Recently, my status message on Facebook was I'm now convinced microformats are a stupid idea. Shortly afterwards I got a private message from Scott Beaudreau asking me to clarify my statement. On reflection, I realize that what I find stupid is when people suggest using microformats and screen scraping techiques instead of utilizing an API when the situation calls for one. For example, the social network portability proposal on the microformats wiki states

The "How To" for social network profile sites that want to solve the above problems and achieve the above goals.

1. Publish microformats in your user profiles:
   1. implement hCard on user profile pages. See hcard-supporting-profiles for sites that have already done this.
   2. implement hCard+XFN on the list of friends on your user profile pages. See hcard-xfn-supporting-friends-lists for sites that already do this. (e.g. [Twitter (http://twitter.com/)]).
2. Subscribe to microformats for your user profiles:
   1. when signing up a new user:
      1. let a user fill out and "auto-sync" from one of their existing hcard-supporting-profiles, their name, their icon etc. Satisfaction Inc already supports this. (http://microformats.org/blog/2007/06/21/microformatsorg-turns-2/)
      2. let a user fill out and "auto-sync" their list of friends from one of their existing hCard+XFN supporting friends lists. Dopplr.com already supports this.

It boggles my mind to see the suggestion that applications should poll HTML pages to do data synchronization instead of utilizing an API. Instead of calling friends.get, why don't we just grab the entire friends page then parse out the handful of useful data that we actually need.

There are a number of places microformats are a good fit, especially in situations where the client application has to parse the entire HTML document anyway. Examples include using hCard to enable features like Live Clipboard or using hReview and hCalendar to help microformat search engines. However using them as a replacement for an API or an RSS feed is like using boxing gloves instead of oven mitts when baking a pie.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Now playing: D12 - American Psycho II (feat. B-Real)

 

David Berlind has a blog post entitled If ‘you’ build OpenID, will ‘they’ come? where he writes

In case you missed it last week, Microsoft is taking another swing at the idea of single sign-on technologies. Its first, Passport, failed miserably. Called Windows Live ID (following in the footsteps of everything else “Windows Live”), I guess you could call this “Son of Passport” or “Passport: The Sequel.” The question is (for Microsoft as much as anyone else), down the road, will we have “Passport The Thirteenth”?
…
When I saw the announcement, the first thought that went through my mind was whether or not Microsoft’s WLID service would also “double” as an OpenID node. OpenID is another single sign-on specification that has been gaining traction in open circles (no suprise there) and the number of OpenID nodes (providers of OpenID-based authentication) is growing.
…
In light of the WLID announcement from Microsoft and given the discussions that the Redmond company’s chief identity architect Kim Cameron and I have had (see After Passport, Microsoft is rethinking identity) about where Microsoft has to go to be more of an open player on the identity front, I tried to track him down to get an update on why WLID and OpenID don’t appear to be interoperable (I could be wrong on this).

Somewhere along the line, people have gotten the mistaken impression that the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK is about single sign-on. It isn’t. The primary reason for opening up our authentication system is to let non-Microsoft sites build and host widgets that access a user’s data stored within Windows Live or MSN services. This is spelled out in the recent blog posting about the release on the Windows Live ID team blog which is excerpted below

The benefits of incorporating Windows Live ID into your Web site include:

 

·         The ability to use Windows Live gadgets, APIs and controls to incorporate authenticated Windows Live services into your site.

For example, the recently announced collaboration between Windows Live and Bebo requires a way for Windows Live users on Bebo to authenticate themselves and utilize Windows Live services from the Bebo site. That’s what the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK is meant to enable.

Although the technological approaches are similar, the goal is completely different from that of OpenID which is meant to be a single sign-on system. 

Now playing: Mase - Return Of The Murda

 

This morning there were a number of news stories about collaboration between Windows Live and Bebo. These news stories didn’t tell the whole story. Articles such as C|Net’s Bebo's new instant messaging is Microsoft-flavored and TechCrunch’s Windows Live Messaging Comes to Bebo give the impression that the announcement was about instant messaging. However there was much more to the announcement. The agreement between Windows Live and Bebo spans two areas; social network portability and interop between Web-based IM and Windows Live Messenger. 

1. Social Network Portability: As I’ve mentioned before a common practice among social networking sites is to ask users for their log-in credentials for their email accounts so that the social networking sites can screen scrape the HTML for the address book and import the user’s contact list into the social networking site. There are a number of problems with this approach, the main one being that the user is simply moving data from one silo to another without being able to get their contact list back from the social network and into their email client. There’s also the problem that this approach makes users more susceptible to phishing since it encourages them to enter their log-in credentials on random sites.  Finally, the user isn’t in control of how much data is pulled from their address book by the social network or how often it is pulled.

   The agreement between Windows Live and Bebo enables users to utilize a single contact list across both sites. Their friends in Bebo will be available as their contacts in Windows Live and vice versa. This integration will be facilitated by the Windows Live Contacts API which implements a user-centric access control model where the user grants applications permission to access and otherwise manipulate their contact list.

2. Web-based IM and Windows Live Messenger interoperability: Users of Bebo that are also Windows Live Messenger users can opt in to getting notifications from Bebo as alerts in their desktop IM client. In addition, these users can add an “IM Me” button to their profile which allows people browsing their profile on the Web to initiate an IM conversation with them using a Microsoft-provided Web IM widget on the Bebo website which communicates with the Windows Live Messenger client on the profile owner’s desktop.

   The above scenarios were demoed at this year's MIX '07 conference during the session Broaden Your Market with Windows Live. The current plan is for the APIs for interacting with the Windows Live Messenger service and the IM widgets that can be embedded within a non-Microsoft website that power this scenario to be available via http://dev.live.com in the near future.

At the end of the day, it is all about putting users in control. We don’t believe that a user’s social graph should be trapped in a roach motel of our creation. Instead users should be able to export their contact lists from our service on their own terms and should be able to grow their social graph within Windows Live without having to exclusively use our services.

It’s your data, not ours. If you want it, you can have it. Hopefully, the rest of the industry comes around to this sort of thinking sooner rather than later.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

Now playing: Gucci Mane - So Icy (feat. Young Jeezy)

 

I just spent an hour doing some research in response to Sam Ruby's post Sousveillance where he wonders whether some of the descriptions of Facebook as a social graph roach motel (i.e. information about your relationships goes in, nothing comes out) is accurate. Sam writes

Dare seems to think that the root problem is oppression by the “man”.  In this case, a 23 year old.  Brad seems to view this as a technical problem.

I wonder what I wrote that gave that impression especially in the linked post. In that post, I was simply giving some advise about the kind of social problems you will face when treating unifying social graphs across different contexts and applications as a technical problem. If anyone is whining about oppression by Facebook, it would be Brad’s original manifesto which mentions the site by name over a dozen times.

Data point 1: one day when logging onto Facebook, I saw an offer to scan my AIM contacts and invite the ones that had Facebooks to be friends.  I unselected a few, and then clicked on submit.  Within hours, my network expanded greatly.  IM ids serve as useful foreign keys.

Like lots of popular social networking services, but not Windows Live Spaces, Facebook is fond of violating the terms of use of various email providers by screen scraping user address books and contact lists after collecting their log-in credentials.

However Facebook prevents this from being done to them by only showing email addresses as images which expire after a couple of minutes due to use of session keys. I once considered writing an application to import my Facebook contacts into Outlook but gave up once I realized I couldn’t find any free, off-the-shelf OCR APIs that I could use.

I did find an article on CodeProject about rolling your own OCR via neural networks which seems promising but I don't have the free time to mess with that right now. Maybe later in the year. Sam also writes

Data point 2: Facebook is a platform with an API.  If there is a need, it seems to me that one could develop an application using FQL to pull one’s friend list out of Facebook and share it externally.  The fact that I don’t know of such an application means one of four things is happening: (1) it exists, but I don’t know about it, (2) despite the alleged overwhelming demand for this feature, and obvious commercial opportunities it opens up, it hadn’t occurred to anyone, (3) I’m reading the documentation wrong, and it isn’t possible for applications to obtain access to one’s own Facebook ID for use as a foreign key, or (4) the demand simply isn’t there.

Or (5) the information returned by FQL about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address)  so it is pretty useless as a way to utilize one’s friends list with applications besides Facebook since there is no way to cross-reference your friends using any personally identifiable association that would exist in another service.

When it comes to contact lists (i.e. the social graph), Facebook  is a roach motel. Lots of information about user relationships goes in but there’s no way for users or applications to get it out easily. Whenever an application like FacebookSync comes along which helps users do this, it is quickly shut down for violating their Terms of Use. Hypocrisy? Indeed.

Now playing: Lil Boosie & Webbie - Wipe Me Down (remix) (feat. Jim Jones, Fat Joe, Jadakiss & Foxx)

 

I just read the post on the Skype weblog entitled What happened on August 16 about the cause of their outage which states

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short time frame as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.

This problem affects all networks that handle massive numbers of concurrent user connections whether they are peer-to-peer or centralized. When you deal with tens of millions of users logged in concurrently and something causes a huge chunk of them to log-in at once (e.g. after an outage or a synchronized computer reboot due to operating system patches) then your system will be flooded with log-in requests. All the major IM networks (including Windows Live) have all sorts of safeguards in place within the system to prevent this from taking down their networks although how many short outages are due to this specific issue is anybody’s guess.

However Skype has an additional problem when such events happen due to it’s peer-to-peer model which is described in the blog post All Peer-to-Peer Models Are NOT Created Equal -- Skype's Outage Does Not Impugn All Peer-to-Peer Models 

According to Aron, like its predecessor Kazaa, Skype uses a different type of Peer-To-Peer network than most companies. Skype uses a system called SuperNodes. A SuperNode Peer-to-Peer system is one in which you rely on your customers rather than your own servers to handle the majority of your traffic. SuperNodes are just normal computers which get promoted by the Skype software to serve as the traffic cops for their entire network. In theory this is a good idea, but the problem happens if your network starts to destabilize. Skype, as a company, has no physical or programmatic control over the most vital piece of its product. Skype instead is at the mercy of and vulnerable to the people who unknowingly run the SuperNodes.

This of course exposes vulnerabilities to any business based on such a system -- systems that, in effect, are not within the company's control.

According to Aron, another flaw with SuperNode models concerns system recovery after a crash. Because Skype lost its SuperNodes in the initial crash, its network can only recover as fast as new SuperNodes can be identified.

This design leads to a virtuous cycle when it comes to recovering from an outage. With most of the computers on the network being rebooted, they lost a bunch of SuperNodes and so when the computers came back online they flooded the remaining SuperNodes which in turn went down and so on…

All of this is pretty understandable. What I don’t understand is why this problem is just surfacing. After all, this isn’t the first patch Tuesday. Was the bug in their network resource allocation process introduced in a recent version of Skype? Has the service been straining for months and last week was just the tipping point? Is this only half the story and there is more they aren’t telling us?

Hmmm… 

Now playing: Shop Boyz - Party Like A Rockstar (remix) (feat. Lil' Wayne, Jim Jones & Chamillionaire)

 

My job at Microsoft is working on the contacts platform that is utilized by a number of Windows Live services. The contacts platform is a unified graph of the relationships our users have created across Windows Live. It includes a user's Windows Live Hotmail contacts, their Windows Live Spaces friends, their Windows Live Messenger buddies and anyone they've added to an access control list (e.g. people who can access their shared folders in Windows Live Skydrive or the events in their calendar). Basically, a while ago one of our execs thought it didn't make sense to build a bunch of social software applications each acting as a silo of user relationships and that instead we should have a unified graph of the user to user relationships within Windows Live. Fast forward a couple of years and we now have a clearer idea of the pros and cons of building a unified social graph.

Given the above, it should be no surprise that I read Brad Fitzpatrick's Thoughts on the Social Graph with keen interest since it overlaps significantly with my day job. I was particularly interested in the outlined goals for the developers API which are included below

For developers who don't want to do their own graph analysis from the raw data, the following high-level APIs should be provided: 

1. Node Equivalence, given a single node, say "brad on LiveJournal", return all equivalent nodes: "brad" on LiveJournal, "bradfitz" on Vox, and 4caa1d6f6203d21705a00a7aca86203e82a9cf7a (my FOAF mbox_sha1sum). See the slides for more info.
2. Edges out and in, by node. Find all outgoing edges (where edges are equivalence claims, equivalence truths, friends, recommendations, etc). Also find all incoming edges.
3. Find all of a node's aggregate friends from all equivalent nodes, expand all those friends' equivalent nodes, and then filter on destination node type. This combines steps 1 and 2 and 1 in one call. For instance, Given 'brad' on LJ, return me all of Brad's friends, from all of his equivalent nodes, if those [friend] nodes are either 'mbox_sha1sum' or 'Twitter' nodes.
4. Find missing friends of a node. Given a node, expand all equivalent nodes, find aggregate friends, expand them, and then report any missing edges. This is the "let the user sync their social networking sites" API. It lets them know if they were friends with somebody on Friendster and they didn't know they were both friends on MySpace, they might want to be.

here are the top three problems Brad and the rest of the Google folks working on this project will have to factor in as they chase the utopia that is a unified social graph.

1. Some Parts of the Graph are Private: Although social networking sites with publicly articulated social networks are quite popular (e.g. MySpace) there are a larger number of private or semi-private social networks that either can only be viewed by the owner of the list (e.g. IM buddy lists) or some subset of the graph (e.g. private profiles on social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces, etc). The latter is especially tricky to deal with. In addition, people often have more non-public articulated social networks (i.e. friends lists) than public ones despite the popularity of social networking sites with public profiles.

2. Inadvertent Information Disclosure caused by Linking Nodes Across Social Networks: The "find missing friends of a node" feature in Brad's list sounds nice in theory but it includes a number of issues that users often consider to be privacy violations or just plain creepy. Let's say, I have Batman on my friend's list in MySpace because I think the caped crusader is cool. Then I join LiveJournal and it calls the find_missing_friends() API to identify which of my friends from other sites are using LiveJournal and it find's Bruce Wayne's LiveJournal? Oops, an API call just revealed Batman's secret identity. A less theoretical version of this problem occurred when we first integrated Windows Live Spaces with Windows Live Messenger, and some of our Japanese beta users were stunned to find that their supposedly anonymous blog postings were now a click away for their IM buddies to see. I described this situation briefly in my submission to the 2005 Social Computing Symposium.

3. All "Friends" aren't Created Equal: Another problem is that most users don't want all their "friends" available in all their applications. One capability we were quite proud off at one time is that if you had Pocket MSN Messenger then we merged the contacts on your cell phone with your IM and email contacts. A lot of people were less than impressed by this behavior. Someone you have on your IM buddy list isn't necessarily someone you want in your cell phone address book. Over the years, I've seen more examples of this than I can count. Being "friends" in one application does not automatically mean that two users want to be "friends" in a completely different context.
   

These are the kinds of problems we've had to deal with on my team while also trying to make this scale to being accessed by services utilized by hundreds of millions of users. I've seen what it takes to build a system like this first hand and Brad & company have their work cut out for them. This is without considering the fact that they may have to deal with ticked of users or ticked off social networking sites depending on how exactly they plan to build this giant database of user friend lists.

PS: In case any of this sounds interesting to you, we're always hiring. :)

 

Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, who recently left Six Apart for Google has published notes on what he's going to be working on moving forward. It is an interesting read entitled Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph which contains the following excerpts

Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.

Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps.
...
Goals:
1. Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as "the" central graph owner. 

1. Establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users)

...
Non-Goals:

1. The goal is not to replace Facebook. In fact, most people I've talked to love Facebook, just want a bit more of their already-public data to be more easily accessible, and want to mitigate site owners' fears about any single data/platform lock-in. Early talks with Facebook about participating in this project have been incredibly promising. 

It seems to me that Facebook is the new Microsoft in that there are now a significant amount of people who are either upset at the level of "lock-in" they have created or are just plain jealous of their "wealth" who have created dedicated efforts to break their hegemony. It'll be interesting watching this play out.

From my perspective, I'm skeptical of a lot of the talk about social network portability because the conversation rarely seems to be user centric. Usually it's creators of competing services who are angry about "lock-in" because they can't get a new user's contacts from another service and spam them to gain "viral growth" for their service. As for the various claims of social network overload only the power users and geeks who join a new social network service a month (WTF is Dopplr?) have this problem.

A real social network is a community and users don't change communities at the drop of a hat. What I find more interesting is being able to bridge these communities instead of worrying about the 1% of users who hop from community to community like crack addled humming birds skipping from flower to flower.

I'll put it this way, when it comes to email which is more important? The ability to send emails to people regardless of what email service or mail client they use or the ability to import your contact list from one free email service into another when you switch service providers?

 

I learned about the Facebook Data Store API yesterday from a post by Marc Canter. The API is intended to meet the storage needs of developers building widgets applications on the Facebook widget platform. Before we decide if the API meets the needs of developers, we need to list what these needs are in the first place. A developer building a widget or application for a social network’s widget platform such as a gadget for Windows Live Spaces or an application for the Facebook platform needs to store

1. Static resources that will be consumed or executed on the client such as images, stylesheets and script files. Microsoft provides this kind of hosting for gadget developers via Windows Live Gallery. This is all the storage needed for a gadget such as GMT clock.
2. User preferences and settings related to the gadget. In many cases, a gadget may provide a personalized view of data (e.g. my Netflix queue or the local weather) or may simply have configuration options specific to the user which need to be saved. Microsoft provides APIs for getting, setting and deleting preferences as part of it’s Web gadgets framework. My Flickr badge gadget is an example of the kind of gadget that requires this level of storage.
3. The application’s server-side code and application specific databases. This is the equivalent of the LAMP or WISC hosting you get from a typical Web hosting provider. No social networking site provides this for widget/gadget developers today. The iLike Facebook application is an example of the kind of application that requires this level of “storage” or at this level it should probably be called app hosting.

Now that we have an idea of the data storage needs of Web widget/gadget developers, we can now discuss how the Facebook Data Store API measures up. The API consists of three broad classes of methods; User Preferences, Persistent Objects and Associations. All methods can return results as XML, JSON or JSONP.

It is currently unclear if the API is intended to be RESTful or not since there is scant documentation of the wire format of requests or responses. 

User Preferences

Object Definition methods
* data.setUserPreference	update one preference
* data.setUserPreferences	update multiple preferences in batch
* data.getUserPreference	get one preference of a user
* data.getUserPreferences	get all preferences of a user

These methods are used to store key value pairs which may represent user preferences or settings for an application. There is a limit of 201 key<->value pairs which can be stored per user. The keys are numeric values from 0 – 200 and the maximum length of a preference value is 128 characters. 

Persistent Objects

Object Definition methods
* data.createObjectType	create a new object type
* data.dropObjectType	delete an object type and all objects of this type
* data.renameObjectType	rename an object type
* data.defineObjectProperty	add a new property
* data.undefineObjectProperty	remove a previously defined property
* data.renameObjectProperty	rename a previously defined property
* data.getObjectTypes	get a list of all defined object types
* data.getObjectType	get detailed definition of an object type

Developers can create new types which are analogous to SQL tables especially when you consider terminology like “drop” object, the ability to add new properties/columns to the type and being able to retrieve the schema  of the type which are all more common in relational database world than in object oriented programming.

 

Object Manipulation methods
* data.createObject	create a new object
* data.updateObject	update an object's properties
* data.deleteObject	delete an object by its id
* data.deleteObjects	delete multiple objects by ids
* data.getObject	get an object's properties by its id
* data.getObjects	get properties of a list of objects by ids
* data.getObjectProperty	get an object's one property
* data.setObjectProperty	set an object's one property
* data.getHashValue	get a property value by a hash key
* data.setHashValue	set a property value by a hash key
* data.incHashValue	increment/decrement a property valye by a hash key
* data.removeHashKey	delete an object by its hash key
* data.removeHashKeys	delete multiple objects by their hash keys

This aspect of the API is almost self explanatory, you create an object type (e.g. a movie) then manipulate instances of this object using the above APIs. Each object can be accessed via a numeric ID or a string hash value. The object’s numeric ID is obtained when you first create the object although it isn’t clear how you obtain an object’s hash key. It also seems like there is no generic query mechanism so you need to store the numeric IDs or hash keys of the objects you are interested in somewhere so you don’t have to enumerate all objects looking for them later. Perhaps with the preferences API?

Associations

Association Definition methods
* data.defineAssociation	create a new object association
* data.undefineAssociation	remove a previously defined association and all its data
* data.renameAssociation	rename a previously defined association
* data.getAssociationDefinition	get definition of a previously defined association
* data.getAssociationDefinitions	get definitions of all previously defined associations

An association is a named relationship between two objects. For example, "works_with" could be an association between two user objects. Associations don't have to be between the same types (e.g. a "works_at" could be an association between a user object and a company object). Associations take me back to WinFS and son of WinFS Entity Data Model which has a notion of a RelationshipType that is very similar to the above notion of an association. It is also similar to the notion of an RDF triple but not quite.

Association Manipulation methods
* data.setAssociation	create an association between two objects
* data.setAssociations	create a list of associations between pairs of objects
* data.removeAssociation	remove an association between two objects
* data.removeAssociations	remove associations between pairs of objects
* data.removeAssociatedObjects	remove all associations of an object
* data.getAssociatedObjects	get ids of an object's associated objects
* data.getAssociatedObjectCount	get count of an object's associated objects
* data.getAssociatedObjectCounts	get counts of associated objects of a list of objects.
* data.getAssociations	get all associations between two objects

All of these methods should be self explanatory. Although I think this association stuff is pretty sweet, I’m unclear as to where all of this is expected to fall in the hierarchy of needs of an Facebook application. The preferences stuff is a no brainer. The persistent object and association APIs could be treated as a very rich preferences API by developers but this doesn’t seem to be living up to their potential. On the other hand, without providing something closer to an app hosting platform like Amazon has done with EC2 + S3, I’m not sure there is any other use for them by Web developers using the Facebook platform.

Have I missed something here?

Now playing: UGK - International Players Anthem (feat. Outkast)

 

If you go to http://dev.live.com/liveid you’ll see links to Windows Live ID for Web Authentication and Client Authentication which enable developers to build Web or desktop applications that can be used to authenticate users via Windows Live ID. The desktop SDK are still in alpha but the Web APIs have hit v1. You can get the details from the Windows Live ID team blog post entitled Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK for Developers Is Released which states  

Windows Live ID Web Authentication allows sites who want to integrate with the Windows Live services and platform. We are releasing a set of tools that make this integration easier than ever.  

Web Authentication works by sending your users to the Windows Live ID sign-in page by means of a specially formatted link. The service then directs them back to your Web site along with a unique, site-specific identifier that you can use to manage personalized content, assign user rights, and perform other tasks for the authenticated user. Sign-in and account management is performed by Windows Live ID, so you don't have to worry about implementing these details.

Included with the Web Authentication software development kit (SDK) are QuickStart sample applications in the ASP.NET, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby programming languages. You can get the sample applications for this SDK from the Web Authentication download page>on Microsoft.com.

As one of the folks who's been championing opening up our authentication platform to Web developers, this is good news. I'm not particularly sold on using Windows Live ID as a single sign-on instead of sites managing their own identities but I do think that now that we allow non-Microsoft applications (e.g. mashups, widgets, etc) to act on behalf of Windows Live users via this SDK, there'll be a burst of new APIs coming out of Windows Live that will allow developers build applications that manipulate a user's data stored within Windows Live services.

Opening up our platform will definitely be good for users and will be good for the Web as well. Kudos, to the Windows Live ID folks for getting this out.

Now playing: Nappy Roots - Po' Folks

 

How social networks handle multiple social contexts (e.g. my work life versus my personal life) has been on my mind this week. Today I was in a meeting where someone mentioned that most of the people he knows have profiles on both MySpace and Facebook because their real friends are on MySpace while their work friends are on Facebook. This reminded me that my wall currently has a mix of posts from Robert Scoble about random geek crap and posts by friends from Nigeria who I haven’t talked to in years catching up with me.

For some reason I find this interleaving of my personal relationships and my public work-related persona somewhat unsettling. Then there’s this post by danah boyd, loss of context for me on Facebook which contains the following excerpt

Anyhow, I know folks are still going wheeeeee about Facebook. And I know people generally believe that growth is nothing but candy-coated goodness. And while I hate using myself as an example (cuz I ain't representative), I do feel the need to point out that context management is still unfun, especially for early adopters, just as it has been on every other social network site. It sucks for teens trying to balance mom and friends. It sucks for college students trying to have a social life and not piss off their profs. It sucks for 20-somethings trying to date and balance their boss's presence. And it sucks for me.

I can't help but wonder if Facebook will have the same passionate college user base next school year now that it's the hip adult thing. I don't honestly know. But so far, American social network sites haven't supported multiple social contexts tremendously well. Maybe the limited profile and privacy settings help, but I'm not so sure. Especially when profs are there to hang out with their friends, not just spy on their students. I'm wondering how prepared students are to see their profs' Walls filled with notes from their friends. Hmmm...

as usual danah hits the nail on the head. There are a number of ways I can imagine social network sites doing a better job at supporting multiple social contexts but they all involve requiring some work from the user to set up their social contexts especially if they plan to become a permanent fixture in their user’s lives. However most social network sites seem more interested in being the equivalent of popular nightclubs (e.g. MySpace) than in becoming a social utility in the same way that email and instant messaging have become. Facebook  is the first widely popular social networking site I suspect will buck this trend. If there is one place there is still major room for improvement in their user experience [besides the inability to opt out of all the annoying application requests] it’s here. This is the one area where the site is weak, and if my experience and danah’s observations are anything to go by, eventually the site will be less of a social software utility and more of a place to hang out and we know what eventually happens to sites like that.  

Now playing: Gym Class Heroes - New Friend Request