Marc's Voice

The Chess game of social networking

I’ve been in this chess game of social networking from the beginning. I had a design called ‘the Community Commons’ which I shopped around in 2001 and 2002 and I have prior artwork to ’social web’ applications and ‘faces being used in software’ - dating back to 1995.

My first involvement in what’s officially called ’social networking’ was with a system called Tribe.net. That system was chasing after Craigslist and even though we HAD social networking - the founder Mark Pincus - was so focused on Craigslist - that he missed the fact that Tribe had a very rich set of features and a rich, vibrant community of ‘Burning Man’ enthisiasts. So using the chess game metaphor - we got check mated early on - and never recovered.

I then created an early version of PeopleAggregator - utilizing contributed open source talent (thank you Eric Sigler!) and learned first hand - how hard it is to make ‘open source’ projects work. That project was well inteneded but failed at offering a stable platform. But it taught me whole lot about this chess game.

I then went on to ‘be involved’ in other ‘customer facing’ social networking plays - including aSmallWorld, 1UP, Cyworld-US and the GoingOn Networks. In each case I helped architect and design the system with others, hoping to collaborate and find the right mix of timing, money, talent and technology to make customers happy.

But while Friendster dominated originally, and then MySpace and now Facebook - I awaited my other ‘colleagues’ in the business - folks like Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson, etc. - to catch up and figure out what was obvious to me - that this social networking game was yet another lock-in Web 1.0 strategy.

I also was consulting folks along the way - AOL, Conde Nast, EMI, Cyworld, Elsevier, Laszlo Systems, Ruckus Networks, Acteva, Marqui, etc. - hoping to make them aware of the potential of social networking and how important it was to ‘free the user’s data‘ and to ‘open up social networking‘.

Using that consulting money - I bootstrapped Broadband Mechanics and built out a platform - which was designed from day one to define a new kind of chess game. It had to be LAMP, have source code available, be affordable to small startups, but free to students, developers, non-profits and government agencies and have a business model baked in which would exploit enterprises, SaaS scenarios and make LOTS of money off of custom work for hire, support and training.

This is what Red Hat, MySQL and JBoss were doing and I saw no reason why this couldn’t be applied to social networking and blogging. Wordpress meanwhile kicked ass in the blogging arena and SixApart built up a strong portfolio of offerings as well.

Now the cats out of the bag. Pandora’s Box is open. And everyone else is figuring out the chess game.

As Fred Wilson writes (the Open Social Network):

We’ve got social networks with lots of users, like MySpace, Beebo, Facebook, etc, and we’ve got open social networks like Marc Canter’s People Aggregator and Marc Andreessen’s Ning. But we really don’t yet have an open social network with a lot of users.

…..

….most of Facebook’s traditional users (like my two daughters) don’t care that their data is locked up in Facebook. I’ll show them my Facebook running in Netvibes when they wake up this morning and they’ll say “that’s nice dad but why would you want to do that?”.

My teenage sons don’t understand why they need to worry about being in an ‘open social network either [NOTE TO SELF: Get Fred's girls together with my boys!]

But history is on our side. History will prove that by freeing the end-user’s data, a distributed mesh of inter-connecting social networks and blogging platforms will create an ecosystem in which ALL software vendors and plaforms can participate in - equally.

That’s what’s wrong with MyBlogLog, Twitter and Facebook. They’re coolio platforms, but they’re closed.

The people will eventually come.  That’s for sure.  Humans are migratory beasts and as soon as they figure out that they’ve been locked-in - they’ll rebel.

In the recent TechCrunch review of the ‘hosted social network space’ - Mark Hendrickson writes:

Broadband Mechanics’ PeopleAggregator is an experiment in building social networks around open standards so that people can easily move between networks, whether or not those networks are run by the same owners or contain the same features. If the social networking world were run the way Broadband Mechanics’ CEO Marc Canter envisions, Facebook users would easily be able to carry their identity (including all the information they owned on Facebook) over to MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster. Then any changes to their identities on those networks could be brought back over to Facebook.

As a model for this sort of interoperability, PeopleAggregator (which comes in both hosted and downloadable versions) implements the OpenID authentication system and strives to support all open standard identity schemes. Broadband Mechanics also provides an API that is meant to enable the import and export of data to or from a PeopleAggregator network. As a long run strategy, the company entreats web service providers to embrace open standards that facilitate interfacing between social networks and non-social networks such as Google Calendar, YouTube, and Yahoo Messanger.

Well he’s right. PeopleAggregator IS for the future.

I just don’t see any other way of building a platform for tomorrow. Without the fundamental building blocks of openness and flexibility, I can’t see offering end-users yet another social network which will lock them in.

What Mark got wrong is that hosted social networks aren’t really white labeling, as they can’t be customized to the customer’s exact specifications. That’s where our custom work and consulting comes in - for either SaaS or source code deployments.

So that’s why we’re helping to put on a DataSharingSummit.com on Sept. 7-8 in Richmond, CA. Broadband Mechanics can lead the way, but we need AOL, Yahoo, SixApart, Google, Clearspring, Cerado, Leverage, Elgg, dabble, Plum, Klostu, NetVibes, PageFlakes, Sxip, JanRain and others to help establish open standards as well.

As Dave Winer points to this Mashable post which talks about ‘tension’ between aggregators, start pages and end-users….

The tension is indicative of what’s happening with aggregators: they’re all motivated to keep you on their own platforms for as long as possible, rather than giving you absolute freedom to take your identity wherever you like. Right now, it’s hard to make money without owning the user’s identity in some way; user lock-in remains the strongest business model, even though superficially they exist to hand more control to you.

To quote Dave….. (which Fred quotes as well):

To all vendors who are tuned in, look for ways you’re keeping your users from managing their own data. The users are getting educated, fast. Better to be on the right side of this one.

Facebook could easily be the place where the dam breaks. It’s attracting so many users, who may at some point realize that they want control of the data that’s locked up inside Facebook. Then vendors who have been on the right side of this issue will be the heroes.

So I call upon Tariq Krim of NetVibes to keep it real and open dude.

And to all those dudes and dudesses at Facebook - I hope you realise you’re not done - yet - til you let your end-user s move ALL their data and their ‘News Feeds’ wherever the hell they want to, including back INTO Facebook.

And finally I’ll quote Dave again - dating back to 2005:

People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.

No one vendor has to WIN the Chess game. We can all just hang out in the park and play chess, backgammon, gin rummy, Go, dance, juggle, sing or just read the paper. We can all parrticipate in a Community Commons of people, technology and commerce - and live happily ever after.

It doesn’t always have to be about winning or losing.