P@ Log

I’ll speak in a panel there, about social platforms for gaming: should be fun.

Augusto came to the hackathon in Buenos Aires to start porting TweetWheel to OpenSocial. TweetWheel lets you determine whom among your friends know each other: he created it for Twitter where friend means follow, but it could be extended to a social graph extracted from an OpenSocial container (hence Augusto’s presence at the hackathon).
TweetWheel has an incredible UI, a neat visualization entirely in javascript, and is built in Python on Google App Engine: I’d say Augusto is the poster child of Google APIs.
He presented his app at the end of the hackathon, in a special category, because he had not finished to port, but drew a few hos and has of appreciation.

Irma Van Der Walt was our translator for the university tech talks about OpenSocial. She had a fun story about hi5. To the hi5 team: you chose your name well!

2 weeks ago I invited Dan Carroll from SOMR to give a tech talk at Google about SOMR’s social recommendation engine. This is a very interesting topic: here is the video.

From OpenSocialSou…

Today Bruno Rovagnati’s parents invited the whole OpenSocial gang for an Asado. Eating meat and drinking wine: what a social and civilized way of spending a sunny afternoon!
Bruno’s brother prepared and cooked the meat, it was delicious! More images of the afternoon on the photo album.

From OpenSocialSou…

The OpenSocial South America Tour started on monday in Buenos Aires and Tandil, Argentina, and it’s a lot of fun!

Here are some pictures of the first 2 days, I will add more to this album as we go.

And here are the slides of yesterday’s presentation:

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Dave blogs about blogs.sun.com’s 100,000’s post. Wow time passes fast! Seems yesterday when I wrote the first post celebrating John Hoffmann and William Snow for deploying Roller so fast. Linda Skrocky posts the picture of the chairman award we got for creating blogs.sun.com, but I’m not on it (in vacations). Hopefully here’s my Photoshopped version of the award. I love that picture: a virtual presence at an award event after 4 years working remotely.

Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian (now chief economist at Google) is the best book about technology strategy I have read. It was published in 1998, 10 years ago, so the examples are Netscape vs Microsoft, or Microsoft vs Intuit, but the examples are just illustrations of deeper principles that apply today more than ever.
During the panel at Web 2.0 Expo this morning “Comparing Social Platforms”, I explained that building a standard like OpenSocial was a direct application of Chapter 8 and 9 of this book. I recommend anyone interested in technology strategy to read it.

When we talked about specific verticals to be socialized, Dave Morin from Facebook who was in the panel said: “We look at it as a market: there are many verticals to be socialized”.

This echoes a quote from the book that applies very much to OpenSocial: “Standards change competition for a market to competition within a market.”

I do hope that Facebook ends up implementing OpenSocial and joins the market that this standard is creating for developers:-)

Today I’ll be representing Google (Orkut and iGoogle) at the “Comparing Social Platforms” Panel at Web 2.0 moderated by Justin Smith from the Inside Facebook blog.
There will be representatives from facebook, MySpace, Bebo and SixApart. Should be a fun panel.

One of the questions he plans to ask is about viral channels and balancing user and developer interest. I will just point to the survey he posted today about Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

Invitations and profile clutter seem to be user’s two worse pet peeves. Both Orkut and iGoogle will soon implement user to user messenging, but eschewed invitations for now, prefering developers to use the Activity Stream to spread their app, because it provides for a more “organic” way of spreading an application. About Organic vs Viral spread, see Kevin Marks’ very good post from February.

Jia Chen from RockYou invited me to talk about Google OpenSocial platforms, Orkut and iGoogle during his talk at Web 2.0 Expo this morning: Building an App for Social Platforms.

It was a great sessions, with representative from hi5 and MySpace presenting their implementation of OpenSocial, and Jia and Raymond showing how to create an application that works on all networks. Here is a link to Raymond’s code sample.

OpenSocial provides a single technical specification, but policies (advertising or not) and features (extensions, which viral channels are open) may vary in each network, as well as user demography and interests, so this kind of session is very useful for application developers: right now there are 3 live OpenSocial social networks and there are already differences to know about.

Here are my slides for this talk.

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