Google Poaching Beacon Partners For “Universal Activity Stream”
Erick Schonfeld
23 comments »
Can Google succeed where Facebook fell flat on its face? It’s been chasing Facebook with OpenSocial, its own platform for social networking applications (which still has a long way to go). But now, we’ve learned, it might be trying to incorporate parts of Facebook’s controversial Beacon program into OpenSocial. Remember, that’s the one that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to apologize for the way it was initially rolled out because of privacy concerns.
Other Websites that became Beacon partners, like Epicurious, Yelp, and Chase, would automatically send information about certain actions Facebook members took on their sites and send it to Facebook, where it would be become a part of that person’s News feed visible to all his or her friends. These messages might include things like “Mary rated a recipe for lemon pie on Epicurious.com” or “Sam reviewed the Palace Hotel on Yelp” or “Danny signed up for a credit card at Chase.” The privacy police objected, and Facebook has since made it easier for its members to opt out of the program.
Given this controversy, you’d think that Google wouldn’t touch anything remotely Beacon-like with a ten-foot pole. But a source familiar with the matter says that Google has contacted at least one Facebook Beacon partner, and perhaps more, in an effort to drum up support for its own initiative for OpenSocial, which it is calling “universal activity streams. These “universal activity streams” are meant to combine all actions you take online, similar to Facebook’s Beacon, and present them as a line of text in your personal activity feed on Google or an OpenSocial partner site like MySpace or Bebo. Within Google, for instance, these feeds could appear in Gmail, iGoogle, or Google Reader. The universal activity stream is expected to launch around February or March of next year.
All of this is still at a very early stage and Google may decide not to roll out universal activity streams. It appears to have just started reaching out to Beacon partners. Yelp CEO, and Beacon partner, Jeremy Stoppelman says, “We haven’t heard anything from Google about this. Most of the hubbub with Beacon seemed to be around opt-in vs opt-out so presumably they’d take the more conservative approach to keep everybody comfortable.” Says another Beacon partner, who also has yet to be contacted: “We started hearing about it through the grapevine. They’d be pretty stupid not to do it.” Google would not comment.
For Google, “activity streams” were always part of the plan. In fact, developers already can create similar “activity streams” for their applications. Since launch, OpenSocial’s documentation (see here) has always included support for activity streams that report on a user’s action to whatever host the developer chooses. They are consumable through a widget based on OpenSocial’s activity stream API. But Google currently specifies that these streams are not to be commercial in nature:
Posts must be about activities performed by users of your application or service. Don’t post promotional messages or other messages that don’t pertain to an actual user activity. If Google notices a client posting a promotional message or abusing the feeds, we will block that client from posting to our Activities services.
The new initiative would extend the functionality of thee activity streams to partner sites a la Beacon. But it is not clear that Google will have to change its rules or only approach those Beacon partners who share non-commercial messages. Even with Beacon, partner sites are only sharing “activities performed by users” on their sites. Where this gets blurry is when those activities themselves are of a commercial nature.
Isn’t sharing my ratings of a restaurant or hotel promotional at some level? Or is it just a helpful recommendation? The idea of gathering all of a person’s social actions on the Web and sharing them in a feed does not necessarily have to be connected to advertising, and it is something Google has been supporting experimentally with its funding of Carnegie Mellon’s Socialstream project. It makes sense to be able to share your social actions on the Web with your friends and acquaintances. Where companies get into trouble is when they let the marketers piggyback on these social interactions in inappropriate ways.
Hopefully, Google has taken to heart some of the lessons learned by watching Facebook’s Beacon fiasco. If it wants to prevent this from backfiring in a similar way, Google needs to make its program opt-in instead of opt-out (which is still the way Beacon works). It should consider keeping it purely non-commercial to start. Partner sites should not send any information to Google’s servers until the person in question has given tacit approval to do so. And consumers should be given minute control on a partner-by-partner basis about what information they want to share and what they don’t. But if these universal activity streams start showing up in my Bebo feed or Gmail with text that turns out to be an AdSense ad . . . well, that would be just plain evil.
(My colleague Nick Gonzalez contributed some major reporting for this post).
I think Google empire will be shaken soon. They want to rule everything and users/consumers hate things like that. Do no evil, my ass.
I have gone from a Facebook/Coca-Cola shill to and AdSense whore in less than a month. I feel so used!
can they fix their opensocial first? why they have to follow facbook in every step but not finish it?
Google has become evil with greed.
Todd, if you’re audience can bare it try AFF instead of Adsense. You will make a LOT more money. Again, only if you’re audience can take it. But if they can, boy you will start to see revenue come in.
The thing is that RSS already produces a universal activity stream if you just splice together all the feeds from all the apps you use - including Flickr, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming.org etc.
These are all best of breed applications - the only thing they are missing is portable social data.
These other proprietary APIs are just an attempt to hold onto user control for a little bit longer.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1835
Somebody over at TechCrunch should have picked up on this. This is very groundbreaking news in IT. MS is going to be forced into the same space as IBM soon.
Google is simply doing what GE done a couple of decades ago. Conglomerating but the only difference is the focus on the web environment.
Soon they will start to kill the non-performing investments like ants…
The no evil crap was always only for who wanted to believe in it
Don’t forget Google’s acquisition of Jaiku which can already fulfil the role of providing an aggregated lifestream based on RSS feeds from your social apps.
I would agree with Chris - this is trying to invent something that already exists in Jaiku, Plaxo pulse and others. Lifestreming does not require a new technology to get off the ground, just easier setup (as Plaxo has somewhat achieved) plus more openness in terms of RSS output from the apps you already use.
@Mark exactly my point. I’m glad people are starting to get it.
@1 Nick
I have been saying that all along, do no evil my ass. I don’t begrudge them being evil but don’t be a freaking hypocrite about it.
Facebook had to apologize not for the tracking of the data, but for the unapproved disclosure of that data to friends. I didn’t hear any of my friends up in arms over Beacon because “they’re tracking me,” they were upset because “I don’t want my web activity blasted to all of my friends.”
Privacy isn’t as important to the layman as us techies… and the New York Times writers. Sad, but true.
@Ryan - Privacy is just a form of control, and as you say Ryan - they DO want control. Control of what is published, and one day they will wish they had control of what’s stored so they can move it to the next hot social network.
@Ryan and @Chris Saad: Exactly.
The evil isn’t in the tracking. We’ve been doing that pre-Web 1.0. Heck, if you wanna get technical, there was much more precise tracking of user activity during the BBS days and the days of Telnet and non-Web based services.
It is a matter of value and permission. If you know your stuff is being tracked and what the promise of where that info will end up, you’ll have a much more happy end-user. By that same token, as I’ve said often, the user’s ROI is an important factor to pay attention to.
If the user is getting all kinds of usability out of sharing information, you’ll see less uproar from them. Compare the non-existent uproar over Google saving your browsing history for several years vs. Facebook just repeating what you did five minutes ago to your Facebook friends.
Not much difference in terms of invading privacy, big difference in terms of how the public reacted.
Soon I’m going to get my friend the Fake Chris R. and we’re going to own the market on fake personalizations of people who comment worthlessly on every thread.
Count it.
Sincerely,
The Fake Angela Hayden
ART GODDESS
Google is just a bunch of theives and conmen kids!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
“Universal activity streams”? How can people abuse the language of Shakespeare* to produce such meaningless drivel? If you hear the words ‘universal activity stream’ in isolation it doesn’t give you the faintest idea of what it means. That’s what words are meant to do - convey meaning.
Further proof that any large company inevitably tends towards bureaucracy and all that entails, including the tendency to develop their own version of English that means nothing to anyone outside it. For Google, a company that still likes to present itself as a two-geeks-and-a-garage operation at heart, this is very bad news.
*For the benefit of TC’s mainly Silicon Valley audience, William Shakespeare was a guy who lived a couple of centuries before California was colonised and was kind of like a screenwriter, only he didn’t go on strike. He wrote the original scripts for well known movies like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo and Juliet and teen comedy Ten Things I Hate About You.
“Partner sites should not send any information to Google’s servers until the person in question has given tacit approval to do so.”
Uhhh, Google is already sending information about your browsing activity back to its servers without tacit approval. Every AdSense ad unit (and soon DoubleClick ad unit) is a beacon for Google.
Maybe the only news here is that they’re trying to create some end-user value out of it.
If I understand correctly, participating Beacon sites send ALL transactions to facebook and then if you opt out, facebook doesn’t post those transactions.
What I objected to is these participating sites should NOT be sending my transactions without my permission PERIOD!!! Right now, even if I opt out, facebook still gets the list of my transactions. That is JUST WRONG!!!! Overstock.com (a retail firm) was sending transations. Would you want your Amazon purchases sent? How about your walmart, walgreens, safeway purchases?
If they switched the program so I could put out at the source then I’ve have no problem with it since I would opt out and my transations would not be send. As it is I hope someone takes them to court over it.