Jim Benedetto, Vice President of Technology for MySpace, presented a technical overview of MySpace’s Developer Platform. The presentation covered where MySpace is now and where they are headed in opening up the MySpace API.

MySpace has had a history of a strong ecosystem

• Youtube , Photobucket, Slide, RockYou are all examples

MySpace values are driving there developer platform.

• Minimal creative restrictions
• Encouraging self expression
• High level of customizability
• Beneficial to user, developers

MySpace API overview

OpenSocial APIs

• javascript/html for embedded apps
• with myspace extensions

REST APIs

• server to server comm
• Oath authentication

Actionscript APIs

• flash support

Why OpenSocial?

Openness

• openness key to Myspace success
• openess helps everyone

Portability

• developers can spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding for every social network

Leveraged existing technologies

• no need to lerrn proprietary development languages

OpenSocial Support

• full support of public spec
• currently support V0.6 with support for V0.7 soon
• MySpace specific extensions for MySpace specific features
  • bulletins
  • additional attributes for bands

Platform surface

• Profile surface
• Canvas surface
• User homepage surface (private space)
  • User specific surface
  • Enables the application to show specific data to a user
  • eg ebay bids, tweets from friends
• Application Gallery
• Application Profile

Security, Privacy and Safety
Applications will go through safety review process makes sure it doen’t spread bad or rogue code or viruses, keeps data secure and protects against rogue actions from other users

Apps will be governed by same privacy controls that are in place for members
will be using new technology to ensure that applications are safe for end ocnsumers

• Caja - MySpace and Google Joint Javascript Sanitizer
• Proprietary MySpace Technology

Balancing Virality and user Experience

Virality vs User Experience

• take long term approach to growth and distribution
• ensure clean applicaiton experience

Spam based growth is not needed for good applications

Measured approach to application growth

• Workflow limited to sending message 1 to 1

Restrictive early on, slowly increase communications channel

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, MySpace

Patrick Chanezon (Google), Chris Schalk (Google), Kevin Marks (Google), Lou Moore (hi5 Networks) spoke on a panel about building OpenSocial applications at Graphing Social Patterns West.

What does Social mean? We look at each other, talking, laughing, we help each other, we read together, we do projects together. We also have social objects that we tell stories about.

The challenge is how do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?

OpenSocial designed to do this. OpenSocial is one API that works with many websites. Just now getting through gartner technology hype cycle over the last 3 months. OpenSocial is now on version 0.7

Core OpenSocial services include people, activities and persistence. After a tour through some of the code used to make the API work, Kevin Marks described two open source projects designed to help build appliations - Caja is project designed to help prevent things from going bad. Caja is an optional Javascript sanitizer for use by developers. The panel recommended using Caja or at least tesing using Caja.

The second project is Shindig. Shindig is a reference implementation of the OpenSocial and Gadgets stack that is designed to accelerate development and deployment. The panel said that now is the time to start developing.

Update: Here is the slide show:

| View | Upload your own

And a post by panel member.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, opensocial

David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google and leader of Google’s OpenSocial team presented at Graphing Social. He started with a perspective that the cloud is here.

Fast, easy, open, and everywhere are key reasons why cloud computing wins. The cloud is about getting the computer out of the way so that we can be more productive.

How does this matter in the social cloud? Getting the computer out of the way so that we can interact more easily and be more productive. People are the killer application of the web. This is not new. Getting me to the information I want has a long history. email, newspapers, bookstores, ftp, gopher, bbs all were the beginning of this. Social used to be spelled c-o-l-l-a-b-o-r-a-t-i-o-n.

Need to get the accidental barriers out of the way.

When Google thought about social they started by asking where would it be better to do things with friends. ie add “do it with friends” to end of sentence such as - You will plan a trip with your friends.

Hard problems still out there. These are accidentalt barriers.

Fragmented authentication is a problem. Different logins across sites cause people problems. OpenID is a good start, but has a ways to go.

Fragmented social connections. Too many places to set up friend.

Fragmented applications across sites - not the same everywhere my friends are.

Goal is tomake the social web better. The end result any app, any site, andy friends without having to think about it.

First step is to share the pain.

OpenSocial’s goal is to allow you to

• Invent it
  • xxx with your friends
• build it
  • standard web app (html/javascript)
  • new JS APIs(who I am, who I know, what I do)
• Run it
  • on any social site that runs api

There were a number of surprises from launching OpenSocial:

1. Breadth of interest. Classic social networks wanted to use it, the business oriented sites wanted to use it, enterprise software wanted to use it, communities wanted to use it. Lots of different types of uses, all with the same basic use case.
2. Open source is a good idea. Shindig in Apache incubator was set up, thanks to Brian McCallister at Ning. Clear mission, open license, engaged community and real world use.
3. Execution is hard. The idea is ahead of the execution. This is what’s next.
4. Questions about can you also help with… connections across networks that extend the solution to other aspects of connecting people, apps and sites.

What’s next?

1. Get the spec and build apps
2. Contribute to Shindig
3. Join the group and grow the spec

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, OpenSocial

O’reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns West they had a speed demo night where developers get to demo apps. They ran through 10 applications. Many of them are from Facebook. We SMS voted for the best of the first six and then again for the second four demos.

Group One - Facebook Apps

• Who Has The Biggest Brain? Facebook App, 600k downloads, 4 minutes per session - 2 million minutes 22%
• Just Three Words 7 minutes on site with lots 2 hours per day three weeks to write two weeks to rewrite 3 million words, 60k stories, average size 200 words, created for public - 2%
• Puzzle Messages - simple hybrid between puzzle and messenger have total of 27 apps and 12 million users - 1%
• Ski and Snowboarding - 1200 resorts in the world - Where have you been? Show off where you have been, share photos etc. Users have geocoded where the resorts are, correcting a lot of what had been poor data about location. -9%
• Dipity - Wikipedia for timelines in Facebook - takes all the data and connects other people and publishes the results in a timeline. Allows you to add other RSS feeds to timeline. -22%
• Developer Analytics - Analytics for Facebook Apps. There’s an analytic tab that’s hidden right now. Virality(install as a result of some one else installing), Engagement(return uses), Revenue. Rolling out to private beta in next few weeks. -40%

Group 2

• Know your neighbor - Written for Orkut - Twitter for your community and neighbors on steroids. Sorts neighbors by distance from you and lets you send messages to your neighbors - 6%
• Reading Social - built on OpenSocial sharing about books across platforms. Also showed dining social, drinking social, music social - 41%
• Going Places - connecting people and places - social travel application. “Smart Travel Layer” connects to Facebook, MySpace, Orkut. Take test - match with friends on compatibility basis. Add places you’ve been. 400,000 places in database. You can see who has been to places you want to go and see how they rated that place. - 8%
• ChirpScreen - photo sharing app using a screen saver. Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts all feed the app. Has comments back to photo owner. - 43%

Note: final votes will be updated tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, GSP AppNite

Chris Messina presented about DiSo.

DiSo is a project founded by Steve Ivy and Chris Messina, built on top of WordPress. The project aims to explore the design of a distributed social network using many of the building blocks the blog software already supports, while leveraging technologies like XMPP and XFN for friendslist federation and message delivery.

Social networking is not all about the add. It’s not about stupid apps. It started out with niches, MySpace - bands, Facebook - college students, LinkedIn - professionals. They were all system centric views of social networks. This causes the view of system centric value, not people centric value. The internet is much bigger than any sytem out there. We should not consider users to be customers.

We need to move from system centric view to a citizen centric view of the world. Who are web citizens? They have identities, they have provenance, they have friends, they have agency.

What are the aspects of a distributed social network. It has a home for your data. It has the ability to manage the data. Systems should subscribe to me. I should not have to subscribe to them. There needs to be flexible permission systems.

Benefits from a distributed model. Cross pollination of value from different systems. A more up to date profile that makes it more valuable to other systems. Permission for everyone to build based upon the profile. Easier upgrade path.

Components of a DiSo site. Activity feeds are proliferating. Ability to publish friends list and ability to move it around. Messaging and notifications are critical components. Filters to handle flood of messages. Standardization of terms and permissions. Groups, grouping and events that put the user in charge. Identity consolidation and rel-me.

Technologies that are available: OPenID, Microformats, OAuth, XRDS-Simple,ATOM/APP, Jabber/XMPP

Current status: Starting with WordPress because it’s PHP and there was an existing OpenID plugin they could use. You can find out more at Diso-project.org

Update: Here are the slides

| View | Upload your own

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, DiSo, Chris Messina

Social networks are letting more people connect than ever before. With just a click, you can make friends with people around the world, and share your work, hobbies, and other interests. But how visible is that information?

Dan Farber (CNET Networks), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), David Lavenda (WorkLight), Allen Hurff (MySpace), Ben Metcalfe (Swordfish Corp / DataPortability.org) discuss managing privacy and data portability for social networks.

Where are we on data portability?
We are still in a walled garden environment. I may be a Digg user, but finding all the other people I know is a pain. People keep scraping your contact list to find other people. We need to get both the technical and the human side of this to work.

Discussions about online reputation, who owns comments etc need to be taken into consideration with respect to how you support data portability and still manage privacy.

What do we need to do to bring intranet data to social sites?
On the data side is the primary issue is how to manage security and access to data. On the work flow side, control over data and data security is a big issue. Secure Enterprise 2.0 initiative is just now getting up and running to focus on the issue.

Where are we on the Data Portability Initiative?
Companies recognize it is a big problem. It has taken time to pull the group and organization together. A number of start-ups will announce when they release products. Across the board there is support, but it is taking time. Are companies still protecting there data or will those that go open gain an advantage? Still an open question, but these large companies want to be involved to help shape how this concept will scale.

How do we get consumers to grok this?
Build real use cases that the consumers understand. When you show them in a way that makes sense to them. Who gets to see your photos etc? Once consumers see it working the right way somewhere they will point to it as an example of what they like.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, data portability, privacy

Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies.

Jeremiah walked through the challenges facing developers as it relates to monetizing apps and walked the panel through how they view these challenges.

One word description of the business models of the panelists:

Forrestor - library, Clearspring - connector, newsGator -Kitchen, Widgetbox - Color Me Mine, Gigya - Spine for Social Media

Measurements and ROI
Not well developed today. How do we measure in a distributed world? Technically we can collect the data, but real communication gap in connecting web data and ROI. Do we get sales bump? Can we measure that like we can with coupons? Need to start with monetization strategy to decide how to measure so that we can structure data collection and measurement correctly.

Brand protection
How can we make sure Pepsi ad does not put next to Coke ad? You can’t. Consumers own the brands and they decide what’s relevant. Give consumers tools to market and evangelize on your behalf.

Distribution
How do we get widget distribution? Well known brands will get picked up, but problem for the remaining 99.9%. One option is to put the widget into ad units, but that might not have contextual relevancy. Getting close to the community may be the best option.

Monetization
How to make money? Everything that’s new, is not so new. There’s the social apps that are view/impression based. Starts with CPI (cost per install) basis. From a publisher prospective, extension of your content. This gets into revenue sharing deals that need to be worked out. The challenge is to get both parties to agree on the split. For advertisers, they want distribution they can pay.

We will learn a lot from the entrepreneurs out there about how to monetize.

Widget Strategy
How do we build a widget strategy? Need to understand full scope of process. need to define end to end success: conceptualization up front, distribution, measuring success on the back end. Start with objectives, for example, awareness=distribution, insight=installations. Take the top one or two things they come to you for and let them take it away with them. If its search, let them take your search with them. Really identify with your audience. Respect them. If it’s not popular on your site, it won’t be popular as a widget. Think of a widget as an extension of your website. Link it to your web monetization strategy.

Mistakes
What are the biggest misconceptions? Assuming it will be viral. eBay created a Facebook widget that doesn’t get used as compared to a third party widget that gets used on websites. The eBay widget doesn’t get used because Facebook is not about shopping, but the website widget gets used because it can be used to drive traffic to auctions.

Confusing information like a news feed with being social. To be social, it needs to be interactive, engaging and make my day. Really social apps that deliver value get lots of clicks.

Questions:
Can revenue be derived from utility as opposed to advertising? Look at Widgetbox - they make money. Lead gen applications like credit apps can be very profitable.

How do you work with a client to budget for widgets and media distribution? Costs can be anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 for development. For distribution, look at online marketing campaign for examples.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, widgets

Facebook has Platform. Google has OpenSocial. Many social networks are choosing to also roll out their own application platform offering.

Oren Michels (Mashery), Seth Sternberg (meebo), Jessica Alter (Bebo), Jeff Roberto (Friendster), Chris Damsen (Netvibes) discussed some of the different social networking platforms.

To add to the competition, Chris, from Netvibes, announced that Netvibes was releasing its platform. Code name Ginger.

We have a lot of competing platforms beyond Facebook and OpenSocial. If you look globally, different platforms have very different penetrations of different geographies. It presents challenges for application developers who must publish on different platforms and opportunities for other developers to make their versions of popular apps for other platforms.

It’s still really early as we are only 8 months into this platform API proliferation, so there is still time to get involved and innovate.

Every platform wants to embrace every application, but also wants to differentiate their APIs to expose unique features of their networks. This makes it tough for developers to really scale across different platforms. Seth, from meebo, talked about how the IM networks have competing standards and how it would be “way” better to have a write once standard for developers and users. The issue is who sets the standard and what risks does this pose for the others.

Jessica, from Bebo, points out that each of these companies would like to have healthy and well developed ecosystem, and that they have different functionality so one standard may not fit across all the networks. Bebo which has embraced the Facebook standard as part of it’s API, and it takes a few hours to port a Facebook app to Bebo. To port to Friendster, it could take hours to days.

Question: Most surprising group to join network:

Meebo - Librarians
Bebo - US community very engaged and younger
Friendster - expats moving around the world
Netvibes - well distributed user base

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, platform wars

Sean Ammirati (mSpoke / ReadWriteWeb), Ian Kennedy (Yahoo!), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google),and David Recordon (Six Apart) spoke on a panel about feeds.

What’s social about feeds? Feeds help you keep track of what you friends/family are doing and can also be used a social filter for new content discovery.

The panel discussed what’s public and what should be private. A concern was raised about how the norm with a feed is sharing, unlike email where there is somewhat of an understanding that it is not something that should be public. In reaction, it was important that there should not be surprises. The user should have control over what information gets shared and with whom. Facebook doesn’t allow user activity to be shared via a feed and the panel felt it should be open.(applause)

The very public is easy, the very private is easy. It’s the middle ground that’s hard. The balance is where the focus needs to be.

The other factor is to be a good partner with the content providers. For aggregators of feeds, sending traffic back to the site that generated the content is really important. The challenge is to drive enough value back to the source to make sharing worthwhile for everyone.

When focused discussions happen within a friend based network the discussion can be much higher quality than a wide open public conversation like those on YouTube. It was observed that as more and more content flows onto the social networks and into feeds, we will see an increase in the need and value of filtering.

Clearly feeds are valuable, but there are some real business model issues to be resolved as more and more mashups integrate content from across the web.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, feeds, lifecasting

Rodney Rumford, Editor & Publisher of FaceReviews.com, speaks about how use Facebook for branding. The audience is large with 66 million people and 16,000 applications. People are spending 20 minutes on site.

Rodney views it s frictionless WOMA, facilitates customer acquisition and drive low cost customer acquisition with specific demographic targeted marketing.

He describes how Facebook can be used for Lead Generation, brand extension, exposure and loyalty.

Suggests that marketers start experimenting.

8 ways to market on Facebook: Apps, groups, paid groups, tarted ads, newsfeed ad buys pages, beacon, and guerilla.

Scrabolous is the new golf - a new way to micro-touch and communicate. Where I’ve Been - good example of how a brand can sponsor an app and is aligned with Orbitz. Firefox group is an example of sponsored group. Facebook Ads is a self service ad solution that allows you to target demographics networks Social Ads with personal relevancy. CTR is low(my experience with CTR is 0.02%). Pages are another way to market. What’s the difference between groups and pages. News feed $100k to buy the banner. 1 ad per page. Third party ad networks like Cubics and Zynga (game network) have emerged to advertise on applications.

Rodney describes steps to success that include a clarity about end goals and a willingness to experiment.

Questions:

What about forced invite numbers? Tested forced invites with greeting card application - forced invites worked, but now growth remains.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, facebook marketing