Google’s Director of Product Management Joe Kraus (the guy behind Open Social and other Google products) is talking today at the Supernova Conference in San Francisco on the topic of “social computing” and the how Google Friend Connect fits into the ecosystem with OpenID, OAuth, etc. The live stream is below.
Note: The video halts around the 9:23 mark because of bad reception. You’ll need to manually seek past that point to continue watching until the end.
Kraus talks about how social networking may be the “new black”, but connecting people on the web is not a new idea. A shift is occurring, however, from sharing information actively (emailing photos to friends directly) to sharing it passively (uploading those photos to Facebook where they will show up in friends’ news feeds). The “publish, then filter” mentality leads to more sharing because people don’t worry as much about appearing self-important.
He sees the web as evolving to a point where it’s entirely social. Just as user generated content can be distributed across websites now, users’ social connections will span sites in the future. Google Friend Connect is meant to facilitate this evolution by tackling three main problems: establishing identity, authorizing sites, and distributing social applications. The three standards at the core of this project are OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, which respectively address each of those problems.
Thanks for transmitting. Very interesting for our social business network.
what’s up with the chat on Qik. Seems to be broken.
The ultimate meta photo http://www.flic...ect/2585814988/
Scoble has just made a meta photo as well (you can tell by the laughing at the end of the video)
Arrington live streaming means chaos
The speech of Joe was very clear specially in the 3 big trends of today SN: behavioural change of information discovery, behavioural change of sharing and the evolution from social network to social web
Poor Joe, he should be running that place, but alas, because he doesn’t have a PhD, he’s forbidden from having a title above director level, and even then, they had to make a special HR exception. He’s a good sport for hanging in there, though. The only smart product strategist in the whole organization.
Gaggle is evil people! These parasites have nothing constructive to say!
More notes and pics from the conference:
http://blog.noovo.com/
my friend went to high school with this clown…all he could say about joe was that he was a rich kid who got into stanford…he didn’t say anything else about him..he was not to EXCITED about his or his companies that he started….first yahoo kicked his ass and now zoho.com and wordpress.
@lance:
Are you saying his “success” (Excite IPO, JotSpot acquisition) was due to connections or he was just lucky?
His number 2 was weak. I think in most cases people THINK others will like what they say, while the person receiving doesn’t find it as important. His argument was people are afraid to tell others cause they might feel insecure, but I find it more the opposite.. everyone telling me info and in their mind it is sooo important, but I could really care less.
His number 1 point was spot on. I can take it to the next level, but not before we release.
His number three I am still debating. In theory it is sound, but I need to think more about it.
Thanks for the post.
awesome!
Data portability, and especially Google Friend Connect seems to me as a way for Google to deal with its lack of penetration in the social network atmosphere. Their US-failure in Orkut has made them look for some other ways to have access to all that information.
Although the idea of data portability does seem appealing to users who are “forced” to use several networks.
Passive information delivery can certainly be powered by social networks and social network dynamics. I also agree that the web of the future will have an underlying social network layer that is yet to be built and deployed. Yet companies need to move away from thinking about social networks as purely friendship-based or as purely symmetric and undirectional. Creating an open architecture for friend-sharing that spans across multiple websites certainly does not solve true informational problems. Technologies and applications of the future will allow for contextual networks to form organically, as they do in real life, purely based on individual behaviors. In doing so, information will be able to propagate passively through individuals in a seamless way but also, necessarily, hop over homophily and friendship circles and into new realms of relevancy and expertise. It does not need to be said that our informational problems certainly reach farther than finding pictures of who went partying with who last night.
What’s with all the fancy lingo… it’s called shared attention!
Attentionsoft, Inc. circa: 1/07
Old news…
Google like Microsoft circa 1995 – slow follower.