Four Aspects of Social Web Evolution

So what kind of emerging standards and technologies are we seeing that can help address these issues? It turns out that there are quite a number of interesting efforts or new takes on existing efforts worth examining right now. These include :

Open activity streams. The central artifact of social media has become the activity stream, whether this is the familiar Facebook news feed, Twitter stream, or the classical reverse chronological list of blog entries or wiki modifications. The problem is that there are too many streams to interact with these days and they are too distributed to perceive and interact with directly. They also come in many different types from syndication formats like RSS and Atom to custom API streams. End users don’t care about the technical details anyway, so there has been some interesting work on standards for modern activity streams and activity stream aggregation. The one watch is activity strea.ms which has already been adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, and Opera and many others with Google and Yahoo! close behind. Some are likening this to when different phone systems or e-mail providers allowed their respective populations to communicate with each other.

Once standards are put in place by providers (and release officially in their tools and platforms), activity streams can be more easily accessed for both browsing and posting using well defined APIs, thereby directly enabling unified 3rd party experiences across different social channels. Activity stream aggregators like Friendfeed or social dashboards such as Tweetdeck can then offer a single social front-end that holds the promise to reduce the friction of using today’s proliferating channels of social media. This could also address some of the disconnect between older and newer social media platforms I outlined above. The bad news? Standardizing activity streams might not create a unified experience across popular social networking application formats such as those between Facebook apps and OpenSocial. In other words, social media data flow will likely be open and standardized soon, but not the social applications themselves, keeping the walled gardens up between social apps for the time being. For now, smart consumers and businesses will insist on open activity streams in 2010.

Portable identity, contacts, and data. Having a single, chosen online identity has become the holy grail of the social Web in some circles for years now. Fortunately, it’s fast become a reality, whether that’s for logging in to Web sites (the approaches include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and Google Accounts) or for directly accessing the data that you own at a site (OAuth and OAuth WRAP). All of these approaches made major headway in 2009 and are poised for mainstream use in 2010. For those building Web sites or using social media tools, these standards will be the stamp of approval. The social graph is also becoming more portable and despite fairly unsuccessful attempts to standardize this up until now new attempts such as Portable Contacts may have more success this year with backing from Google and influential figures from the open Web community including Chris Messina and Joseph Smarr. There are also efforts emerging, such as WebFinger, to make metadata about people more open and easily obtainable instead of relying on profile pages on proprietary social networking services or poorly supported microformats. A few semi-proprietary yet popular social metadata services have thrived as well and will continue to be grow in importance this year. A good example is the Gravatar service, which let’s users define how their user profile picture looks, and is then pulled in from whatever social media tools they interact with later on. This gives users one single place to control their visual representation across the Web.

Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices. Social APIs in mobile devices that understand the Web (and things like Portable Contacts) have not yet emerged in the iPhone or Android SDKs other than some local address book access. For now, individual applications must connect to social media on the Web and access activity streams and contacts only if they are socially savvy. A few, such as FourSquare, are doing some impressive things but the industry currently lacks the critical mass of a major mobile vendor putting intelligent social capabilities into the device APIs itself, thus making most mobile apps non-social today. For now, there are some innovative examples of mobile social solutions including Bu.mp for easy contact exchange and Loopt for socially-powered mobile discovery. As for location, while initiatives such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and especially Google Latitude have made some headway in fueling location services in mobile apps, there’s still a long way to go yet before location is ambient enough to make a big impact on the social side. Emerging to fill the gap this year are open source projects such as PhoneGap, which offer consistent location-aware capabilities across the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Better distributed models for the social Web. Two good examples of this includes the advent of the increasingly widely used PubSubHubBub for faster and more efficient notification of social media updates and the Salmon Protocol which “aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle.” I’d also expect to see some social capabilities emerge in Open Mashup Alliance, which itself can help bring together social capabilities very easily, both in the Web and the enterprise.

What’s missing from this picture? Unfortunately, quite a bit and this means 2010 is also going to be another year of consolidation and hard work to get the many and varied pieces of the social media world to fit together better and more easily. Of the issues I raised early on, a few will hardly be addressed this year by new social Web standards and technologies. These include the ability to support aggregating and filtering social media in a consistent way. Specifically, while some services, notably Twitter, make it fairly easy to build services that can sort through, process, and analyze the flow of social media to derive real intelligence and insight, most do not. Other areas where work needs to be done is in social media applications models 0where the great divide lies between Facebook apps and OpenSocial, neither of which may be ideal vehicles for the long term. There are others as well.

Of course, in terms of how it will impact us at home and ultimately in business, as we’ve seen with Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing, open APIs, and other major advances, the ideas in software these days are increasingly coming from the consumer world and then pushing their way into the enterprise realm. This is very much the case with the social Web. Thus, those looking to bring the latest advances into their organizations will need to track the developments above closely as many of them will appear in an enterprise social computing platform near you very soon.