Bickel Blog

While Open Social is still getting started (there are less than 300 open social applications on Orkut for example and nearly 30,000 on Facebook), it is going to be an important platform in the coming Social Web. Ringside has been working on letting any website be a container for Open Social and to hook into the emerging Open Social ecosystem. Bill Reichert does an excellent job of explaining it in this video . Open Social reminds me of the old J2EE specification. Sun released a reference implementation – similar to Open Social’s Apache Shindig reference implementation. Like the Sun version, Shindig is meant to be used as a framework for large social networks like Orkut and Hi5 to implement their own version of Open Social – just like IBM, BEA, JBoss and many others did with the Sun reference implementation. Ringside is filling in the role of implementing a production version of Shindig that any website could use to build their own little mini social network among their own users. ...

Shaun Connolly just joined us at Ringside, and he is already developing some interesting perspectives on the Social Web. Read his big dog pick ... To add my two cents, I think it is clear that Facebook is the big dog for Social Networking and Google is the big dog for the Social Web . Facebook of course gets points for the rapid growth of their prime target social graph and extensive developer community - which are all targetted at making THEIR social network stronger. Google gets points for trying to make Social a real part of the entire Web. The strong community they have built around Open Social is impressive. The ideas of Friend Connect open up social capabilitites to any website. These are efforts that make Social a part of the entire web. Facebook has fought back. First by locking down Friend Connect from being a part of the Facebook community. Their current statements about moving to open source could put them into contention with Google in terms of "big dog" l...

As my colleagues Jason Kinner and Rich Friedman (and many others) have pointed out, last week’s announcements by MySpace and Facebook to open up their user’s identity, friends and privacy to any website is a major step toward a Social Web. Now any website can start to offer socially aware applications, like putting a Facebook user’s profile picture on that user’s webpage, or listing friends to buy a gift for. We are very excited because it gets website business owners thinking about the possibility of a more social website. And if enough websites start doing that, then a Social Web really starts to form. This is exactly the scenario we mapped out at the Passariello’s pizza parlor a year ago when we first started talking about this. Website business owners will start to ask the same questions we were asking: If some of my users are on Facebook and some are on MySpace, how do I hook them together? What about my website users who don’t use a Social Network? Can they benefit? Can I offer m...