Google Working on Social Network Aggregator
Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, who recently left Six Apart for Google has published notes on what he's going to be working on moving forward. It is an interesting read entitled Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph which contains the following excerpts
Context & Ripple Effects
Brad Fitzpatrick built LiveJournal, then watched the platform he created convulse this spring when its mass deletion of discussion groups swept up legitimate accounts and triggered an unprecedented user revolt — with Six Apart, his employer, owning the damage. His move to Google, confirmed today, comes days after he published notes titled Thoughts on the Social Graph describing what he intends to work on there.
The significance is who is saying it: the author of one of the web's earliest social platforms arguing that the social graph — who knows whom — should be portable across sites rather than rebuilt inside each walled garden, and taking that argument inside Google rather than a startup.
First-order effects
- Google gains a dedicated effort, led by Fitzpatrick, aimed at aggregating users' fragmented friend lists across social networks rather than competing with any single one of them.
- Social network operators whose lock-in rests on holding users' friend connections now have the largest search company publicly framing those connections as something users should own and carry.
Second-order effects
- If Google ships tooling around a portable social graph, rivals like MySpace and Facebook face pressure to either expose friend data through APIs of their own or be cast as the closed incumbents.
- Aggregator and widget developers gain a prospective common dependency — whoever standardizes the social graph layer becomes gatekeeper for the apps built on top of it.
Third-order effects
- The structural direction is that identity and relationships become shared web infrastructure, shifting competitive advantage from owning the friend list to controlling the interfaces and APIs through which it is accessed.
- Whether the graph ends up governed by an open specification or by whichever large platform operationalizes it first — Google chief among candidates — is unresolved, and determines how much portability users actually get.
The trend: The social graph is moving from a proprietary asset locked inside each network toward claimed-by-users infrastructure, and major platforms are positioning to own the standards rather than just their own slice.