Now that I’ve had some time to catch up, I’ve just read Jason Kotke riff on Facebook as the new AOL - and I want to assure you all that he was not paid by me to say these things.   Jason is describing social networking APIs.  We just happen to have social networking APIs - ready to go - being used by developers today.

Jason is asking for an anti-platform - a codebase which looks the opposite way of everyone else. Instead of offering a platform which locks developers into a ‘proprietary language’, Jason asks for a solution which works inherently on the Internet - which is open and controlled by no one.

The way RSS is exploited and monetized by everyone.

The way media (like audio and video) cannot be OWNED by any one vendor.

Or widgets.

That’s how important platforms are and how important it is to inter-connect social networks together.  Many can say that Facebook is perfect, while others focus on ID and the ideal API for presence or profile access.

Now lets jump to a recent debate Dave Winer and I have been having over whether folks will be members of one social network or not.  I say “no way - LOTS of social networks - cause that’s what’s happening right now.”

Dave disagrees with me - and uses a Zen metaphor to explain why there can only be just one. His name was Neo in the Matrix. The one. Me.

That’s me and you. Us. A bunch of individuals who collectively can be called a community or a bunch of people who are part of the same ’system’ or ‘platform’.  And all this ID stuff is all about us, as we’re the folks who spend the money and who drive everything.

Platforms are where people are. There can’t be one platform. But you are one person. This is where Dave is both right and wrong. The Zen metaphor works for a person, but not for a NETWORK of people.

People are multi-plural - they are by defintion going to exist on multiple networks, even if those networks are as disparate as the school my kids to go, our neighborhood, my college buddies, former work colleagues, affinities I’m a member of and my secret life as a cross-dresser.

My favorite line by Jason Kotke is this:

Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.

That’s what we have. Its called the PeopleAggregator APIs and its available in source code form and we’ll support any and all standards that anyone comes up with in this space - to continue to provide ‘open social networking‘. We actually have both web services calls and internal APIs exposed.

So whatever kind of hybrid social app or service you wanna build and however you want to inter-connect with other social networks - we have all the base constructs, pages, galleries, groups, verbs and services available - in API form.

And if you don’t want to pay us our measly scrapes of money, then go reinvent your own platform. It’ll only take about two years to do it. But the APIs should still work!  If anybody else has some open APIs, we’ll support those too!

But locking into proprietary APIs is a no no.  That’s the ‘language’ Jason is referring to.   Jason has a clear notion of what open social networking should be - and I love him for that.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 2:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.