How It Works

The "hybrid approach" - currently available in a limited beta - that Google and Plaxo have employed uses OpenID to sign in, then invokes OAuth for delegated authorization, and finally calls on the Google Contacts API to access information about contacts. And it does all of this transparently to the end user.

The first step in the Plaxo-Google scenario involves a new user being invited to Plaxo by a friend via Gmail. The invite understands the user is logged into the Google system and prompts the recipient with a "Sign up with my Google Account" button.

After clicking the button, the new user is directed to a Google Accounts page and asked to confirm their identity. The user is also given the option of allowing Plaxo to remember him or her in the future.

Accepting the sign-in request allows Plaxo to have access to the user's Google account credentials and the contacts associated with that account. The end result? The user now has a Plaxo account without all the rigamarole generally associated with a new account setup - and without a new username and password to track.

Why This Matters

While the concept of site-specific logins made sense in the early days of the Web, the idea of users being forced to develop a new identity, username, password, and profile on every site they visit - including adding all the same people as connections, over and over again - seems almost laughable today. It's definitely not scalable. Especially as password requirements become more and more stringent.

With the launch of Facebook Connect, the idea of a digital identity that could follow users from site to site moved from bleeding-edge tech people to a much larger contingent of the general populous. And the ease-of-use demonstrated by Facebook Connect put some friendly pressure on the OpenID contingent to improve the way they were managing the login process.

Plaxo's and Google's demonstration is something that could improve usability for all OpenID logins, reducing the series of handoffs that tend to frustrate and confuse users. But as Eric Eldon of VentureBeat notes, there is still more to be done:

"Multi-site sign on, like what the companies are announcing today, will be more compelling when it can bring integration down to one or zero clicks, but this is certainly a step in the right direction."

Who Wins? Everyone

This isn't a "winner takes all" pursuit or an "either/or" situation. We are participating in a Web environment where both Facebook Connect and OpenID can co-exist, because there are different applications that make both options viable and useful.

Personally, I'm not likely to use my Facebook account to access my bank and credit card accounts. But I am likely to use my Facebook credentials for social sites that would be enhanced by my existing Facebook connections. Similarly, my OpenID isn't always the right answer.

Facebook has momentum and a fervent user base. OpenID has a who's who of tech companies getting behind the concept as the preferred way to manage digital identities. Neither of these identity options are going away anytime soon.

What's best about the current situation is the rivalry between the two camps: one proprietary and easy-to-use, one open and more complex. It will be interesting to watch the two solutions push one another to become more and more simple for the end user. Because in that case, we all win.

Users Want ISPs Out of the Way

The plan for Plaxo at Comcast appears to be for the acquired company to power media publishing, sharing, lifestream aggregation and presumably contact management. The problem is that there's a whole market of alternatives for those services and many users just want their ISPs to deliver the damn internet so they can use it however they see fit.

Comcast has done a poor job of this lately. By engaging in a practice called "traffic shaping," whereby the company throttles down the bandwidth available for activities like media downloading, Comcast has made itself the poster child proving that network neutrality is a valid concern. How much further would things need to go before Comcast slows the user experience to a crawl when users seek to visit sites that compete with Comcast properties? The kind of lifestream aggregation that Plaxo offers is an emerging bandwidth hog - perhaps Comcast customers ought not be allowed to use lifestreaming apps other than Plaxo.

Likewise, you'd expect your address book to mind its own business - but that's not what Plaxo has been about traditionally. Email inboxes around the world used to be filled up with spammy requests for contact info from Plaxo. ("hi, this is Joe, could you update the contact info I have for you in Plaxo?") While the company's earliest reputation as one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web has been greatly softened lately by a very charming (and now wealthy) young exec named Joseph Smarr, the old tarnish is hardly gone from many peoples' minds. Some users complain that Plaxo is still spammy and some people in data portability circles, where nouveau hip geeks like Plaxo (and yours truly) hang out, say that Plaxo is still clearly doing what's best for Plaxo above all else.

Maybe big money on the table means never having to do more than say you're sorry, but the Plaxo deal with Comcast is liable to hit more bumps in the road than just an unpopular history.

Mismatched Visions, If Everyone's Telling the Truth

One-stop social web shopping at your ISP isn't an unusual vision at all. Plaxo's data portability talk seems at risk of going out the window for the relatively cheap price of $150m, though. Comcast is far more likely to want Plaxo to power a new line of Comcast branded social web services than they are to want their customers running links off-site to Yahoo and Google properties through their Comcast experience.

Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen. Perhaps though Comcast just wanted to acquire some human resources, including people who figured out how to spam the whole web for contact information and just a few short years later end up hated less than a telco. That is impressive, even if not enough to warrant trust from users.

From the Consumer Perspective

Probably the biggest concern from a consumer perspective about using general social networks for business networking had to do with privacy. When you start adding colleagues or other business contacts, you have to be more careful about what you expose on your profile. But with the addition of new privacy controls last week, Facebook users now have more granular control over who sees what on the site.

Profile information and other shared items -- such as photos -- can now be restricted to user-created groups of friends, to specific people, networks, or "friends-of-friends." Users even have the option of barring specific content from specific users. Though we also noted that they are so inclusive they could potentially be overwhelming for some users, they are also a necessary step in making users feel comfortable using Facebook for professional networking.

Facebook is slowly positioning itself to be a place where both casual and business networking can take place at the same time, which means that rather than maintaining two accounts -- one at Facebook and one at LinkedIn or Xing -- users could stay at Facebook and use the tools they grew accustomed to in college.

From the Business Perspective

The concerns from the business side are a little more complicated for Facebook to deal with. First, there's the issue of security. The photo lapse we reported on earlier this week may seem inconsequential for most business uses, and was apparently fixed once it was discovered, but security issues like that don't make businesses happy about storing data on a site. Another, potentially more serious (from a business use scenario) security issue that was reported recently is a phishing technique that allows users to record some information from private Facebook groups. Though the info it is able to gather was mostly benign, it still highlights the concern that business users might have about Facebook security.

It is important to note that the above concern assumes a business use case for Facebook that is slightly different than the networking going on at LinkedIn. In the above scenario, businesses would actually be utilizing the network at Facebook internally, rather than professionals merely using the site to network on their own time.

However, the larger hurdle to getting businesses and professionals to adopt Facebook as a networking platform is about attention. Unlike LinkedIn or Xing or Plaxo, Facebook is not all about business. First and foremost, Facebook has been about connecting with your friends and having fun, and that will worry business users. Facebook might have potential as a great business networking platform, but it's also a guaranteed timesink.

The Infrastructure

Facebook, of course, already has a huge number of business users, they're just not using Facebook for business. The business networks on Facebook are already enormous. Microsoft's network has 30,000 users, Google has 8,500, Well Fargo has 4,200, The US Army has 74,000, and the list goes on. Even MySpace has 407 users in its Facebook network.

The trick is to get those users to start looking at Facebook as a place for work as well as a place for play, and the way to do that may be to leverage something that LinkedIn doesn't really have: a platform full of eager developer. (Yes, LinkedIn did launch its platform last December, and it does have OpenSocial involvement, but as we've pointed out, so far it has been quite closed and the results have been less than stellar.)

What Facebook should do, is appeal to the companies that these networks -- which have grown organically as employees voluntarily joined Facebook and declared allegiance to this network or that one -- to utilize Facebook for a closed corporate networking environment. Facebook should encourage platform developers to create tools aimed at enriching company networks (or create them in house if need be), and encourage companies to leverage their existing Facebook network as a corporate intranet by installing applications on it.

That's no small task, certainly, but it is plausible. It's not the same route that LinkedIn has taken -- where company networks have grown organically in much the same way that they have on Facebook. But the end result is the same: making people comfortable enough with the network to do business on it.

Conclusion

Facebook has a history of attacking their competitors at their strongest points. MySpace had a strong widget ecosystem, so Facebook launched their application platform which forced MySpace to scramble to do that same. MySpace has strong ties to music and film, so Facebook has recently tried to forge their own (too early to tell if it is working). LinkedIn has a strong stake in business networking, and Facebook has recently been making moves to suggest that they could be laying the groundwork to go after LinkedIn's audience they way they've gone after MySpace's.

What do you think? Could Facebook ever be a place where serious business is done? Or does it pay to maintain two separate network profiles -- one for work and one for play? Let us know in the comments.

Update: According to Webware, Facebook quietly launched a "People You May Know" feature that is basically identical to a popular LinkedIn feature of the same name. Hmmm...

While Facebook certainly led the adoption of this 'feed paradigm' in social networks, in the area of integrating external web services, Facebook clearly has lagged. Startups like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and Iminta are integrating content streams from other services and Facebook may well be doing this to compete with those offerings.

I think FriendFeed has a slightly unique approach (see the differentiators section of our coverage on FriendFeed & my interview with two of the founders on Read/WriteTalk.) Regardless, the point is that Facebook is clearly playing catch up in this area. Also, it's worth noting that earlier this week FriendFeed announced that they had closed a $5 million series A round and have officially launched the service (it was previously in closed beta).

Not Enough ... Enable Sharing

Unfortunately, I don't believe that what Facebook is planning will be enough. Until Facebook allows users to take their Mini Feed and News Feed with them to other services, the sharing is all one way (to Facebook) and not compelling relative to these other services. Users should be able to share their Mini Feed and News Feed data back out of Facebook.

Conceptually: Attention Should be Portable

We've covered the attention economy regularly at ReadWriteWeb and encouraged these Attention Silos to open up. Interestingly, in the post on Attention Silos, Alex Iskold commented:

"Modern services like del.icio.us and Flickr recognize the importance and the benefits of being good citizens and letting other services access their information, but among older web players opening up this way is a taboo."

I find it amazing to say, but Facebook is still behaving like the 'older web players' in this area. This is especially remarkable, because Facebook has joined Data Portability Working Group. A group whose purpose is to:

"...put existing data portability technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used."

Ultimately, these feeds are a reflection of my attention and my network's attention and conceptually I should be able to share this with any other services I choose.

Pragmatically: User Benefits

A few times I've heard Dave McClure point out that 'open isn't better nor is closed better ... better is better.' I completely agree with this. Therefore, while I think there is a solid conceptual argument for Facebook to allow users to share their News and Mini Feed, ultimately the best reasons are that both users and Facebook would benefit. Specifically, I see three benefits:

• Display Facebook activities across the web
• Accelerate learning on other web services
• Stay up to date in my feed reader / start page

Display Facebook Activities Across the Web

If Facebook was the only place on the web to interact with content, this wouldn't be meaningful. However, obviously many of us maintain other digital identities on the web such as blogs, Tumblr pages, and even other social network profiles. On these other sites, it would be great to create dynamic Facebook badges, similar to what I can do with my Twitter Badges.

Facebook would also benefit from this by increased exposure and reminders to visit the site. While they certainly aren't struggling from a lack of awareness (they're even featured in the latest iPhone ad), I'm pretty confident that these dynamic widgets would not only be valuable to users but increase engagement with Facebook.

Accelerate Learning in Other Web Services

As data flows more and more freely across the web, it's interesting to see how other web services are able to leverage interactions. The most common example, is discovering friends on one service and adding them to another service. Facebook even does this by allowing you to discover friends based on people you email with. While finding friends is a great, simple use case, the News Feed and Mini Feed are a reflection of the activities and interests of my friends and me personally. I imagine a whole ecosystem of entirely new and creative services built off interpreting these attention streams, such as product recommendations based on your behavior in Facebook.

Stay Up to Date in My Feed Reader / Start Page

I'm sure this one would be more controversial inside Facebook, but one of the reasons I log into Facebook is to check my News Feed. I would love to be able to subscribe to the News Feed in my Feed Reader so I didn't have to login exclusively for this purpose.

While this would certainly decrease the number of times I visit Facebook just to check that feed. I actually think it would increase my engagement with Facebook, because the number of meaningful visits I make to the site would increase. My reasoning is that the significant visits are when I see a friend's action that I'm interested in learning more about. I'd still see these activities and be driven to Facebook to do this investigation.

There is no doubt this would be valuable to me as a user, I actually think it also would be valuable to Facebook as well, since engagement is ultimately what matters as long as their advertising is primarily based on cost-per-action metrics.

One Challenge: Filtering

Creating filters that appropriately share the correct information is obviously going to be an important issue to work through. This is especially true with the News Feed (more than Mini Feed), because it includes other people's behavior.

The Problem with Current News Feed Filters

I highlight this because I don't find the current News Feed preferences very empowering for filtering. Only some percentage of my actions actually show up in my friend's feed and more importantly only some percentage of my friend's actions show up in my feed. The current empowerment is limited to tweaking parameters by which certain actions are chosen and others are not (see the screen shot below).

Beyond manually adjusting these preferences, Facebook also empowers their users to 'thumbs up' certain activities from their friends to indicate an interest in receiving more similar items (see the screen shot below).

I'd specifically like the ability to do at least three things:

1. see all my friend's actions that could have shown up in my feed
2. apply my own filters to the feed
3. understand why one specific item was delivered to my feed

I appreciate that the interactions are a tough to get right, however, Facebook has a lot of smart engineers and designers and I'm confident they can tackle this. Plus, I'm sure I speak for entrepreneurs everywhere when I say that any number of startups and would be happy to help.

Conclusion

Even acknowledging that the appropriate method of filtering is a difficult problem to tackle, I think Facebook has to move to completely open up the Mini Feed and News Feed for sharing across the web. This is a topic I'm sure that will come up in my upcoming panel at Graphing Social Patterns - Social Networks and the NEED for FEEDS. However, I thought it would be appropriate to attack this lack of functionality Facebook style. Therefore, I've created a group in Facebook to request it. Please consider joining the group and I look forward to your feedback in the comments below.

Full disclosure: Sean Ammirati is the co-founder of mSpoke, which makes a product called FeedHub that filters aggregated sets of content feeds. Therefore, this is an area he has a vested interest in.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web.  Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.

Further embracing open standards, actions are published via the plugin using the Atom format and the Microformat hAtom, which Six Apart hopes will make it easier for people to move their activity streams around and use them however they like.

On some level, this development at Six Apart somewhat mirrors the direction that chief rival Automattic is taking with Wordpress: microblogging. A couple of days ago, Automattic introduced a new theme for Wordpress.com called Prologue, which adds Twitter-like functionality to Wordpress. Six Apart's plugin, meanwhile, basically allows users to create a tumblelog of content aggregated from the places they already post it (thoughts from Twitter, images from Flickr, etc.). Activity Streams and Tumblr are not perfectly analogous, the same way Prologue and Twitter are not, but they do all fit in the same category of tools.

To me these announcements points to a couple of key trends:

• A trend toward microblogging -- always on updates distilled to their most base form are becoming a more visible and important part of blogging.
• A trend toward open formats and data portability -- take your data with you and display it however and wherever you want.

So how long until Wordpress follows Six Apart's lead with Activity Streams? My guess is that the always strong Wordpress developer community won't take very long at all to kick something unofficial out. In fact, my friend Dan Grossman has been using a plugin he developed for his own Wordpress-powered blog to do more or less the same thing for months now (see it in action here). He hasn't released the source yet because others haven't expressed much interest to him. Perhaps that's about to change.

As more sites join DataPortability.org and we begin to hopefully see the fruits of their labor, things like distributed activity streams should become easier and more common.

Mark Zuckerberg's decision to make a wall street style news feed the central feature of the home page and the profile page at Facebook has been a huge reason for its recent success (and might also be the source of its growing pains)... And its been imitated all over the place these days.

Here at Read/WriteWeb, Marshall's year in review post on RSS included:

Facebook Introduced Millions of People to Syndication - No single event probably came close to the impact of Facebook's explosion in popularity in terms of popularizing the concept of syndication and feeds..."

In this post, I'll highlight why I find this so significant.

Significant Feeds in Marketplace

Facebook did lead the social networks with their News Feed. Initially, this was met by some resistance from the community (see these three Facebook Blog posts). However, eventually Facebook users did seem to calm down about this and the News Feed became one of the site's most oft-copied features. Followers include:

• Google Open Social Attention Streams (already included in Plaxo Pulse)
• MySpace Friends Updates
• Netvibes Activities (part of Ginger Release - see video below)


• LinkedIn Network Updates

Why is this significant?

In the introduction, I stated how bullish I was on the trend toward more and more applications using this feed style around users' activity. I'd like to highlight three of the reasons I believe this is such a good trend:

1. Improves Efficiency Using the Social Network
2. Increases Engagement with Site
3. Increases Awareness of Attention Silos

Improves Efficiency Using the Social Network

If you've used RSS to read content, you're certainly aware how efficient it can make you when consuming a lot of information. The paradigm lends itself to scanning a lot of information quickly and focusing on the most important content. I believe these feeds actually allow social network users to see the same benefit.

Increases Engagement with Site

Research has shown RSS are more engaged then other website visitors. It certainly would be interesting to repeat the research with feeds from social sites, but intuitively I believe these feeds have also increased engagement with these social networks. This theory is also validated by the importance thought leaders are placing on news feed optimization, such as Justin Smith and Dave McClure.

Increases Awareness of Attention Silos

The attention economy has been a big issue on the web for some time, but currently the data is still locked up in attention silos. (See an overview here by Alex Iskold.) Interestingly, the feeds these applications create do a great job educating users on the information being stored about them. All you have to do is look at the initial reaction the Facebook community had to the news feed introduction. It will be interesting to see if users ask to take their personal mini-feeds (attention) with them.

Conclusion

There certainly are features I'd like to see each of these feeds adopt. However, I believe the paradigm is a good one and the trend toward more social networks applying it is positive. Let me know if the comments below if you are equally optimistic.