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Will Google “Friendster” Facebook? « Scobleizer

Scoble makes a really interesting point. He says “Can the social graph be componetized so that I could add a social network to my blog, for instance?”

OpenSocial is blasting open the door to the long tail of social networks. Every blog on the planet can roll it’s own “MyBlogLog”-like social network and applications that work with it.

So many angles to think about. How fun.

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Tags: facebook, google, opensocial, blogs, social networks

Google’s Response to Facebook: “Maka-Maka”

Amazing, I was just writing up something like this yesterday. I said:

For good measure, you could also add in GPhone data – who is in my address book, what I’m saying over SMS and phone conversation (transcribed into text via a service like Jott), and my location. The only part (and I admit it’s a crucial part) that I don’t understand is how Google will benefit by “out-opening” Facebook. My guess is that more data = googly goodness. Google will know more about you if you take Google with you, or bring the places you visit to Google.

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Tags: Google, social networks, platform

Leak: More Evidence of Comcast’s Non-Net Neutrality

This might push me to cancel my comcast subscription.  Collecting metrics about bandwidth demographics and mix is OK with me, as is various Security features, but controlling bandwidth is a no-no (even if it is for “non-Comcast customers”.

The utility companies scale with consumer needs. Why shouldn’t ISPs?

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Tags: netneutrality, comcast

The User-Generated Content Reality

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins gets it right – there is more to User Generated Content than content that users explicitly create. Web 2.0 includes what Read/WriteWeb calls the “Implicit Web” – people’s clickstream, searches, and purchasing behavior. This, of course, is what we at Amazon.com’s Personalization team have been doing for almost a decade.

At Amazon.com, we have a popular feature called “Customers who bought this also bought”. This feature could not exist in any form without customer actions, which makes it (IMO) User Generated Content. Now, it’s not User Created Content, like customer reviews are, but the product relationships are certainly generated by users.

More Amazon.com examples – Personalized Recommendations, Behavior-based search, Top sellers lists, Personalized ads.

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Tags: amazon, web 2.0, implicit web, personalization

Web Warrior – Forbes.com

This article reminded me that the Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Google platform wars may be a little premature. The biggest platform, outside the OS, is the browser. Everyone uses it, and through the browser, everyone accesses all other sites. Your browser stores your account information, commonly submitted form fields like email address, street address, credit card numbers. There are already a multitude of extensions.

This article reminds me that Google is working on a Google-branded Firefox browser. My guess is that this ties right in with Google’s claim to release a platform that is more open than Facebook’s. What if they centered it around the browser?

Here’s how this would work. Google knows my social network from Gmail, GTalk, and Orkut (if I use Orkut). Google knows all of my login credentials for all sites on the internet because every time I log into a new site, Google asks me if I’d like to save that information with them so that I don’t have to be bothered with logging in to Amazon, Netflix, eBay, etc. Google has access to my areas of expertise by applying semantic analysis (like what Twine does) to my emails (Gmail), documents/spreadsheets/presentations (Google office suite), and local files (Google Desktop). Google knows my financial portfolio (Google Finance). Google knows what areas I’m interested in (Google Reader, iGoogle, and my browsing history).

Mozilla could do this too – Combining Thunderbird (email) and Sunbird (Calendar) with Firefox  would get you a social network, areas of interest, and login credentials. Various extensions have been created for RSS aggregation, messaging, bookmarking, etc. I think it would be a hell of a bold bet, but an interesting one.

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Tags: facebook, google, firefox, platform