Open Social and the Rules of Social Objects
13.06.2008
"Not another social network!" - Patrick Chanezon explained the rules of social objects and the benefits of OpenSocial at the Google I/O developer gathering which took place in San Francisco in May 2008.
Two Days, 70+ Sessions
Google I/O is not a conference: It's a gathering devoted to Google applications and APIs, and as it caters first and foremost for developers, its promise is to offer "in-depth technical sessions, hands-on training, and face time with engineering teams for Q&A."
Looking at the schedule (which was published as a Google spreadsheet) as well as at the documentation - slides and videos of more than 70 sessions that took place in the Moscone Center in San Francisco on May 28 and 29 - one is more than ready to believe that Google I/O lived up to its promise.
The sessions were presented in six categories: AJAX & JavaScript, APIs & Tools, Maps & Geo, Mobile, Social, and Tech Talk. The Social Track was, obviously, centred around OpenSocial and SocialGraph, yet the lessons to be learned for instance from OpenSocial as a standard for the Social Web, a talk given by Chris Schalk, Kevin Marks and Patrick Chanezon, are applicable to all social communities.
Patrick opened the talk by picking up on a definition of social objects as proposed by Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku (acquired by Google in October 2007). A social object, in their sense, is an object that is socialized, e.g. a photo on Flickr.
These are the five questions that one needs to tackle, according to Jyri:
1. What is your object?
- For instance a photo on Flickr, a slide on slideshar.
2. What are your verbs?
- E.g a photo on Flickr is uploaded and tagged, on eBay, an object is sold and bought; these verbs must have a a prominent position in the design of the user-interface).
3. How can people share the objects?
- Each object must have a unique URL; Flickr was only successful once it introduced URLs for each photo.
4. What is the gift in the invitation?
- Patrick always spams messages such as "Please join platform XYZ and help me save time filling in my addressbook", because there is no gift in the invitation for the recipient.
5. Are you charging the publishers or the spectators? -
In other words: What is your businessmodel?
Patrick then raised the question: How do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network? The OpenSocial Foundation, not surprisingly, is his answer to this challenge, whose claim is to "Keep the specification open."
Read the proposal of the OpenSocial Foundation on their website or watch the video of the presentation on YouTube.