Sources: Gmail Contacts, Google Reader Subscriptions and Your Google Profile

Social Search can tab into three different sources, so you will need accounts on at least one of these services to make Social Search work.

Social search uses the Gmail contacts you have added to your friends and coworker lists and those you have chatted with on Google Talk. Social search also looks at your Google Reader subscriptions and the social networking profiles you have added to your Google Profile.

While you don't need to have a Google Profile, this service is a hub for your social networking profile on Social Search. Based on the information in your Google Profile, Google can auto-detect your social networking profiles and your friends on services like Flickr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, BrightKite and many others.

How it Works and How to Trigger Social Search Explicitly

Once activated, Social Search results will appear at the bottom of the standard search results page and will be clearly labeled as "results from people in your social circle." As Google's search evangelist Matt Cutts pointed out to us in an interview earlier today, it is important to note that not every search will trigger Social Search results. When it does, however, the results should be highly relevant.

You can also explicitly trigger Social Search from the search options panel. There, Google will now also present a list of your friends that it thinks are the most closely related to the keywords you were searching for. By clicking on a name, you can restrict your search even further and just see results from this one person.

Social Search Makes Google Profiles More Useful

This new feature will also put a new emphasis on Google Profiles. Google has made some moves to make these profiles more prominent by highlighting some profiles when users search for people, but Google Profiles has generally not received a lot of attention from users. Now, however, as the hub for Social Search, users have an incentive to fill out their profiles - which, of course, will also give Google more information about you and your social network.

Privacy Concerns?

We talked to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, search evangelist Matt Cutts, and Maureen Heymans (the Technical Lead for Social Search) and Murali Viswanathan (the Product Manager for Social Search) earlier today and the team was obviously excited about this launch. The Social Search team was especially excited about the fact social search will now make your friends' knowledge far more accessible than ever before and that this will make it easier to find trusted product reviews and local search results.

We also asked the team about how they thought users would react to the fact that Google indexes and surfaces all of their social networking profiles and connections, which could spark some privacy concerns. In reaction to this, Matt Cutts pointed out that all of the info that Google indexes is already publically available on the Internet, including a user's friend connections. He also stressed that this was an opt-in experiment.

Social Search as "A Big Chess Move Against Facebook"

Web Trends

Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious?

Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as "Facebook on sites all around the web," entered general availability this week and we had one big question - should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to authenticate and learn about their users? Will Facebook become a dominant identifier online? Will the OpenID community lose out to the company's proprietary system or will this challenge breathe new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity?

Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn't just about desktop software anymore - now it's about our identities and social connections, all around the web. We published a mind map in our post, displaying our understanding of the contrasts between these two identity systems. If you'd like to add our thoughts to that map, you can.

See also: What if Amazon and iTunes Implemented Facebook Connect?

The Distributed Social Networking Puzzle: Putting The Pieces Together

Distributed social networking - where users can connect their profile, friends and other data across multiple sites - is still a relatively new concept and not fully developed. There are plenty of companies and projects vying to be a major piece of the distributed social networking puzzle. The big Internet companies have initiatives such as OpenSocial (Google), Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, Yahoo! Open Strategy. There are also smaller company and open source projects such as DiSo and Noserub, which we explain in our post.

The End of Online Anonymity

It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead of being anonymous, faceless IP addresses; social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web.

Education 2.0: Never Memorize Again?

Memorization is a waste of time when Google is only a a few clicks away. That's what Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling books Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital, believes. Tapscott, considered by many to be a leading commentator on our Internet age, believes the age of learning through the memorization of facts and figures is coming to an end. Instead, students should be taught to think creatively and better understand the knowledge that's available online.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Pro Opinion allows you to get paid to take surveys.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

Techmeme Hires Megan McCarthy to Edit Site

Freelance tech writer Megan McCarthy just landed one of the coolest jobs on the new web, editing semi-automated news aggregator Techmeme. The hire was made last month but just announced this week by site founder Gabe Rivera. Rivera explains in a post that Techmeme has always been the product of some human intervention, primarily on the part of the bloggers whose links power it, but that "interacting directly with an automated news engine makes it clear that the human+algorithm combo can curate news far more effectively that the individual human or algorithmic parts. It really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived."

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008

In 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008.

This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish over December, listing our choices for the top web products of the year. Then at the end of December, we'll post a Top 100 list - which we'll be promoting over 2009 and opening up at some point for public voting. Check out our picks for the top 10 Semantic Web products of 2008, by clicking through to the post.

A Taste of Magic: The First Apps We Show New Users

Whether it's with your family, your co-workers or your clients - many of us like to share the excitement we have about the new, social web with others. What do you show other people to demonstrate how powerful, and yet easy to use, this new world of technology really is?

We asked our staff and a number of other advanced social web users what the one thing is that they like most to show people who are less experienced with the web than they are.

Nokia Challenges Apple and Google with New N97 Phone

This week Nokia unveiled its new flagship phone, the N97, which is clearly meant to compete with the iPhone and Google's Android platform. Unlike the iPhone, however, the N97 has a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. In terms of its other hardware features, the N97 also clearly outperforms the iPhone. The N97 supports up to 48 GB of storage, including the 32 GB that are already built-in. The phone has a 5 megapixel camera and its GPS is capable of giving turn-by-turn directions. The resolution of the phone's 16:9 touchscreen is 640x360.

Join the YouTube Global Symphony, Play Carnegie Hall

Always wanted to play in a symphony? Here's your chance - without even leaving your living room. YouTube has announced the "world's first collaborative online orchestra" - the YouTube Symphony Orchestra - a one-of-a-kind experiment that provides individual musicians with an opportunity to collaborate with other musicians all over the world. But that's not all. If you play well enough, show some creativity, and exude passion, you may find yourself seated in the famed Carnegie Hall, performing live with other YouTube musicians.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

We spotted an interesting screencast in the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, The Future of Tech, that explains distributed social networking more.

Distributed Social Networking - An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

The screencast was created by Sebastian Küpers, an Open Web and Virtual Worlds Evangelist from Germany. He starts by explaining that profiles are a building block of social networks - for example there's a lot of useful profile data in his Facebook account that he'd like to use elsewhere. Friends/contacts, messaging, groups, and activity streams are other building blocks of social networks, explained Sebastian.

He mentioned two projects that are aiming to create distributed social networks by using open standards - DiSo Project (our coverage here and here) and Noserub (a German app). DiSo is basically an umbrella project for many of the leading open standards in the social Web currently - microformats, OpenID, OAuth and more. Noserub describes itself as a "protocol" and uses standards like OpenID, RSS and FOAF.

Sebastian outlined the following use case: if you are a MySpace user and want to add someone who isn't a MySpace user to your friends list, right now you can't. But if MySpace supported the open standards that Noserub, DiSo and others are advocating (microformats, OpenID, etc), then it would be possible for MySpace to support that scenario.

Key Differences Between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect

One question that people have about distributed social networks, which Sebastian might like to address in a future screencast, is what is the relation between open source projects like DiSo and Noserub, and 'open data' projects of the bigcos such as Google's OpenSocial and Facebook Connect? Chris Messina, one of the founders of DiSo, pointed out one key difference in DiSo's Google Group in June:

"Our model is rather different than OpenSocial as I understand it, as we're trying to architect this in such a way that anyone can host their own friends list (for example) and not necessarily defer to Google, MySpace, etc... for starters."

So for DiSo, they are using the Wordpress blogging platform as their main vehicle for now. However in the same message, Chris mentioned that he's "personally very interested in the overlap between DiSo and fbConnect and OpenSocial." See also Marc Canter's comments on DiSo, because Marc's "open mesh" theories are very relevant here.

If Everything is So Open, Why Can't We Connect Yet?

There is confusion right now because all the commercial vendors are positioning themselves as open - yet they don't necessarily connect to each other! For example Google has been using the term "Open Stack" to explain what OpenSocial is doing. OpenSocial is still in development and it's important to point out that Google doesn't 'own' it, although it is obviously driving it. But OpenSocial isn't being used by key players like Facebook and Microsoft; and when it is being used by bigcos it can be buggy - a RWW commenter recently remarked that MySpace's OpenSocial implementation is "incredibly buggy". So the fact that all of the main pieces of the distributed social networking puzzle are still in beta, goes some way to explaining why ordinary people can't connect many of their profiles just yet.

We'd like to get some more feedback on distributed social networks in the comments - how would you explain the key differences between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect to people? How do you see all the different projects connecting together eventually?

Note: the idea for this post came from the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, The Future of Tech. Thanks to Sebastian Küpers for posting it. If you're want to inspire the RWW crew to write posts on certain topics, our Friendfeed room is a great place to let us know! Thanks also Zee for managing that room for us.

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.

The justification was that Mozilla was doing a better job hosting and promoting the add-ons, and the majority were the same for Flock and Firefox. Since Flock does not have enough resources to support the extension site, Evan announced the decision to "cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system". (Note the keyword 'fat', it will be important in the rest of the post).

In itself this move was not surprising. Flock's team has just released version 2.0 of its social browser and has other battles to fight. IE8 is coming out soon with innovative features. Mozilla is racing forward with Ubiquity and the upcoming Geo-aware Firefox 3.1. And Google threw its hat into the browser ring with Chrome, so competition is getting tight. For Flock to be a player in the browser market, it needs a razor focus on building a base of diehard fans. Extensions are not helping much in that respect, they're an expense, so it was logical to cut them.

Facebook Platform - The Big Up and The Big Let Down

When the Facebook platform was unveiled in 2007, it was called genius. Never before had a company in a single stroke enabled others to tap into millions of its users completely free. The platform was hailed as a game changer under the famous mantra "we built it and they will come". And they did come, hundreds of companies rushing to write Facebook applications. Companies and VC funds focused specifically on Facebook apps.

It really did look like a revolution, but it didn't last. The first reason was that Facebook apps quickly arranged themselves on a power law curve. A handful of apps (think Vampires, Byte Me and Sell My Friends) landed millions of users, but those in the pack had hardly any. The second problem was, ironically, the bloat. Users polluted their profiles with Facebook apps and no one could find anything in their profiles. Facebook used to be simple - pictures, wall, friends. Now each profile features a zoo of heterogenous apps, each one trying to grab the user's attention to take advantage of the network effect. Users are confused.

Worst of all, the platform had no infrastructure to monetize the applications. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived on the scene and looked at the balance sheet, she spotted the hefty expense that was the Facebook platform. Trying to live up to a huge valuation isn't easy, and in the absense of big revenues people rush to cut costs. Since it was both an expense and users were confused less than a year after its glorious launch, Facebook decided to revamp its platform.

The latest release of Facebook, which was released in July, makes it nearly impossible for new applications to take advantage of the network effect. Now users must first install the application, then find it under the application menu or one of the tabs, then check a bunch of boxes to add it to their profile (old applications are grand-daddied in). Facebook has sent a clear message to developers - the platform is no longer a priority.

Google's OpenSocial and The Me Too Syndrome

Apparently Google was threatened by the Facebook platform. Its quick response was OpenSocial, the open platform for social applications. Unlike Facebook, which was proprietary and closed, Google's was open to everyone. When OpenSocial was announced, techies raised their eyebrows - it looked raw and unpolished. Some of the existing iGoogle container APIs were mixed in with a new contact sharing library. But, being Google, a lot of people signed up to support it.

Fast forward one year later and how much has been done? Well some companies did implement some elements, but the overall buzz died. Why wouldn't Google put more resources and marketing behind it? Because now it doesn't matter. The Facebook platform play is over and so the marketing strategy called Opensocial is not a top priority for the search giant anymore.

Why Apple's App Store Will Be Different

Next we turn to the latest platform getting buzz, Apple's iPhone App Store. At first glance it's much like Facebook, but in reality it isn't. Firstly, the user profiles aren't visible - you can't see applications installed on your iPhone. Each user can decide which apps to get, based on a simple review-based dashboard. There's no promise of a massive network effect, although there's a simpler user experience.

Importantly, Apple wired the monetization into the App Store right from the start. Sure there are free applications, but for companies that want to invest resources and play on the iPhone for a long time, there is an instant, simple opportunity to monetize. Note that paid applications get priority listing in the App Store, which is no accident.

Apple took care of the most important part of the equation - the transaction. It was also able to insert itself in the middle and recoup some costs associated with building the App Store. In the future, if it takes off and sustains the growth, App Store will ring in significant revenue for Apple. Jobs and his team were smart to wire monetization into the platform at the outsert.

The Future of Platforms

Where does all this leave us? Certainly it's absurd to say that having Web platforms is a bad idea. Yet we're left with a bitter taste in our mouths after the latest moves from some big platform players. The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization. Here are some questions that companies need to ask themselves before delivering a platform:

• Why are we building a platform?
• How will we monetize this platform?
• Will the platform make us money, and how much will it cost?
• How will applications be able to monetize the platform?
• Can we support the platform for years to come?

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook's momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

Let us know what you think about the opportunities to plug into major platforms? What are your thoughts on the recent platform dynamics that we have witnessed?

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network's own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

Facebook is now planning to follow Google's lead and open source their platform. Previously, Facebook's platform technology only powered an app development platform on one site outside its own -- that of rival social networking site, bebo (recently acquired by AOL). An open sourced platform means that any social network could implement Facebook applications. More details should emerge in the next couple of days, according to TechCrunch, who broke the story.

Two questions immediately spring to mind following this news: 1. Does this help users? 2. Do platforms even matter?

Does An Arms Race Benefit Users

The short answer here is: no. Exposing key parts of the social networking experience as open source projects seems like it should be beneficial to users, but for as much as the companies involved talk about openness, there is clearly a lot at stake here. Google and Facebook certainly want some amount of control over user data (so far, major players here have only paid lip service to data portability) and social applications. The latest round of developments in the social networking API world have seemed a lot like a series of power grabs.

As Steve O'Hear wrote yesterday on ZDNet, "One widely supported and open standard, not two, would be in the interests of the industry as a whole."

Do Platforms Even Matter?

A quick look at the app galleries on Facebook, MySpace, or any other mainstream social network might lead you to say, "Who cares? All these apps are trivial junk anyway." And that might not be a false statement -- we even noted in January that Facebook users seemed to be losing interest in applications, and in November we argued that Facebook's users and user experience trump any app platform.

But Facebook's coming new profile design is clearly reminiscent of an operating system. As Facebook tries to become the mainstream everything, control over the dominant social application development platform on the web ends up mattering a lot.

Conclusion

Try as it might to shed its "fun" image by adding more granular privacy controls, and cleaning up its profile design, Facebook is still associated with "college socializing," the same way MySpace is still associated with high school (even though both web sites count users above college age as their fastest growing areas). One major strategic advantage that Google has gained via its Open Social iron curtain is that it has hooks in different types of social networks -- high school, college, business, international, regional, or anything in between (via Ning). That's a major selling point for social app developers choosing a platform.

Unfortunately, a platform arms race benefits no one except the eventual winner (if there is one). What would benefit users is a single, open platform standard, and a real commitment to data portability by all social networks.