frogpond

What is OpenSocial? Yes, it’s a business model innovation

There’s a myriad of posts on OpenSocial already and I know that I’m a latecomer to the party. Yet I will try to put down some observations and notes, if only because this has rattled the plans for my planned BarCamp session this weekend. I have to update my slide deck now, thanks Google. OK, most of the stuff I’ve written before remains valid and/or got valified through this move (see e.g. Portable soziale Netzwerke, and my post on NoseRub, german posts also touching on big hairy questions like privacy of data).

Some observations from a strategic / business point of view:

Google is proposing an open approach with the goal of integrating a variety of networks – they are not building up yet another social network. This is a platform approach, not a product or services innovation.
And this is also a cool business model innovation move – Google is opening up the social networking space to the many developers outside with a standard platform, i.e. they have learned the Facebook lesson and expanded on it – turning the table for Facebook in effect. Now who’s leading the charge in the web OS game …
Google understands that there’s more value to be gained from a shared ecosystem and from the long tail of distributed communities, than from a walled garden even if it’s big. There’s no need for an one and for all über-network, but for an easy way to integrate the many existing social networking sites (and communities of people in fact).

Nice before/after picture:

Some snippets (via Richard MacManus, …):

OpenSocial is not a social network itself, rather it is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:

* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

For developers there are lots of benefits. They can build an app that easily works across all the OpenSocial partners. And they can use normal HTML, Javascript and Flash – instead of the proprietary languages Facebook forces developers to use.

You may also check out the Google guys view on all this, here at the all new OpenSocial API blog (“The web is better when it’s social“)

Then, for those with more time on their hands there’s also this one-hour explanatory video:

And here’s a little video by Marc Andreesen of Ning explaining the concept of container and apps:

Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators

Interested in more analyses? Go visit Techmeme and bring lots of time. Or take my short list of cool posts, starting with Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester (“Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives”), this is a good short status report, short excerpt:

What is Open Social?

Google says: “OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

Translation: Social Networks, and other websites (we can call them platforms or containers) can let mini-websites (applications or widgets) to be shared and interact with existing online communities (social networks, social graphs, communities).

Jeremiah also expands on the opportunities this offers, namely in the community building space (Efficient development, harness existing communities, open standards help long term, your existing applications become social, future brings social to your website). Recommended analysis, gets you up to speed quick.

Then there’s Anil Dash of Six Apart (“OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People”), on why the opened social graph can help people in their networked lifes:

This gives regular people on the web more control over the social networks and applications they use.

Interesting times ahead.

More KM blogs …

Luis included me in a list of worthwhile KM blogs, and asks for more.

This is hard as my list resembles Luis’ quite a bit. But here are some more, in no particular order, and playing almost by his rules:

I want to make it very clear though that this is not my complete essential list of KM reads. To me, that would be the entire 200 KM blogs I am subscribed to right now and that I follow on a regular basis. What this list is, actually, is a whole bunch of folks who have grabbed my interest the most just recently and I will be adding a single line per blog detailing what may be of interest to you, so that you would have the opportunity to check them out further, if you wish to.

What does almost mean? I may point out some of the recent entries of the particular blog, that I’ve boomarked recently – using my shared del.icio.us bookmarks which give a neat summmary if and why a peculiar blog is worthwhile:

So here I go:

GridLock – Just another KM Blog, by Arjun Thomas

I bookmarked some 15 entries by Arjun over the course of time, stuff like

What prompts the need to capture Best Practices?
Knowledge Culture (“The bottom line is, do not hoard information. Get as much of it out to your people as possible. They just might surprise you.”)
Capturing and Transferring Knowledge (“unless an organization’s culture is geared towards sharing knowledge, creating systems and processes to enable the sharing of knowledge is a moot point”)
Why KM? (“With attrition levels high, initiatives, ideas and direction are lost. The other driving force for building KM – where is the time to train new joinees?”)

Arjun is clear, knowledgeable and outspoken, like e.g. here (Why E-mails make bad Idea Management Solutions) or here (MS Wiki Vs Wiki):

What Microsoft seem to have done is create a web based front end for microsoft word, and slipped in a interlinking system and called it a wiki. Even with the versioning system this is probably the simplest and least effective wiki i have come across

Then there is Incredibly Dull by Andrew Gent, a quite new blog with only a few posts for the start. But they are fine and thought-provoking, like e.g. Three Types of Knowledge Workers or The Threat of Social Software (for corporate intranets) (part2, part 1).

Third, and last for today is Knowledge Forward by Craig Roth of the Burton Group. This is a pretty new blog but looks promising, at least for people who are into technologies for KM. From Craig’s mission statement aka about:

[…] My goal is to provide information and ideas that help organizations get their knowledge-based Information Technology initiatives moving forward. […]

I have found it fascinating to see how industry consensus emerges around new technologies and concepts and to follow their acceptance from geeks (“Isn’t this a great new technology?”) to VCs (“Wow! Look how much money we can make!”) to end users (“What can this really do for me today?”). I continue researching new areas with a healthy dose of skepticism, applying the lessons I’ve learned so far to each.

So many good blogs, so little time. And now on to Luis’ next challenge, see next post (in BMID).

The state of Enterprise 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe analyzes the state of Enterprise 2.0, collects some of his learnings and introduces a new visualization:

Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.

Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.

Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.

and

Nothing extraordinary in here, yet these are nice heuristics to play and design implementation efforts by. While these heuristics don’t make our lifes easier – changing “state of minds” is harder than experimenting with nifty tools – they can surely help in planning our adoption strategy and organizational change management efforts:

[…] to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model […]

Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the corporate world …

is this really reality? Now, I’ve been collecting and compiling some serious stuff on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 adoption lately, some of them are worth pointing out … especially given a discussion I’ve had lately and that was revitalized today.

There’s this HBS Case on How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t) and the related discussion (“Wikipedia in Pinstripes”), that handles a lot of the adoption challenges social software has in the enterprise:

[…] Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more collaboration inside companies, but I’ve seen mixed results. It can be as simple as “We’re having an office party, please sign up on a wiki page, and tell us what you’re going to bring,” to “We’re going to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together, and then we can self-organize.”

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.