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The Real McCrea

On the Emergence of the Social Web

Dare to be Open?Yesterday

This week, influential blogger (and Microsoft employee) Dare Obasanjo kicked up a little controversy with a post he did on Portable Contacts, entitled The Portable Contacts API: Killing the Password Anti-Pattern Once and For All. It is a largely positive piece, making the case for why Portable Contacts makes sense:

The…problem…is that each site that provides an address book or social graph API is reinventing the wheel both with regards to the delegated auth model they implement and the actual API for retrieving a user’s contacts. This means that social networking sites that want to implement a contact import feature have to support a different API and delegated authorization model for each service they want to talk to even though each API and delegated auth model effectively does the same thing.

However, the piece closes with a critique of the process by which Portable Contacts and other open-spec building block are coming into existence:

If anything, I’m concerned by the growing number of interdependent specs that seem poised to have a significant impact on the Web and yet are being defined outside of formal standards bodies in closed processes funded by big companies. For example, about half of the references in the Portable Contacts API specs are to IE

Discussing the New API from NetflixOctober 3

In this week’s episode of The Social Web TV, we discuss the new Netflix API with Michael Hart, director of community engineering for Netflix. If you’re interested in this topic, you should also check out Joseph Smarr’s “Step-by-Step Guide to Using the Netflix API“. This is all part of an important trend of mainstream sites opening up via APIs, and we discuss Mashery a bit, a company that’s making a business out of helping sites roll out APIs.

      

Netflix: Welcoming a New API for the Social WebOctober 1

Yesterday, I learned in a piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb that Netflix would be opening up an API today. According to Marshall:

the API will allow access to data for 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well as Netflix account access on a user’s behalf.

So I checked this morning, and indeed the company has taken the password restriction off of a new Netflix Developer Network site.

This is a great move for Netflix, and it fits in a broader “opening up” trend, in which sites of all sites are making social mashups a central part of their strategies for growth. The Netflix API and site were developed by Mashery, a company that has been making some great moves lately. As covered by Brad Stone of the New York Times, Mashery was also behind the recently launched APIs for Best Buy and for MTV. Great to see the new API uses OAuth for secure access to the data!

Here

The End of Walled Gardens Now in SightSeptember 26

The tech landscape is changing more rapidly now than at any time since this crazy Web thing came along in about 1994. The walled garden model has been under attack for much of the past year, and all of a sudden, the walls are crumbling. And not just for traditional social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, who are transforming themselves into hubs that help their users interact with the rest of the web through initiatives like Facebook Connect (see great piece just posted by Jesse Stay on allfacebook on developing for Facebook Connect) and MySpace Data Availability. The walls are crumbling for the traditional Internet portals, as well, as seen in Yahoo’s big opening up via Y!OS, and now also for the mobile phone space, via the entry first of Apple, and more significantly, Google, with its open source mobile OS, Android and its completely open developer program and app market.

My co-stars were not available this week, but with so much going on, the show had to go on! I cover Facebook Connect spotted in the wild, Google’s Android launch, and a visualization of the “new open stack.” Check it out:

      

Joseph Smarr at Web 2.0 on the New “Open Stack”September 19

Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s chief platform architect, and de facto leader of the Portable Contacts initiative, gave at talk today at the Web 2.0 conference in New York. Entitled “Tying it all together; Implementing the Open Web,” it was a rallying cry for developers to jump in and get working on the new “open stack” of OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XRDS-Simple, and Portable Contacts. See converage from attendees Kris Jordan and Steve Kuhn (who quips about Joseph, “Dude talks fast”)!

Joseph asserted that the industry has now come together around a common vision for the future of the Social Web — a vision that abandons the walled garden model in favor of a new services layer that interconnects social hubs with the rest of the web. The service layer is comprised of Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, and Content Aggregators:

And, indeed, that is the vision behind the strate