B. Mann Consulting

So, we now have Google's answer to Facebook's closed development platform: OpenSocial (link goes live Thursday).

Google has a good selection of launch partners for this -- Ning, LinkedIn (an API?! finally!), and Plaxo being the most interesting ones. RockYou and Slide are Facebook development companies that are also signed on, so we'll definitely see some launch apps, not just bare APIs.

This is, of course, very encouraging and similar to the short discussion I lead at the Facebook Developer Garage: integrate with systems other than Facebook, use open standards, and put your stuff out on the open web. Marc Canter has a gleeful post about all of this, including linking back to standards and experiments that have already been underway. Be interesting to see how OpenID Attribute Exchange, which I have long been a fan of, fits into all this.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that there was already a Drupal module ready to go -- here's the project page. Except, it's just a placeholder for now :P But, nonetheless, this is an obvious set of APIs for Drupal to support and participate in this open web.

Will it work? Well, we've got a whole other set of mashups and connections to be making. This code is brand new, and developers, designers, and business owners are going to have to spend time kicking the tires and just trying stuff. Just like Facebook and the Facebook platform has been a new thing which has seen an explosion of creativity and experimentation, I expect we'll see the same thing around these open APIs. It's going to be a fun ride...

I'm helping out the local Vancouver Facebook Developer Garage event this coming Tuesday by running a "Future of Facebook" Q&A. Johnny Bufu of SXIP will be on hand to lend expertise around portable social networks, especially regarding identity, OpenID, the OpenID Attribute Exchange extension, and related tech.

The timing and title of this talk is interesting: there is an "all hands" meeting at Facebook on Tuesday, so the rep from Facebook that was supposed to attend can't make it. There is much speculation here, everything from "Microsoft will buy them" to "Facebook is worth $15 Billion". It will be fun to talk some of this through live at the event, but I'll mainly try and jockey live audience discussion, not do my own pontification.

It has been most interesting, with the "rise of Facebook", to see its vast spread into "non techies". Indeed, that's where *I've* found it to add real utility: since so many people are on there, both organizing events and seeing what people are up to "in the real world" has become much simpler, and has led to more in person meetings, for me at least. Pointing the way what a ubiquitous, interoperable identity infrastructure on the web could enable?

Some other preparatory material for such a discussion is this video of an interview of Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by John Batelle at the Web 2.0 Summit.

The event is this Tuesday at VFS starting at 5:30pm, full event details on Facebook, of course :P

Scott Kveton does a bit of a round up of what some folks are working on a technical level with portable social networking, in and around OpenID and some loose markup.

He takes what, in my opinion, is a bit of a cut against Attribute Exchange:

Also, attribute exchange doesn’t solve the portable social networking component although I imagine it could be hacked up to do so.

Sorry, Scott, when you use phrases like "hacked up", I take issue. Frankly, I would never have gotten on board with OpenID if I didn't see AX on the horizon as the logical conclusion of the SREG stop gap.

AX is an extensible system that will be able to pass many different kinds of information back and forth between systems. It has the same decoupled nature that OpenID has. Different sites can loosely couple by doing nothing more than using the same keys to define different sets of attributes. Why, exactly, would one NOT use this? In theory, one could do something as simple as host an agreed upon list of attributes -- based on FOAF, XFN, or for that matter any one of them in their own namespaces or with mapping between them.

I mean, we implemented syncing of user profiles using Drupal's simple distributed authentication + FOAF *3 years ago*. Working with SXIP in their various protocol incarnations, DIX, and finally the merging into OpenID and AX has all been part of the process of consensus around standards.

Attribute Exchange is a flexible, extensible base on which to implement many use cases around data exchange for user profiles and related information. Any solution around portable social networking should use this at its base, and the OpenID community should move to finalize the extension and move forward to building cool sh*t on top of it.

Marc Canter continues to blog up a storm. If you really, carefully, read about all the stuff he's been posting: he really is looking to the future.

Yes, I do find it a bit scary to be agreeing with Marc. I mean...I love the guy, I love his family, but he drives me crazy 50% of the time

So, what has Marc got right lately?

• It's about the network of networks
• social networking is a feature...and it makes sense to pick and choose building blocks to start from rather than blowing your brains out developing code (and UI, and standards, and, and...) from scratch every time; Marc feels burned by open source, so he's doing PeopleAggregator, me, I'm pushing away at my old friend Drupal
• identity is great for sign on is great; now let's get working on attribute exchange, without which 2.x is somewhat pointless -- we had this working 2 years ago with SXIP

That last point is from Marc's latest on Microsoft's CardSpace plus Open ID, and he closes with "without import/export we have no context". That is code for "don't make me create an account on another god-dang site that really should be a feature, and especially don't make me re-enter all my stuff into another system".