Last October, Google launched an attack against the much vaunted Facebook platform by promising to be even more open with its own OpenSocial. It had also managed to assemble an impressive line-up of launch partners including MySpace. For a while it seemed as if the world had split into two camps — Facebook and the rest of the world. It seemed as if yet again, Google had pulled the rug under someone with its stellar execution and superior technology. Or had it?

Fast forward just a few months later to Spring 2008. Pretty much every one of the launch partners is announcing its own proprietary extensions to the standard. It seems OpenSocial is fast becoming the lowest common denominator — a spot it shares with many such poorly executed standardization efforts. Clearly there is huge consumer benefit if there are open standards in this space. A walled garden is not the right model. But, as OpenSocial partners and application developers (including us) quickly discovered, each of these networks caters to a different user base and serves different needs — from the attention-challenged MySpace to the staid LinkedIn. So, in practice, the promise of write-once, run-anywhere will not be possible with OpenSocial. As an application developer, I am forced to design my MySpace application differently from my LinkedIn application.

A better model that is emerging is exemplified by applications such as LivingSocial, Chirp and ours (See a sneak peek below). Each of these applications is offering a valuable service and does not require you to be logged into the various Social Networks. You get to share your information and get updates from friends no matter where you are — just like you IM with friends in AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber or MSN using either a multi-protocol chat client or through gateways that allow you communicate with friends elsewhere. Users will not remain stuck in a walled garden and will cruise wherever they want to, however they want to. Then, and only then, should Open and Social be mentioned together.

“We barely had TV when I was growing up.”
“Really? So you must have been on the internet all the time then…”

This was just one of the highlights from our West Coast trip last week. Though we’re deep in developing our social web applications (coming real soon!), a colleague and I took a quick detour last week to go to the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego.

It was a great opportunity to meet and learn from a number of the leading players in the social networking space: Facebook, MySpace, Google (Open Social), application builders and users, and social ad networks, among others.

Forrester’s Charlene Li had one of the more interesting talks. She started things off with a simple concept: “Social networks will be like air.”

They’re becoming so commonplace (if you have kids, is Webkinz not your top bookmark?) that they’re just part of the environment…nothing special. Heat, food, Facebook?

Coming down the road in the not too distant future she sees data portability and then ubiquitous social networks emerging. But what do people do on social networks today? Certainly a big chunk is collecting ‘friends’ and wasting time playing lots of basic, simplistic games. The novelty of the plethora of available applications is still new, and there’s certainly lots of interest based simply on these applications’ existence, rather than any compelling value or true insight being shared. But I thing we can all agree we’re in the early innings of this game.

One of Charlene’s recommendations was to “compete on creating the most compelling social media experience, not social graph lock-in.” We couldn’t agree more. Our social web applications will leverage your existing social graph, wherever it is, while adding value to your time online and presenting opportunities for you off-line. Walled gardens, silos, whatever you call it - that just doesn’t fly anymore.

She added that you need to “develop social applications that have meaning.” Exactly. The voracious appetite for the volume of simplistic Facebook and other networks’ applications will likely wear thin and users will instead focus on a few solid applications that provide a real value-add to their social networking (whether on-line or off-).

This was good to hear. Compelling experience and apps with meaning. Sounds like a plan.