Orkut preparing to take on Facebook

Orkut taking on Facebook is like David v. Goliath 2.0, but in the 2.0 version, David’s family has a ton of money with which to purchase him state of the art weapons.

Business Week has a long 2-pager on the future of Orkut talking about the opening of the Orkut platform a la Facebook (via TechCrunch. Here’s the part that I was most interested in, though:

Orkut itself could conceivably become a hub for accessing multiple social networks in one place, a concept demonstrated by another Google-funded Carnegie Mellon group last year in a project called Socialstream. “We don’t know what they will use,” cautions Brad Myers, project adviser and a professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon.

But there are signs Google sees wisdom in a concept like Socialstream. In September, Orkut introduced an array of new features, some similar to those offered by other social networks. One addition was Updates from Your Friends, a box that alerts users to new photos or links to YouTube videos their friends have posted. Another was Feeds, which enables Orkut’s pages to display information posted on other sites—such as a blog from Google’s Blogger or Six Apart’s LiveJournal, or photos from Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s (YHOO) Flickr.

If Google can integrate Orkut with it’s other services (like add a status update that synchs with your GoogleTalk status, or allows you to microblog from GoogleTalk), then it will certainly become more compelling. They certainly have some of the right ideas. And they have best-in-class office/productivity apps for just about everything except To Do lists. But will their push for sociality be to build Orkut into Socialstream, which would be a best-in-class social network app?

It’s funny cause I started this post in the morning, and by afternoon… More social networking developments for Google. Jaiku has been bought out by Google. Now, we all know that I am a fan of Jaiku despite only having 2 friends who use the service. But, once again, here’s the interesting part for me:

we’re eager to go beyond what’s there today, and build something completely new for you to enjoy. Take this as an invitation to join us on a journey to reinvent how you communicate and stay in touch with the people you care about.

The most obvious way that I see to read that is that they’re going to build a Jaiku app for the gPhone operating system. The second most obvious choice is they’re going to work on building Jaiku into Orkut to serve as Orkut’s News Feed. If it is the latter, then hopefully they’ll find a way to limit feed items by groups (as Facebook will be doing sometime soon). But first, Orkut will have to add the concept of groups to their current privacy areas of “friends,” “friends of friends,” and “everyone.” Perhaps the Communities play some part in the privacy settings, but I’m not familiar enough with Orkut to know.

The funniest part of the acquisition, though, is all the people on Twitter who are now fighting a Twitter v. Jaiku war via Tweets. Clearly a lot of people don’t know enough about Jaiku to realize that they can just throw their Twitter RSS feed into it and only have to update in one place. I’m sure that’s part of the decision process that led Google to buy Jaiku instead of Twitter. A very small part of the process, but part of it nonetheless.

Is SocialStream coming November 5?

If SocialStream is what Google plans to release on Nov. 5, then it will be the best birthday present that Google has ever given me. It will also be the only birthday present that Google has ever given me, and they won’t really just be giving it to just me…

I’m not too hyped up though, because it’s really just going to be some sort of API that everyone will have to sort of adopt before Google decides to make SocialStream a reality. Or else they’re going to wait until a bunch of people build “open” social networks using the APIs and then buy whoever makes the best one.

Two things I’ve been investigating (probably too) heavily in the past few weeks are (1) ways to aggregate all the social stuff I have, and (2) create a personal/private blog that I can limit access to, but still actually make accessible without requiring a lot of effort on the part of the people with whom I want to share the blog.

Facebook does a decent job with both of these, but my Facebook Notes are stuck in Facebook once they’re posted there. I created a private blog here on wordpress.com to see if WordPress’ Facebook application would import those posts, but I’m afraid it’s not happening (unless it’s just taking a long time to update). SocialStream would take care of the aggregation as well the ability to post with different levels of privacy, so it would actually solve real world problems for me. (If you can really call them problems, of course)

Plaxo’s Pulse also does a pretty good job with the aggregation, but it’s just another network that I’d have to get people to sign up for in order to make it worth anything. And I don’t think it has the ability to pull in my private WordPress blog posts either. Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll find something that actually does that.

OMG. CSB just resized my browser and then made me install RealPlayer.

The post title was going to be my Twitter. But Twitter is down. And then this turned into a full blog post. Or at least, a sort of external storyline.

Anyway, I joined the how i met your mother official AWESOME gang group on Facebook. I saw there was a link to a “Robin Sparkles” video. Can’t say no to that. So, I ended up at a CBS video page. There my browser was resized. And I was told that I needed to install a missing plugin. No big deal there… lots of sites resize my browser for no reason, and maybe it was plugin I could actually use. I should have stopped as soon as it said RealPlayer. Should have searched YouTube. Because of course it’s there (see below).

But I didn’t. So, now I have RealPlayer installed on my two day old T60p. I will be uninstalling it shortly and subsequently running AdAware and SpyBot, but I know that the claws of RealPlayer have already dug themselves inextricably into the skin of my computer. First, I guess I’ll watch all the other HIMYM videos on “InnerTube” to try to make it worth the agony of RealPlayer.

In conclusion: ATTN: CBS Web Guys: It’s called Flash. Please learn to use it or hire someone who can. Or if you want to get ahead of the game, use Silverlight. It’ll probably end up being nearly as evil as RealPlayer, but at least it doesn’t still feel all 1997 about it.

For those wondering about Robin Sparkles, here’s the first hit from Google.

Vertical Social Networking

This is another one of those question posing posts. The question for this post is: Is Vertical Social Networking important? Or do we just need more fine-grained privacy controls?

vs.

The question is one raised indirectly by Scott Gatz in his Keep Facebook Fun post.

I will freely admit that I’m a member of Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Oh, and Yahoo 360, for good measure. I also will admit that I was sort of faced with the same issue as Scott when I started delving into Facebook after they launched The Platform. There are some people who are not my friends on Facebook because I’d consider them business associates or contacts, and for those people, I don’t really want them to know what level I’m on for the iLike Music Challenge. I don’t really care if they read my movie reviews, but I’m not sure if I want them to see all my Twitters (this is kind of a separate issue, but my Twitters are restricted to my “friends” on Twitter, but I think that all of my friends on Facebook can see them; yet another reason not to be friends with people you aren’t really friends with on Facebook).

But, instead of having two different social networks - one for “fun” and one for “business” - couldn’t I just have one social network that will allow me to place my friends/contacts into different groups with different levels of privacy?

Flickr actually does a pretty good job of this, allowing me to have Private (only me), Family, Friends, Family+Friends, and the more generic Contacts. But the privacy is really only 3 levels deep instead of a more desirable 4. I.e., My House, Walled Garden, Public. The Walled Garden is divided into two spaces, but it would be nice to have one addition level between Walled Garden and Public. There’s some photos that I wouldn’t mind sharing with my Contacts, but I don’t want to make them public to the world. So, they remain as Friends photos, and my Contacts don’t get to see them.

Of course, as I mentioned above, wouldn’t it better to let me designate what my groups are and which groups can see what? It would certainly be better for me! I know for a fact that it’s more difficult for the programmers on the other end. How do I know? Yahoo 360. (Just for good measure, remember)

I’ve tried sharing photos on Yahoo 360, but the permissions just don’t come out right. I LOVE LOVE LOVE that they let me create my own groups and put people in as many different groups as I want. Of course, if it really worked, that would be even better. But as far as I can tell, it’s still a little buggy. I’m pretty sure that no one else has tried this approach for that very reason. It’s always going to harder code and test.

But (but!) if someone could give people a social network where all the contacts are grouped into categories that are centered around the user, wouldn’t it essentially eliminate the need for any other social network? I believe it would.

Now go build it! I’d do it, but I’m working on my America’s Next Top Model fantasy game.

By sheer coincidence

Bob Lee at crazybob.org made a post yesterday listing his recent Twitterings. Funny because I’d just been wondering about the same sort of scenario.

At first I thought, what the heck is the point of using Twitter if you’re going to be posting your Twitters on your blog? Well, to attempt to answer that question, one could argue that having your Twitter feed separate from your normal blog feed means that people who like your long-form postings can subscribe to that feed and not be inundated by the constant Twitter chatter (this is a link to Bob’s Twitter page so you can see what I mean). So that’s nice for those people. But the people who want to just read everything you post now have to subscribe to two different feeds (and if they’re like me, they have to worry at least once or twice a week if the feed is updating correctly since there haven’t been any new posts lately).

But, in fact, it appears that Bob is thinking nearly the same kind of thing I’m thinking since his most recent Twitter (at the time of writing) is:

I’m starting to wonder if I should just start a high frequency blog–kind of like Dave Winer. Or maybe I should convert my existing blog.

Exactly.

The question, I guess, is: are more people going to be annoyed by having to read more, shorter, Twitter-style posts in between the longer posts that they’re more interested in? Or are more people going to just wish that you’d only have one feed for everything?

I will do some searching about this magical “meta” feed, of course, right after I finish this post. Just as I did some searching yesterday after that post and found that Facebook will import blog entries for you from any RSS feed and post them as “Notes.” So, now, everything I post here will be crossposted to Facebook automagically. For the meta-feed, though, I’m imagining something that will include public Flickr photos integrated as well. But then the question still remains, will people want to see somewhat random photos just appearing in my feed whenever I happen to upload them, mixed in with the .plan posts as well as the more-than-one-paragraph posts? Or is it just better to have 3 separate feeds for photos, twitters, and posts, and let people subscribe to whatever they choose?

Another potential solution - perhaps the easiest for everyone - would be to add a “post” or “longform” category to this blog, and make sure that all posts that are not twitter-like in nature are included in that category. WordPress is nice enough to create feeds for each category, so anyone who wanted to get only the posts without the twitterpations, could subscribe to that category and get what they wanted without all the other stuff. To provide for the eventuality that this idea becomes the implemented solution, I have added said “Longform” category now, and this is that category’s inaugural post.