By Caroline McCarthy, 3 March 2008 17:41
NEWS
On opening up Facebook
From our point of view, we think it would be great if they all did OpenSocial. From their point of view, they've got an API that fits their site very, very well because they designed it around that. OpenSocial we designed to be this abstract generalisation that fits a lot of sites and that's a lot of the value it brings developers...For Facebook, that may not be as attractive to them, but I suspect it will be attractive to developers. We've already seen somebody build a "run OpenSocial inside Facebook" thing as an experiment, and I expect we'll see more of that...Bebo's running both APIs so I expect that will be an interesting place for people to experiment as well.
On the practicalities of interoperability between social networks
It's one of those things that people talk about, bringing the users between sites. But that's one of the things that [is] actually quite hard to do, because there are two boundaries to overcome. One is that there are differences between the sites, and the other is the users' privacy concerns, which is why they've got different accounts on different sites anyway. The Social Graph API works with the publicly articulated things that are out there and connect them between sites, but that's there to work. Doing that between the private ones is a harder problem because you've got a permission barrier in each case.
It's something that we could potentially do, and the part of the Social Graph API that does the profile ID mapping stuff and canonicalisation could be used to do that, but you've still got to ask the user and connect them and things like that. And if the stuff's not public, you've got to not just ask the user, you've got to ask the user's friends about bridging the stuff. Sometimes people blur the difference between open and public. You want your code to be open, but you don't necessarily want all the data to be public because people have explicitly given it to the social network with the trust that they'll treat it in a certain way.
On maintaining individuality
Each container obviously has the ability to police which apps run on their site, and we expect to see some variations there, with some being wide open and some having "white lists" and some having "blacklists".
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Would it turn down any OpenSocial requests?
No. Would we do that? I can't even think of how we would do that, or why. It's an open standard, an API. They can check the code out and build it themselves. I expect we will see all kinds of different sites doing it. One of the interesting things has been seeing that Oracle was interested, and Salesforce.com was interested, which you don't think of in the same breath as Facebook or MySpace, but they have a large collection of information about people that's correlated together and it makes sense for them to have an API to do that.
On the blog buzz surrounding the infamous "Before you think about your business model, think about your pleasure model" quote
I first said that when I was talking to a bunch of nonprofits. I was at a conference before I joined Google, and these [nonprofits] were talking about how they can work on the web and work on their business models. And I was like, "What? Where did that come from? You're charities! You're not supposed to be 'businesses.'" A lot of it is that people think they have to put a business in it, and show revenue, and put something out...[but] you have to work out what it is you're doing that will make people want to use your site and come back to it, and why that's useful and interesting. And then, later on, you can say, "If I've got a lot of interest in this, I can probably make some money from it."
Now it does sound fantastic, because you've got to invest a lot of time and money to do something, so why would you start a business that way? Part of the point of this web stuff is it's lowering the barriers to entry. You can build an application much more easily. You can put something up and see if people like it or not, and tweak it. One of the points of OpenSocial is to make that stuff even easier because you can build an application without having your own server, you can run it inside the social network itself, you can let it store data in the social network's site, and later on you can decide, "OK, this is interesting, I've got a bunch of users in this app, I should connect them to an external server, I should work out ways of serving advertising or something."
Profit plans from OpenSocial?
It's not a 'Google open social web', it's an open social web, and this is part of our help to catalyse the standardisation and help it converge in the same way that we're working on HTML 5, we're working on TCP-IP standards and a whole bunch of other standards and open source projects in Google, because they're complementary to our core business. By making the web better, there's this nice feedback, and Google is far-sighted enough to do that and has enough money that it can keep that cycle going.
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