Graphing Social Patterns conference is next week, and if you haven’t already registered, we highly recommend you do — it brings together the best community of social applications developers. Going by the past conferences, the panels and speaker tracks are invariably excellent.
For readers of this blog, who are planning to come, here is a discount code that gets you 20% discount for conference registration: gspe08fos.
It was a strange conversation at a panel today at Graphing social. At a panel that featured folks from Bebo, Friendster, Meebo and Netvibes, at one point the panelists were talking about the impact third party applications have on the user base and the platforms.
I was very surprised to hear Jessica Alter from Bebo bring up “regulating” third party apps and developers so they behave well on all platforms. It seemed to get quick yays from Friendster and Netvibes, to the extent they were all ready to create a working group right then to regulate these apps.
It seemed to me a case of the platforms suddenly turning prude, especially one like Bebo. I think even Facebook’s recent strategy to turn down the ability of apps to tap into the social graph falls into the same category. Social networks — Myspace, Facebook, Bebo — are all largely built around very inane set interactions. None of these networks have any really deep collaborative components, or even anything that is significantly useful. So they turn to third party apps to build it on their platform.
What they don’t realize (or they realize but refuse to admit) is that users on their platforms aren’t really in the mood for deeper apps. Deep, rich apps don’t do well on Facebook. It is a reality. Spammy, inane apps do quite well — and that is a reality as well.
So they try to force it upon external developers. Turn off virality. “Regulate” them. If the trend continues, like it seems to be, the story of open social platforms will be a short one. Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 even mentioned that they would prefer to open the gates to virality slowly. Maybe they are justified in worrying about the impact to their user base, but they should probably set their expectations right as well.
On the panel, thankfully, Seth Sternberg from Meebo voiced an opinion against the cry for regulating apps.
In fact, even otherwise, Seth Sternberg impressed me on that panel more than anyone else. I’ve not interacted with him before, or heard him before. I hope to, though, in the future.
I just got back from the morning session of the Myspace Dev Jam at their San Francisco office. The short summary is — their platform is not yet ready to go live, but is getting there quickly. They still do not have a date for the launch to the users, but expect to make an announcement “shortly” (possibly next week at the next meetup at their offices on 5th).
I think after Facebook, Myspace is probably going to be the most exciting one to develop to for the developer community. That said, their history of not working with the widget developers and actually coming out with their own products to compete with the popular widgets on their site indicates the wrong kind of DNA that one would want in the platform company. It came out somewhat in one of today’s questions as well — when asked about the ability to upload photos to the developer sites from within the canvas pages, they were somewhat puzzled we even wanted that ability. Posting forms from within canvas pages in Myspace (and opensocial in general) is going to be an issue for some time too. That said, Myspace is the biggest social networking site online, and has a huge presence in the US. That by itself makes it exciting.
We had an opportunity to present at the Facebook and Opensocial developer meetup at the Google offices on Feb 13. Here’s the video and the slides. You can find more coverage on the meetup here.
