Digging deeper into the portable social graph
Facebook Connect was announced a few days ago, and, of course, it's the talk of the Web 2.0 world. Google Friend Connect has been around for a few months, but they just opened it up to everyone last week.
What do these two toolsets mean? Are they truly open, and based on open standards?
Just a quick definition: the "social graph" is, basically, your data about who you are, and who is connected to you - who your friends are. A portable social graph would be one that you can take with you, wherever you are - so the friends that are connected with you on one network are also connected with you on another. It's the holy grail of social network connectivity - you are connected to who you are connected to, no matter what site you are on.
Google Friend Connect is a toolset based on three standards, two of which are open, one of which could probably be considered an open standard, but it originated with Google: OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial. Any social network that can use these three standards can be drawn into the open social network web using Google Friend Connect. Any user on any of the social networks that use these standards can connect with their friends on others that use these standards.
Facebook connect, on the other hand, is a proprietary process that competes with OpenID, and is only a two way communication between other sites and Facebook - it's not at all open. And, if you are not on Facebook, that other sites use Facebook Connect won't matter to you. (For instance, it won't help connect your LinkedIn social graph with your MySpace social graph.)
Facebook Connect is not the portable social graph we've all been hoping for - Google Friend Connect is a bit closer to it. Both Google and Facebook are interested in being the repository for your credential and social graph data. However, the fact that Google uses the open standard OpenID means that you can actually control where that data lives - and that is not the case for Facebook.
What is most annoying to me is that Facebook Connect is proprietary, and it competes with an open standard, OpenID. They could have just as easily implemented the open standards - but they chose to go in a different direction. For most of the social networks except for Facebook, the walls of the gardens are coming tumbling down. But Facebook is basically just enlarging their walled garden.
What does this mean for most nonprofit organizations? Not a whole lot. This is going to take a long time to all of this to shake out, and only the most Web2.0 savvy nonprofits are going to be doing technology projects that will involve implementing either of these new toolsets.
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2 Comments:
I agree it is going to take more time for all this to shakeout - and MySpace is expected to announce its version.
However, for those organizations that have established a presence on Facebook and have a network there - this may have some implications for them. We're in the early stages of all this - and will be interesting to see where it all shakes out.
Your view is similar to what Marc Canter expressed about FB Connect - walled garden, not truly open.
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/12/social-networks-facebook-people-browsr-.html
I just hope that adoption of one of these options over the other is based on who your constituents are and who you want them to be, not who you have connected with already. As always seems to come up in these topics, we have to be wary of tunnelvision - my friends and I are all on Twitter, so twitter is a valid medium. I have a constituency pre-built on Facebook, so Facebook should be my website's authorizing agent. But Facebook and Twitter have user bases that encompass only a fraction of the online world that donates.
Geeks like me are very excited that Google Connect supports OpenID, because we see OpenID as the true authorization equalizer. But, in this case, I think it's more important that Google Connect allows anyone with a Google or Yahoo! ID to authenticate. Because my bet is that the sphere of people with one/the other/or both of those dwarfs the populations of Facebook and MySpace combined, and includes a whole lot of people who have no interest in joining a trendy social network, but plenty of interest in joining yours. Add to that the fact that 95% of all Facebook users have Google and/or Yahoo! addresses as well. Which one is more inclusive?
For sheer numbers - the people you can reach - choosing Facebook Connect over Google Connect seems statistically, well, unwise.
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