OpenSocial. Yawn.

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Gerald Kanapathy's Blog | November 4, 2007   2:11 PM | Comments (1)

Google and a bunch of sites with not much traffic (aka "losers") came out in support of OpenSocial. Is it better? Does that mean the end of Facebook?  My take on it is that this isn't particularly important. While the tech press and spin machines get all excited about the thousands of apps available on Facebook, I don't think the apps matter much to Facebook's success. Oh, I have no doubt they make some marginal contributions to visit duration and pages viewed per user, but I think the overwhelming value of Facebook resides in the set of users, the set of relationships between users, and the small handful of apps (Poke, Wall, Message, Status, maybe Photos/Notes) that let you see what your friends are doing. The sorry part then, about OpenSocial is that it tries to take advantage of the least useful feature of these networks. I guess it's clever of Facebook, Google et al to push and hype it, because hey, it gets other people to put in free (free to the network owners) effort to capture the incremental usage. And an apps API gives bandwagon-jumpers and trend-chasers (San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the technology business press are poisonous with these) some way to associate themselves with success.

Am I too cynical? Well, let's look at that:

• There are thousands of Facebook apps, but I haven't found a good way to search for or sort by useful ones. Don't kid me with that "viral among your friends" line. Despite what Web 2.0 (wow, doesn't that term already smell like "dot-com"?) rhetoric would have you think, "Viral" doesn't means the results are good or useful. And in the Facebook apps ecosystem, the results look like smallpox. All I get from my friends is Movies, Zombies, Superwall, Funwall, Graffiti, Superpoke, and the usual. I can only conclude from this that no truly useful apps exist, or that the viral mechanism doesn't work that well. Neither conclusion speaks much for the significance of apps.
• Facebook group pages can't even have apps added to them. That doesn't seem to hold them back much. (The biggest thing holding back Facebook group pages is that activity in a group I'm in doesn't make it to my news feed. Hey maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the inability to put apps on a group or network page is the biggest thing holding them back, and Ning will slaughter them for it.)
• MySpace seemed to get by without any apps API. The main thing that hurts them is that their PR department isn't as good, and their user demographic isn't as aligned with technology and business journalists. Also the pages look like crap.

Hey, wait a minute there. I'm supposed to be all about how ALUI Portal (Plumtree, whatever) is great because you can build apps in it, just like on Facebook or OpenSocial. Right? So, why am I undercutting this?

I'm not. I'm not saying that remote applications plugging into a personalizable framework is bad or useless, not at all. What I am saying is that, in the context of a social network, it's not that important. In a social network (especially ones that rely nearly entirely on user-generated content), the applications are pretty well defined, and Facebook's got them covered: poke, individual messages, posting of items and status, and that's pretty much it. You get some specialization of applications for different types of messages or content items (for text, or links, or video, or photos, or documents; or a Zombie attack instead of a message), sure, but there are only a few of those (and sure enough, all the functionality of the "Superwall" and "Funwall" apps were quickly incorporated into the Facebook standard Wall app).

But in an enterprise portal, it's different. There, you do have specialized apps doing specialized things, needing information from various other types of systems and applications. You do in fact need to be able to write portlets (or apps) and you can get useful value from it. That's why JSR-168 and WSRP have been around for years while Facebook and OpenSocial both showed up in the past six months (or six days).

Another way to look at it is that the social sites are basically specialized cases of a portal application. They solve a specific application, namely, to connect users, and let them post messages and share content. For this, there are only a few applications needed. (In Plumtree/ALUI, we've had Collaboration Server applications providing document sharing and message posting for about seven years now.) But an enterprise portal needs the more general app/portlet plugin API, as that's core to getting enterprise functionality.

Of course, it's possible that someone could take OpenSocial or Facebook and write some really useful application for it. For example, a social network about cars might have some application that would take a VIN and list out parts and add-ons and notices about your car or something. (Or, in the real world, on MySpace, bands can put up tour dates, songs, etc.) But as useful as that is, it's not core to the value of a social network like Facebook. The value is simply in the connections to other people. That's not to say that they couldn't orient themselves around specific interests or apps, and thereby make these matter (much as MySpace has done in the specific area for artists, or that Ning is kinda-sorta trying to do) but right now they're both buying and selling the "personal connections" story. (Possibly to distinguish themselves from "community sites" which are pretty Web 1.0.)

I'll have more of this to come, because ALI 6.5 (that's the next portal release due early next year) is going to have some more of the social networking features, and I'll want to talk about how they apply, and more importantly, don't apply, in the enterprise.

Comments

• I agree with you about 99% about the nice-to-have (but not need-to-have) utility of most Facebook applications. However, if you use Google reader, the Feedheads app is about the most useful thing I've found on Facebook. Besides putting a nice presentation layer atop my Google Reader shared items (including a tag cloud), it publishes out to my friends the articles that I find interesting. Likewise, I can look at what my friends find interesting or look at top shared items globally (outside my network of friends using Feedheads).

  Again, this is probably functionality that I can live without, but I find Feedheads to be a very useful way to engage with others by sharing RSS media content.

  Posted by: bucchere on November 5, 2007 at 7:50 AM