« Congestion Pricing Plan is Dead in NYC -- A GOOD thing | Main | Ballmer to Yang: You're a fucking idiot. »

April 25, 2008

Trent Adams and Steve Greenberg of the DataPortability Group were awesome enough to invite me to chat on their weekly DataPortability podcast. You can listen to it here:

http://www.mediaslate.org/wp/2008/04/25/dataportability-in-motion-podcast-episode-5/

We hit the specifics of the findmeon/opensn technology -- and our mandate for privacy to be covered by all portability standards -- but we chatted at length about the history of 'portability' and touched on the Google issue. I didn't get a chance to elaborate as well as I should have on some points , so here's a quick 'extension' of what I wanted to say:

A_ The History of Portability

When I started FindMeOn, and just until last Summer, people hated us. I mean they really and truly HATED us. We were laughed out of meetings with corporations, investors and pundits -- many of whom are now becoming 'active' in the scene. One amazing meeting had the seasoned veteran sitting across the table from me jump in amazement at the concept of porting identity , content and action: "No. No. NO NO NO NO NO. NO NO. NEVER! NO." Another meeting had one of the more famous tech icons look me dead in the eye and say "This is the worst idea I've ever heard of."

Everyone wanted data non-portability. The thought of creating doors or lobbing balls over the 'walled gardens' of networks was deemed heresy. This wasn't just from the investment world -- we spoke with representatives from many of the companies now evangelizing data portability: they all admonished the concept.

In March 2007, the 'technology scene' had this outlook on social networks and identity-oriented applications:

1- Content & interactions should be owned by the network. Play by our rules, or we ban you. Keep in mind: note even a year ago, MySpace and Friendster were disabling/blocking/stripping widgets at their leisure from member profiles. Remember when YouTube embeds or photobucket images would just disappear for days at a time, synchronized to negotiation talks on the front-page of Mashable/TechCrunch?

2- The only networks that matter are the large networks. There will probably by 6 major networks at any given time, and every few years a new network will rise and an old network will lose its place. All the other networks are irrelevant.

Today, things are much different. Companies that once held users and widget providers hostage, are now suddenly evangelizing open networks. People are similarly realizing that smaller networks - that cater to niche demographics - are exploding and important.

What caused this overnight change?

During our discussion, Steve Greenberg brought up a great point - a lot of people in key positions right now are people who managed product & strategy of the instant messenger world when they had their all-out wars. The second he mentioned that, I started to have flashbacks to countless resumes/bios and articles I've read - indeed people from particularly the AOL IM product line are now CEO / CTO / VP of Platform at dozens of firms. So Steve might be right -- a round of hirings, promotions, and general chaos that resettled the upper ranks of tech firms may have contributed greatly to this...

But a bigger player, I would argue, is the critical mass that Facebook created through their API.

When we first started building the FindMeOn system, the Facebook API was well over a year away; when we launched, they were still 8 months away. Our system relied on a ton of Regex, proxy use, reverse-engineering network throttling triggers, and lots of other tricky features to help port data for our users -- APIs were not commonplace, they were frowned upon.

I would argue that when Facebook launched their API, everything shifted. My CNO and I were on-call to present at the NY-tech meetup, doing a modified version of what we had given at the Web20 meetup a month earlier, but James from HotOrNot showed up and we got bumped. (BTW, I was fine with that - he helped my friends get MochiMedia.com off the ground! ) James said some crazy things though... like people should stop building webapps or companies and just use Facebook's API: it was easier to build off of, gave you an audience, and virally integrated with their newsfeed.

As people listened to that message - from James and others - Facebook's API gained traction and other groups were left in the dust. Market leaders were now becoming market followers. Everyone started taking a side in the Great API Debate - with some proclaiming "This is excellent! We will follow!" and others downplaying the necessity and utility. For months stories of forthcoming APIs were debunked as vaporware, while many debated ownership rights and "What really is an Open API?".

In August something big happened... not the Brad Fitzpatrick manifesto, but a leak that Facebook was ramping up into the advertising game, and would have some big announcements at Ad:Tech. All of the sudden, rumors started to fly that Google was getting in the game -- a few hirings happened, and Valleywag/Techcrunch/et al reported a few behind-closed-doors meetings occurred with 'key players in social networking'. We soon found out that Google had a top-secret 'Open Social' program, which was aligning everyone against Facebook. How do you combat a proprietary API? With an Open API used by their nemesis. At their gala / product launch, Google quickly announced "We've been working on this for almost a year!" - thought it became clear to everyone in the technology scene that it was a brand new initiative. Instead of a full-fledged product launch, we began to see barely 2-3months worth of software development and immature product design, while 'key partners' quickly built their own APIs as the Google-led initiative flailed.

So why did all these firms who were anti- 3rd party applications and anti- data_portability and anti- user-data-ownership take a 180° turn in their beliefs? The open source advocate in me says "because its the right thing to do!", the historian concedes to Steve's point that "the new people in charge did not want to repeat their mistakes" - but the cynical bastard/businessman in me says "because if they didn't open up, they risked falling too far behind Facebook".

B_ A clarification on the FindMeOn/OpenSN(Open Social Network) vs Google/OpenSocial issue:

We launched the Open Social Network standard publicly in October 2006. We couldn't get OpenSocialNetwork.org, but we could get OpenSN.org - so we ended up with that domain, and began using both terms interchangeably.

We were more than upset to find out that Google decided to create a product so similar in name and function. The situation was only exacerbated when we discovered their attempt to trademark the name. Not only had Google never contacted us, but they declined to respond to dozens of our attempts to contact them -- something we found really odd, since we were at the top of their search rankings for related terms and would have been caught by any due-diligence team.

We are indeed committed to opposing any and all of their attempts to lay claim to "Open Social" as a trademark for software. However, Reports that we have filed suit are completely inaccurate, written by bloggers and reporters who were misinterpreting text in a CNET article -- the only organization that actually ever spoke with us concerning the matter.

There are portions of Google's OpenSocial implementation and related projects (like the Social Graph API) that are covered in exact detail (not vague interpretable text) in USPTO patent applications we filed long before they began work on their product. We tried many times, without luck, to contact them on this matter and open a dialogue. We never got a response. Will there be legal issues stemming from this in the future? Most likely. Will this affect Open Source developers and networks? Absolutely not.

We started as a group of people advocating some really big changes in online interaction, and fighting an uphill battle to educate people on concepts they weren't quite ready for. We made a lot of guesses on the direction of social media and the necessary technologies, which have all ended up being right. When someone new came into the market, instead of trying to work with us, they ignored out outreaches and have behaved pretty-much-like they're trying to work against us. The names and sizes of companies shouldn't matter, neither should the fact that we're both offering 'open source' parcels of our technology... What does matter is that at the end of the day, our Karma is really high... and I'm not really impressed by theirs.

Posted by Jonathan at April 25, 2008 3:41 PM

Comments

Post a comment