I’m signing up for a “sneak preview” of Google’s Friend Connect, and it’s looking an awful lot like the Openbook I just described in a recent post.
So what would this mean? Hopefully I’ll get to look at it pretty soon. I’m not stuck on the idea of building something from scratch, so if what Google is attempting is moldable into the same sort of scenario I described as “Openbook,” I’d be more than happy to piggy-back on their efforts.
Of course, there is again the potential problem of who has the data and exactly how much you can do with it. Google’s Friend Connect and OpenSocial seem promising, though, and I don’t see any reason why the data that interacts with their APIs couldn’t be on a non-Google database server, or an Openbook-style social network which simply plays nice with their APIs.
Scoble also mentioned Friendfeed as a potential Facebook replacement. I can see this working, also — in a sense. Not necessarily FriendFeed as it exists on their site, but more as an API or a platform that you could build a client for. I has sort of neglected to use or think about FriendFeed for quite awhile; Paul Buchheit said this at Startup School (approximately 23 minutes into the talk), which made me reconsider:
I don’t really consider FriendFeed as an aggregator. It performs aggregation… in the same sense that an email client aggregates SMTP traffic. So… it’s a different experience; it’s a different product.
The ability to import feeds makes it a lot more useful than… if it didn’t do that. Just as an email client that couldn’t receive email wouldn’t be as useful.
This drew a big laugh, of course. But the fact that Paul described and thought of the product in that way definitely made me want to take another look at it as something more than just a mashup of a bunch of feeds.
At any rate, I do think the concept of an “open,” distributed social network is something that would be of value. Whether or not Google’s Friend Connect has the potential to be a major component of it probably remains to be seen.
(Gosh I hate ending blog posts that way. I’m not writing a throwaway piece of crap for WIRED or something. How many retarded say-nothing magazine articles all end “whether or not X does Y still remains to be seen.” Yes, we know it remains to be seen. It’s in the future. It hasn’t happened yet. That is why we call it “the future”. Um, okay. Rant done. Maybe. It remains to be seen.)
