Alterman in Context

The Social Graph Engine

FAQ of the day: What about Google Connect?

The short answer:

Anytime the large social networks make it easier for us to help our customers (web publishers) promote audience growth, it’s a very good thing.

The long answer:

While few and far between, my blog posts have always been about the opportunity large social networks and traditional portals have to begin serving publishers across the entire web. I’ve used phrases like “open portal”, “anti-portal” and “the distributed web” to describe this opportunity.  In sum, if the major players hope to extend their ad networks to credible publishers across the web, they will have to earn that inventory by helping publishers grow their audiences. After all, Fox and NBC have to earn the right to place ads across their network of independent television stations by providing their affiliates’ programs that grow ratings. The same is true for internet ad networks.

Recent "openness" initiatives by MySpace, Google and Facebook Connect begin to ask the right question: How can we begin providing value to the universe of websites outside our domain? It’s a first step, but only a baby step.

While these initiatives allow website publishers to make limited use of mega-portal social information, they don’t empower publishers to aggregate and own their own user profiles and social graph information.   I believe this limitation is fatal if the major social networks hope to interoperate with high value web publishers in a meaningful way. Moving forward all serious publishers want to contextually inform their advertising experiences and user applications with real-time user data that is unique to their audience. It is therefore essential that publishers own and control their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine.

Providing publishers their own social graph engine is core to the KickApps product offering.  In fact all KickApps applications (e.g. UGC, social networking, widget building, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party OpenSocial and Facebook apps, are fully integrated with the KickApps social graph engine out of the box.    What’s equally important is that we provide a full set of APIs, customizable feeds, widget builder tools and a plug-in architecture such that our publishers can easily build and deploy their own custom applications that make full use of our social graph engine.

The KickApps platform will certainly integrate with Google Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace because these initiatives may help our website publishers accelerate audience growth by tapping into “friends” on the big social networks. But this value to publishers is modest relative to the benefits of leveraging their own social graph engine. KickApps will continue to earn long-lasting relationships with publishers because our sole mission is to serve them. 

More analysis from around the web:

Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point? Mike Gunderloy, Web Worker Daily, GigaOm Network

Why should I, as a webmaster, set aside part of my page for you to have a conversation in? Why should you, as a user, come to my site to talk with your Facebook friends, rather than using Facebook? Why should I have to choose which identity to share with a site, rather than just logging in with OpenID and interacting with other users of that site? What are we getting in return for pushing another stream of data through Google?

Google Confirms Friend Connect  Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.  …The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect Charlene Li, Groundswell

Prying Open the Social Graph Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM

Hooman on semantic web

I enjoyed Hooman Radfar's post re semantic web at  Widgify.  When semantic web finally rolls out in a meaningful way I doubt consumers will have any idea that they just experienced the "semantic web".  They'll just find that many separate services that they normally use in an ad hoc fashion are suddenly integrated in more interesting ways.  Semantic web will also bring new ways to navigate the internet.  More on that later.

KickApps 3.0

It was a pleasure watching the KickApps troops in action over the last few weeks.  Our new release is the result of an amazing team effort, and I'm looking forward to sharing KickApps 3.0 with our customers. 

Stay tuned---we have a few more big surprises on the way.

Hosted Applications, Google Apps, etc

 

KickApps was designed from the ground up to deliver a suite of hosted applications that developers can call on-demand.  Although different in scope, platforms like Google Apps have a similar agenda.  Over time the promise for developers is a limitless array of hosted tools and experiences that deploy quickly in a cost-effective manner.

KickApps can be different things for web developers with very different needs.  For example, some developers may begin with a few Video Players and later add Widgets and Social Networking.  Others may begin with a UGC contest and later integrate Video Players that present playlists of their own editorial content.

Video Players: KickApps web developers can build any number of individually styled and programmable video players for instant deployment on any web page, all supported by a web accessible media management system.

Widgets:  KickApps web developers can build and deploy any number of individually styled and programmable widgets to display and syndicate their own video, photo or audio content.  Widgets also  deploy and syndicate user contributed content.

UGC:  KickApps provides an easily deployable, highly scalable UGC application that includes, video, photo and audio uploads, transcoding, tagging, search, storage, CDN, flagging, media moderation, video blogs, webcam functionality, video-enabled message boards and member-to-member video messaging.

Social Networking: The KickApps social networking application includes customizable personal pages, personal media management, personal widgets, integrated webcams, RSS, IM alerts, comment management, custom settings, customizable wallpaper, themes, and member management tools.

OPWs: The Making of An Open Portal Website

I initially invented the term "Open Portal" to describe how portals like Yahoo! or Ask might evolve a larger strategy to reach all that lies beyond their own destination sites.  But individual websites can take the same cue with surprisingly little effort. 

Open Portal Websites (OPWs) invite members to bring everything they are into the website experience (friends, family, hobbies, thoughts, ideas, videos, photos, blogs) and invite them to take a piece of that experience with them when they leave (widgets, feeds, RSS).  It's not just about reaching people with effective SEO and it goes beyond creating programming for your own URL.  The goal of an OPW is to program the entire web!  And your audience should do most of the hard work for you.

OPWs are living, breathing organisms that swell and grow with user "stuff"; and like living things their children help them duplicate and grow virally as they wander off and connect to other people and places.

To enable major media and other websites to transform their websites into Open Portal experiences,  platforms must provide user-generated content, social networking, video messaging, multi-media discussion boards, widget building, video players and a host of tools that invite meaningful user participation.  But enabling functionality is simply not enough. 

User features must be built upon media management, member management, administration and reporting layers that support fast, safe, customizable deployments (a service-oriented architecture with easy to use UI objects and robust APIs).  It's one thing to enable Open Portals, but it's quite another for traditional media and niche websites to feel safe with all this “openness”.  Without management tools, abuse and offensive material will scare off major brands and advertisers.  So behind the scenes, we must remember to include a measure of both form and structure.

A final thought...  Windows transformed DOS by allowing application developers an easy way to innovate without the necessity of building the same structures (print, file management) over and over again.  It's time for an analogous development for web developers.  A kind of "internet operating system"...a platform that provides developers with more than a language...instead, it will provide a wide range of business components, hosting and services...callable at any time, by anyone at little or no cost.

Check back soon...there's much more to talk about!

Open Portals, Anti-Portals and the Wholesale Web

Prediction

Portals like AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google will soon generate more impressions and ad inventory by providing their programming to third party websites then by serving retail traffic within their own domains.

The idea of internet portals morphing into "wholesalers" of programming to many thousands of "affiliates" should not be surprising. Wholesale distribution is the driver of nearly every major industry (from manufacturing to major media), and the television and film industries have worked that way for decades. NBC distributes its programming to loads of independent affiliates, so why shouldn't major web portals expand distribution beyond their own web properties? And from the perspective of most webmasters looking to invite user participation at their sites, programming complexity requires help from larger web players.

While portals like Yahoo and Google may capture dominant market share relative to other websites, their audiences are modest relative to the aggregate audience of niche websites across the internet. The universe of websites has a very long-tail, and soon it will be clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary mission of every major portal. Open Portal or Anti-Portal may be the best ways to describe this new animal.

User-generated content plays a central role

Perhaps there's nothing all that radical about syndicating content on the web. Video distribution has become fairly common, and there are a number of companies (like BrightCove and thePlatform) making it easier for content aggregators. But the syndication of traditional media is not enough to validate my outrageous prediction. A portal platform designed only to distribute video files is just not that interesting—the internet is by nature an interactive place. User participation is the key ingredient driving consumer traffic and, in the context of portals distributing programming to 3rd party websites, any definition of programming that includes only traditional media content is far too narrow.

Context will drive the next evolution of user-generated content and social networking (among other Web X.0 features), and that context will be expressed thru many thousands of niche-oriented websites, from major media websites to local radio, high school and family websites. Whether those niches are primetime reality television show websites or high school URLs, the winning solutions will blend premium and long-tail UGC within the many sub-contexts of individual websites.

By way of example, Major League Baseball will want to blend vintage footage of Babe Ruth on highest rated lists at MLB.com with highest rated Little League videos uploaded by 14 year-old fans and their parents. Or MLB.com will present a list of junior girls soccer videos alongside a premium content story about Mia Hamm. In any case, user participation blended with premium content will soon define the total experience within specific contexts and sub-contexts on many, many websites.  By the way, MLB also may also want to power, brand and distribute content to every Little League website in the country---enabling all these microsites is part of the challenge.

The only thing standing in the way is the difficulty of web developers effectively building the kind of complex backend infrastructure and media management necessary to support these user-driven experiences.

So how might this fancy new portal platform work?

Imagine if a portal like Yahoo took the initiative of providing any 3^rd party website open access to a wide range of hosted programs (with both traditional content and user participation functionality). The Yahoo affiliate platform would invite webmasters to browse for programming that improves their user experience, thus creating incremental traffic and ad inventory for both Yahoo and their affiliate websites. Programming would include user-generated content and social networking functionality, Flash video players, media-enabled banner ads, online games, a selection of live events, short video programs and everything else available from Yahoo's existing "retail" verticals. All programming would be supported by a seamlessly integrated media management system, complete with administration, transcoding, hosting, reporting and data mining services.

Widgets will no doubt be the fastest and most customizable way for webmasters to implement Yahoo syndicated programming. But these widgets will go beyond the skin-deep objects we've seen thus far (e.g. chat, video blogging). That is, most of the functionality would present itself to end-users at 3rd party website after they've clicked thru these deep widgets to more full-featured page experiences (branded to 3rd party websites, but "powered by Yahoo") with web services allowing customization and seamless integration of these experiences on affiliate websites. The widgets themselves (whether Flash, HTML and/or AJAX enabled) will be customizable by web developers with just a few clicks at Yahoo's affiliate center.

Portal distribution platforms will be even more ambitious than those provided by ASP trailblazers like Salesforce.com. Think of them as fully hosted tinker-toy sets for webmasters. Application frameworks like Ruby on Rails provide a half-step in this direction—what I'm describing is a fully hosted platform far more abstracted and non-technical than any programming language. The platforms, themselves, will be built on sophisticated, service oriented architectures, and may make use of JBI and other powerful messaging technologies. By contrast, deployment of hosted programming on affiliate websites will be trivial.

By elegantly blending off-the-shelf, hosted programming with their own premium content and personality, webmasters can quickly implement complete solutions with minimal engineering support and cost. Implementation of feature rich hosted programming will take hours, not months, and the only price to affiliate websites will be sharing some ad inventory with their portal provider—just as local television affiliates share ad inventory with the major networks.

Impact on internet advertising

This portal syndication model will have tremendous impact on internet advertising. In a very real sense Google's Adsense program is already embracing the concept of capturing real estate on third-party websites. The only difference is that Adsense is capturing real estate with advertising alone—zero programming! Imagine if NBC announced that there would be no Fall Lineup for its independent affiliates—just ads this season. How many of those stations would remain NBC affiliates? Zero is a safe assumption.

The implication is that soon as other ad networks begin to level the technology playing field (which is inevitable), Google will have to begin earning that Adsense real estate by providing their affiliates with programming that makes sites more sticky and viral. In fact, the Google Apps program is a first step in that direction. No surprise to me. Google is, after all, a very smart company.

Major media

Traditional web portals will not be the only companies interested in distributing programming to third party websites. Major media brands like MTV and Sports Illustrated will discover that their brands are powerful enough to live outside their own web domains in a more meaningful way. And the programming they provide third party websites will go far beyond traditional content, and will include hosted services that enable deep user participation. For example, it's easy to imagine MTV providing a turnkey "Powered by MTV" hosted service that enables every musician, record label and music-related website with user-generated content functionality, live events and other programming. Similarly, it's easy to see why it will be compelling for SportsIllustrated.com to provide every local Little League website their very own "Powered by SI" social network.

The promise

My predictions are all very self-serving, I'm ashamed to admit. My company, KickApps Corporation, has set out to build the kind of platform I've described in this blog entry. But there will certainly be others, and that's a good thing. The promise of Web X.0 requires that we increasingly make building amazing user experiences as easy as it is to use these experiences. The line between user and web developer will continue to blur as surely as the line has blurred between content creator and content viewer. Web developers that seek to fully empower their site visitors will need lots of help from platform companies focused on making their jobs easier.