Asking the right questions at the right time
I had a great Wednesday asking questions of both Mark Zuckerberg and Chris DeWolfe. First we did a workshop on ‘open data’ and then I made a nuisance if myself by insisting on asking the same dam question - twice.
“Will you please expose the unique identifiers of one’s friends to use via your APIs - so we can do what you do INSIDE Facebook - on the outside.”
I was then confronted several times during the day by folks like Eric Shonfeld who asked simply “why would a vendor open up and let their social graph leave their ‘gated community?”
Each time someone asked me that - I pointed out that MySpace would not have announced a platform at all if it weren’t for Facebook and that Google’s announcements on Nov. 5th would change the playing field again.
But taking this all to the next level - its only through actual examples of interop between systems that we’ll start to really prove that users want and will use this kind of functionality and in fact - eventually demand it.
I talked with Loic LeMuer and Evan Williams about providing some sort of interop demo for LeWeb3 which would show Twitter Followers and Followees moving into Seesmic - and vice versa. If they could do this by December for LeWeb3 - that would be coolio. And maybe Tariq Krim and NetVibes will also participate as well and provide a widget to keep one’s lists of friends - to to date and in sync.
Eric Shonfeld has nice things to say about me asking questions and here’s a video of me asking the question (after :25 of Battelle interviewing Zuckerberg. I suspect the DeWolfe interview (and my subsequent question) will be posted soon - as well.
October 20th, 2007 at 1:19 am
When people ask you “why would a vendor open up and let their social graph leave their ‘gated community?” Perhaps you should point them at LinkedIn which has been allowing you to export your contacts in CSV for some long time now. It doesn’t seem to have hurt them much. Not quite such a good analogy, but just about every webmail service lets you do the same thing. We’d be horrified if a webmail service wouldn’t let us have access to our friend’s email addresses. Why don’t we feel the same way about Facebook? Oh, right, you, me and quite a few others do!
October 20th, 2007 at 7:33 am
is there any relationship between the way facebook started up and the way facebook is renewing its promise to its users ?
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:30 am
[…] very interesting from a technology perspective. Marc Canter did his best to liven things up, asking both Facebook and MySpace’s leaders to open up their social network properties. But even Marc […]