tweetdeck, Cliqset says it is doing API work of its own that should enable Tweetdeck to serve up streams from 80 different social networks very soon. That sounds very cool, and like something that deserves its own coverage.

Cliqset is the most sophisticated, forward looking tool for stream reading on the internet today. It's also awkward, unstable, confusing and full of more potential than actualized usefulness. But that balance changes a little more with every iteration. You should check out Cliqset - sooner or later it could win you over.

Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open-source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold.

The Players

Evan Prodromou of Status.net says his service has 1.2 million users, hosts 12,000 sites on its cloud and is adding 800 sites per week. It's a hot little startup that's fast implementing new technical protocols and making high profile hires. Status.net began rolling out Salmon support earlier this month but today announced that it was working with Cliqset on displaying the cross-network communication. "We've got disparate implementations communicating well using this open standard for cross-network conversations," Prodromou said today, "It's the first time!"

Cliqset is better at trailblazing innovation than at user acquisition but is a very respected member of the technical community working to create social network interoperability.

Google Buzz appears to have seen a lukewarm public reaction to its launch but is most disruptive because of its support for open data standards. Salmon is still listed in the "coming soon" stage of the Buzz roadmap.

Today's news isn't just about those players, it's about the Salmon protocol that would allow any social network to participate. Salmon was developed primarily by Google employee John Panzer. If you've seen the way that the Echo commenting system displays Tweets, trackbacks and other social media mentions below blog posts, that's the kind of model that Salmon aims to make open source.

Interoperability as Foundation for Choice, Innovation, User Control

Facebook's near monopoly on mainstream social networking means that users have limited options in how they experience social networking and they have to play by Facebook's rules. Not everyone likes how Facebook changes its rules, especially its privacy policy.

Likewise, though Facebook is incredibly quick to innovate, it's generally assumed that a market with more than one competitor gives all companies in question more incentive to try to win the hearts of users.

Simply put, if you could leave Facebook and still communicate with people using Facebook (you can't today) then leaving Facebook would be a lot easier, and more social networks would have reason to invest in building a compelling service for you to use. If there was more than one meaningful option, those services would compete to build the best social network they possibly could. And Facebook would have more reason to be careful when considering dramatic changes in things like its privacy policy. Today, where else are you going to go without losing touch with all your friends?

That's why interoperability is important and that's why it's a big deal that two small social networks used by early adopters have pushed Salmon-based interoperability out into the wild.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that's compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It's intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It's important, exciting and inspiring work.

Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation. This API enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces.

Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don't.

As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future:

An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: "An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities."

In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don't require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at:
http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds.

The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites.

Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used - but it's an important step none the less.

What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It's a powerful new level of granularity.

Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now.

As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds.

Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds.

Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other.

Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company's release could have some very significant consequences.

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

The most important thing Cliqset is doing is probably transforming all these different update feeds into the standardized format called Activity Streams. That format is already being supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Opera.

Michael Calore explains what Cliqset is doing with Activity Streams as follows:

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, "Amy shared a video" or "Mike rated this photo." It's a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.
But if not everyone is reporting their users' activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.
As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web's mess as it goes.

Cliqset tells us that it's working on making a streaming API for this data available and let us in on some secret projects to bring real-time cross-platform data flowing to places around the web that it's not available today.

Right now you cannot easily pull Activity Streams feeds through Cliqset for people who have not signed up for the service themselves. It would be great if Cliqset began consuming the Webfinger protocol, for example and let me point at all my Google Contacts, discover their social media sites from around the web and then transform those into Activity Streams for consumption in other apps. That future isn't here and it may never be, but a web user can hope.

For now the company is using the long polling method and this newly normalized data to do some impressive things with its own user interface. Michael Calore goes into depth about that part of the project on Wired.com's WebMonkey blog. We'd like to recommend his post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day, in fact. Check it out for a closer look at the innovative effort underway at Cliqset.

We're highlighting one article about the real-time web from off-site every day, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Data normalization, Activity Streams, filtering and APIs are going to be big topics of conversation there. We hope you'll join us for those conversations.

If it did, that could be a real game changer. We'd love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That's what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it's the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.

Cliqset uses the OAuth data standard to do all this, so it doesn't even have to ask for your password to the networks you want to connect.

Who's using Cliqset so far? Unfortunately, the geeks behind Cliqset don't do a very good job explaining what they do and they don't have any examples other than their own site today at launch.

That could change soon, though. The company has released a variety of code libraries for developers to drop Cliqset support into their applications. At launch there are Java, iPhone and .net for Windows Mobile libraries. A PHP library is forthcoming. All the libraries will be open sourced and posted to Google Code.

Facebook Connect lets 3rd parties publish updates to a user's activity stream, but that's about it. We asked a number of hardcore identity geeks whether they had seen anything quite like Cliqset before and no one had. There are OpenID and related specifications aiming to accomplish just this, but nothing in the wild yet, according to the OpenID Foundation and Six Apart's David Recordon.

Recordon is a little concerned about seeing another company release an API to accomplish what Cliqset aims to do. "At first glance, it seems like Cliqset is leaning in the correct direction with their support of OAuth for APIs and OpenID for sign in, but are still creating their own APIs - ala Facebook Connect - when dealing with profiles and activities," he told us. "This is both yet another validation of the work by the wider DiSo community and opportunity to finalize the Portable Contacts and Activity Streams specifications for broad adoption on the social web."

We asked Cliqset specifically about Facebook Connect, whether it wasn't in the company's interest to implement a Read/Write capability in its identity system as well. They said they believed it was but that they expected the giant social network to take much longer to implement this key feature. By offering iPhone and Windows Mobile libraries right out of the gate, we think Cliqset could move quickly in the mobile world as well.

Unfortunately, the company isn't doing a terribly good job of explaining its fundamental value proposition so far. We're not the first site to cover Cliqset today (see PC World's coverage for example) and everyone else is writing up the company as just one more cross-site identity provider. There's more than that going on here, but we'll see if this startup with what it calls "the most robust APIs you'll find anywhere" is able to make the market headway that its innovative vision seems to warrant.