Tender Surrender

A few days ago, Google unveiled a service called Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a feed aggregator similar to FriendFeed, Cliqset. Service itself looks very typical and stereotype: entries on timeline with comments, likes. The only characteristics I could find was that it’s on Gmail, Google Profile. I was watching the press conference on live stream, but couldn’t find a reason it will be a big hit.

But once I look at the API docs, I’ve changed my mind. There I found that Buzz is not meant to be just a feed aggregator, how this project go beyond people’s imagination and tremendous. There was an answer I was dreaming of for three years about socialweb.

I couldn’t stop my impulse to write an article about Buzz and here it is:

True meaning of Google Buzz

Sorry it’s all written in Japanese, so the link is automated translation (might not quite understandable). But if you are disappointed about Buzz, check it out. You will change your mind.

What is Foursquare

Service called Foursquare is getting attention from Japanese early adopters recently. I’ve got more than twenty friend requests in one day in Foursquare, and that is apparently, because of an article famous blogger wrote. I’ve just started using it, found a few appealing points.

The basic usage is to post information about the place you are currently around. Though this sounds a typical location based service, there’s some characteristics you should check out:

• User motivating point system, Mayorship, Badges.
• You don’t need to post precise location since you can check-in to places someone else already have registered.
• If the place is not registered yet, you can register and get points.
• You can leave Tips on the place. For example, you can tell people that the restraunt’s curry is good.
• You can add Todos from Tips other people left on the place, so that you can someday accomplish it.

Thus, Foursquare is a kind of service that the more people join, the more people enjoy. There might be other reasons people give focus on it, I’ll keep trying to find its goodness.

By the way, did you notice that there’s some socialweb trends that Foursquare is following on this service.

Typical socialweb service design

It’s social

Yes, it’s social. Most of the services starting recently are social, and others will follow, too. It’s really hard to gain users without making the service social. It’s too common for readers of this blog, though :)

In Foursquare, you can check your friends’ where about, tips of the place you visit.

Facebook Connect / Twitter Compatible

It’s being common to adopt Facebook Connect or Twitter to a service these days. You can skip time consuming registration process – filling your name, finding friends, etc. (Foursquare requires you to complete a form, though) Some of other services don’t ask you to fill all.

What is interesting about Foursquare is that, Foursquare’s profile url is numeric by default. But once you connect Twitter account to it, its profile url turns to the one with Twitter’s screen name.

Importing Friends List

One of the reasons I got many friend requests seems because of Foursquare’s functionality to find Twitter’s followers and friend them quickly. Of course, you can do the same with Facebook friends.

Feedback Activity

The most significant reason for connecting to social service is activity stream. By being able to post feedback, the service can attract user’s friends. I know it’s needless to say on this blog, how this is effective.

By using this feedback, you can share realtime event to your friends. There’s been events like this on twitter, and this on Ustream, for example. It’s getting common to have realtime event sharing on the web.

On Foursquare, you can of course feedback activities to Twitter or Facebook. You may be able to find your friend visiting neighbor by tweet on twitter from Foursquare.

iPhone / Android apps

There’s tendency that services release iPhone / Android applications along with its web service. They are not just application on smartphones, but something that take advantage of its GPS.

Foursquare is a typical example for this kind, they have iPhone, Androind and Palm Pre version of apps.

In Japan?

So, how do japanese service do?

• Are they social?:
  Of course!
• Support Facebook Connect / Twitter?:
  The number of Twitter compatible services are rising, but for Facebook, since there’s not so many users in Japan, I don’t see Facebook Connect so often. How about mixi Connect and GREE Connect? Unfortunately, they are not public yet.
• Do they feedback activities?:
  It’s important that receiver services’ acitivty stream is popular enough. But unfortunately, there’s no real activity-stream-ed service in Japan yet. Let’s wait for mixi or GREE to maximize its activity stream’s possibilities.
• iPhone / Android apps
  You can develop smartphone apps in japan too!

Now you see, there’s potential viral effect, by utilizing social media like Twitter or Facebook. While Japanese service are delaying, you can use them and spread the service.

Summary

If you couldn’t find what’s good about being social, imagine Foursquare without characteristics I’ve introduced on this article. Not social, not able to import friends, not able to feed back activities… You may have imagined service you’ve used 5 years ago.

The slide I’ve introduced at SocialWeb Conference last year may be effective yet. Check it out.

On early 13th Jan. (JST), Google unveiled something we’ve been calling “GDrive”, as part of Google Docs’ functionality. You can use up to 1GB for free, add 1GB/$0.25 per year. Slightly different from what we(maybe only I)’ve expected was, Google doesn’t offer client application for this. But don’t worry, there’s already an API. Sooner or later, Google itself, or third party will definitely release Dropbox-like client software, I’m sure.

By the way, did you notice that this online storage means more than just a storage?

SocialWeb and Access Control

I’ve been insisting that, web will act like operating system in the future, and social web will be important part of it. Here’s ideas:

• SocialWeb will be too common to notice it exists.
• Global identity will be required.
• Social Graph will be tied with identity and will be portable.
• Social Graph will be ported to phones, TVs, etc. as well as web services.
• Social Graph will control accesses, as well as used to share or invite someone.
• File systems will eventually have ACL using Social Graph.

I’ve been thinking the last one will be future, but…

ACL on Google Docs

Google Docs Storage seems to have social ACL functionality. As you know, Google Docs originally have Access Control: When you create a doc, it’s basically private. Then, you can publish it to public, or share it with groups or people individually, by specifying his/her email address. Mail address of course, will be auto-completed as you type, derived from Gmail contact list. You can give read/write access to them.

Imagine this strong access control feature is adopted to your other files like music, photos, videos…and you can access them from desktop, iPhone, Android. Files are synced with cloud. ACL is managed easily using global identities like email address, WebFinger, OpenID. Isn’t it nice?

This is what we call: Web OS.

Summary

Some people say Google is behind Facebook, because Google doesn’t own SNS. But it’s just about application platform. Google is building something better than that, slowly but surely, as you can see on Google Docs Storage: web OS platform. In the future, Chrome OS will take advantage of this, their concept will see its completion. Their layer is lower than Facebook’s.

Someday, Facebook will notice, that they are just playing on Google’s palm top.

Happy New Year!

It’s been a while since I last updated this blog because I was too busy taking care of my kids. Today, I’d like to write down some thoughts on Social Web (mainly about Japanese Market) and its prediction for this year.

2009 was a huge mile stone for Japanese Social Web, there emerged the first OpenSocial container, Social Application market, on horizon. mixi Appli have been doing quite well and interests around social application market seems getting even bigger. Other japanese big SNS, like Mobage is awaiting to release its mobile social application platform too. 2009 can be recorded as the first year of Social Web for Japanese. And it’s my honor to be able to have got involved in it.

By the way, I’ve posted an article “Predicting Social Web 2009” in the beginning of 2009 (Japanese only), which was influenced by Mr. John McCrea’s article.

Reviewing my prediction for 2009

Like John McCrea has done, I review my prediction here.

Google turns to Social Network

In the article, I predicted that Google will put their social graph into iGoogle (meaning OpenSocial-ize) including the ones on FriendConnect, and make their whole services more social. Yes, iGoogle now is OpenSocial container, but they haven’t associated it with FriendConnect yet.

Meanwhile, services like Wave, Docs, Calendar, Android shares the same social graph which Google Contacts (part of Gmail) provide. This means Google is turning itself more social. Slowly, but steadily, Google is being Socialized. I’ll keep my eyes on Google’s socialization.

Market platforms

iPhone App Store emerged in 2008 as an example, I foresited that there might be various markets, selling videos, music… Market for creators.
I might be able to say mixi Appli, Android market were answers for this, but they are just for developers. Not quite matching my prediction.

Social Ad platform wars

I predicted there would be social ad platforms and its war. On top of Facebook expanding its online ad share, Google revealed social ad platform using FriendConnect. These may be counted as the beginning of social ad war, aren’t they? ;)

Predicting Social Web 2010

So, my prediction for 2009 was not totally wrong, but a bit going further than it actually was. But never mind, I try the same thing again for this year :)

Twitter

Twitter will stay on top issue around web 2010. Including Japenese prime minister, a lot of celebrities are starting to tweet in Japan. Talking about celebrities, Ameba Now should be the strongest micro blogging service candidate to hire, but Twitter is attracting and making them start to tweet by themselves. So it’s clear that Twitter will be talked a lot in 2010.

Realtime web

Realtime web will also be focused on in Japan this year. You might say, you’ve been able to use mobile and talk with people real time on 2 channel already, but the realtime web in 2010 is social. Looking at Twitter, it is needless to say social realtime web is comfortable to dive in, mixi Voice or GREE Hitokoto will trail the path. Don’t forget that one timeline is enough for one person.

Activity Streams

As you may know, yet another open spec ActivityStream has been drafted by people from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc. It’s already been deployed on Facebook, MySpace and will be included in OpenSocial spec. ActivityStream is extension of Atom and can describe more semantic and thus social than the one in OpenSocial’s current spec. Also, AS is one of the essential component of realtime web. Since timeline on micro blogs and AS are good suit, they are tend to be merged, just like GREE’s Hitokoto or Facebook. PubsubHubbub will help its realtime-ness too.

Federated Identities

With specs like OpenID, OAuth, individual’s personality will be reflected on the web clearer than before. OpenID getting more common, APIs like social graph, activity, payment will strengthen a person with its online identity. Similar services as Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect should drive these tendencies too.

OpenStack

OpenStack used to have OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XRDS-Simple, PortableContacts. 2010 seems to add ActivityStreams, Salmon Protocol, PubsubHubbub, Webfinger. This is plan more than prediction though.

Social Media Marketing

Although there’s been Social Media Marketing(SMM) already, 2010’s SMM will be more realtime and direct.
In old SMM, people try to make buzz indirectly by creating contents on media like Youtube, blogs, etc. They tend to refuse responding to users’ comments and was one way communication.
In recent SMM, there’s increasing number of cases where marketers join social activity like on Twitter, Facebook, and communicate with other users directly. These activities fit in SNS (explicit social graph) more than blogs (implicit social graph).

Finally

Please join SocialWeb Japan. It’s a community sharing infomations like this post. (Sorry we speak japanese only there)

“Web will become more social” This has been what I kept telling people after 2005, when I’d joined goo. There’s so much things we can do when we make social graphs as a platform.  First thing I tried was to make a social platform on a portal site, which turns out to be goo Home.

I already had an image of the future at that time: the social graph will be expanded to external web and it will tie any other services into one with social connections. It was before we laungh goo Home when Facebook emerged.

What Facebook was trying to do was not like what I initially imagined: getting external services into their service. It was totally opposite to what I was imagining, but I realized our ultimate goal must be the same. Making web social. After a few month, OpenSocial got announced.

OpenSocial decides its spec democratic and open. Openness is good. Imagine you want to tie 2 systems social. Needless to say, it’s easier when the spec is something standard. You can omit communication cost as well as technical endeavor.

On top of that, with open spec, a lot of product may be expected. Taking OpenSocial as example, there’s Yoichiro Tanaka’s OpenSocial Development Environment, OpenSocial Client Library, OAuth related libraries, OpenSocial Signed Request Library which I developed… Whole bunch of open source products help latter joining developers.

And the primal open source product among OpenSocial is Shindig, OpenSocial container’s reference implementation.

Shindig was my textbook to learn existing spec of OpenSocial. There was almost no one else in Japan who looked into Shindig, so I was invited to become an Google API Expert.

I’ve also wrote a lot of patches to Shindig on my way to developing goo Home. And 1 and half years have passed…

I have become a committer of Apache Shindig

I made my first contact with Mr. Chris Chabot who has been the main committer of PHP Shindig. I met him in person at Google IO 2008, occasionally chatting on messenger, he recommended me to become Shindig committer.

To become a committer in Apache Software Foundation, you have to get voted. And luckily, I was approved.

PHP Shindig is said to be used be more than 26 SNS with 5 million users. I was really excited to know that.

To me, OpenSocial is just a tool to make my ideal social web possible. But at least in Japan, there’s no other choice now and OpenSocial IS the standard. And Shindig which is used in mixi and goo, is the one which support its core.

I’m hoping to make Social Web happen in Japan and support it as a Shindig committer.