So XSpace is actually, well, everyone in the social networking space except for Facebook.
And the Red Pill app itself is still a hypothetical, but it's getting closer and it's clear where that data would be helpful now.
Scoble's suggestion that his friends would all have to move before he'd look outside the "walled garden" of Facebook, and Don Dodge's suggestion that Facebook users won't just leave are both missing the point.
Users don't need to make up their minds now, they only have to decide that at some point in the future they might want to spend more time somewhere else. That's where Red Pill and its data come in.
Meantime, Bebo's press release headline ("[...] REVEALS PLANS TO LAUNCH FACEBOOK-COMPATIBLE DEVELOPERS PLATFORM") appears to overreach the actual article content -- namely, that Bebo will "make it easy for Facebook developers to port their applications," not necessarily host Facebook apps directly.
But there seems to be no clear reason why an OpenSocial proxy system could not actually host F8 applications. Except for maybe some terms-of-service issue. All those "fb" abbreviations and tags may have to get ROT13'ed or the like.
2 comments:
The next logical step is for the social networks to turn inside out via something like OpenID, so that your profile need not reside on the same network as your friends. You might have a web of profiles that each clump together to represent you as a whole, and so might your friends. That's sharding across back-end companies instead of just across DB servers (e.g. I have part of my profile on the last.fm shard but lots of my friends don't).
This possibility almost seems like a return to social networks like GeoCities. :) Just post your junk with a simple tool and link to your buddies. But this time it'd be structured, and the tool wouldn't be an HTML editor, it'd be a structured profile editor.
Add some microformat mojo, and this arrangement could float right on top of all those home pages.
But that would be reaching something like a (partial) semantic web. Which is of course magically impossible.
Thus, one of our premises must be incorrect :)
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