The unfolding chess game of implementing the open web
More and more vendors are releasing building blocks mechanisms for constructing distributed apps, services and inter-connected social “what-cha-mah-callits” that utilize widgets, OpenSocial, Gadgets, APIs and standards like OpenID, microformats and oAuth.
This is the continued movement towards building the open mesh I’ve talked about previously. Clearly there will not be one vendor, one approach, one set of APIs or even one set of constructs that will unite the pieces together.
Rather there will be a hodge podge of different notions of what friendships and relationships are. There will be friends and there will be followers. Plurk has both.
There will be track and there will be IM. And all sorts of forms of microblogging.
Photo sharing seems to be grokked, and video has entered the mainstream, especially when it comes to video comments and real-time streaming.
XMPP appears to be having a comeback (or shall I say it’s slow evolution is coming to fruition!) while other standards like oAuth are also coming into their own.
Statistics, analytics, getting brands and marketeers involved, figuring out “where’s the beef? (i.e. business modes) is also healthily evolving, while social networks themselves are opening up realizing that his new world order can shift on a dime and abandon them faster that you can say “hmmm - I like this new service” POOF! and they’re gone!
Our company - Broadband Mechanics is building this sort of stuff - and deploying it to customers as we speak. We’ve brought social features to Bell Canada’s move downloading site - BellVideoStore. We’ve inter-connected a social network to a series of content sites for InteractiveOne (the folks who own 70 black radio stations, a TV station and magazine.) We’re working on other projects right now.
The distributed web is happening, Clearspring is serving almost 5B widget views - a month now. With each new widget platform announcement, we’re seeing the combination of client side intelligence (Java, Flash, Ajax) combined with back-end analytics, statistical collection and gateways to just about every other service out there - and the whole thing gets wrapped up within the context of “social”.
God bless the social web!
So what are the common notions and constructs that we’ll all share - regardless of implementation scheme or technology basis?
- personal profile pages - both public and private
- groups - and/or some form of clustering (rooms, clubs, mail lists, etc.)
- content permalink pages - isolating just ONE idea/item
- a gallery of stuff, and albums or playlists or slide shows - within that gallery of stuff
- private messages wthin some controlled ‘mesh’ or alliance
- contests, promotions, offers; getting money into the hands of influential users and bloggers!
- some connection into the Live Web (see XMPP) - presence
- the fact that the user must control their own data - whether directly - or via it’s movement via other users
So welcome Zembly, welcome Sprout, congrats Gigya on “bringing social to widgets” and here comes Clearspring. And lets not forget Snipperoo, Widgetbox and all the rest.
It’s brave new distributed web we’re building and lets not forget that the users will want to connect all these widgets together - inside some sort of dashboard like NetVibes, iGoogle or MyYahoo.
This is all perfectly timed for next week’s Web Widget Expo in NYC. Basically this is what my speech is about there. 