Already for a long time questions about the future structures of the web unconsciously flow through my mind. Now, in this post I will not give definite answers to those questions (sorry! :-)). But in this context I noticed the news that Yahoo! will allow you to login with your Facebook identity on Yahoo! properties through Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will allow you to login with your Twitter account on all sites using it.
This actually implies that Facebook and Twitter have sunk their teeth deeper into the social web infrastructure. On the surface this sounds like a great idea; many people are using Twitter and at least an order of magnitude more people are using Facebook. But as is pointed out in this excellent post on Read Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick these deals sidetrack open standard initiatives that work to create an open social web infrastructure.
This infrastructure will:
- Allow you to have more control over your social web identity (OpenID)
- Enable streaming & aggregation of your social activities (e.g. Tweeting, liking, commenting, rating, etc.), and standardized interpretation & use of your activities throughout social web service, across the web. (Activity Streams)
- Allow for a portable description of your profile (e.g. interests, dislikes) that can be used on social services to find people, products, services and content that could be of interest to you. (User attention profiles)
- Allow you to have more control over what of your identity, social activity and profile can be accessed and what not (OAuth)
By choosing branded identity systems, fully controlled by subsequently Facebook and Twitter, further adoption of open standard solutions and ultimately new social web innovations are slowed down.
Of course, on the short term these are good deals for Yahoo! and Google, their services become more valuable for the Twitter and Facebook users to use. However – and now I finally come to the thesis of this post – with these decisions the potential long-term business opportunities of an open social web are not recognized. To make an analogy, this is somewhat similar to companies that can’t see that investing in sustainable solutions (in the resources & environmental sense) actually make money instead of only adding to costs.
To give an example: data about users (which is usually highly guarded) allows services to show them relevant ads or, for instance, link them to the right partner resources (e.g. news items of a partner publisher). But what if they could have easy access to the social activity of users from across the web, instead of only within a few selected networks? Or, what if they could have access to very rich profile descriptions, aggregated over time from all over the social web?
Now you (or for that matter Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter and any other service) might wonder how services can differentiate in this open social web infrastructure? Well, services can focus even more on what matters the most: catering different user needs by offering specific functionality in the best way they can… using all the data the open social web will offer. Joy!
Please let me know what you think of the thesis in this post. Could an open social web work? Will it bring more opportunities instead of less? Will the status-quo of branded social network hegemony prevail or will an open social web win in the end?
Tags: activity streams, ampl, Facebook, Google, identity systems, OAuth, open social web, openID, profile standardization, social identity, social networking, standardization, twitter, web business, web establishment, Yahoo
