Last week at Future of Web Apps Miami I gave a new talk entitled “In Search of The Social Web” which focuses on Facebook Connect, our next steps towards Openness, and thoughts on the future of a more open and social web.
In the spirit of openness, here’s the slides and some notes taken by a member of the audience. Thanks to Craig Agranoff for taking these great notes. I’ve added to them to make them more complete to go along with the slides.
In Search of The Social Web
Future of Web Apps Miami
Dave Morin
For 1000’s of years everything we did was social, including the games we play, life, love and happiness. Its always been social. Over the last 20-30 years everything became personal, and private, with the advent of the computer. The building blocks to build social experiences didn’t exist yet, so most people played games alone on their personal computers.
Over the last ten years we starting thinking about social experiences on the internet. For the last 2 years (since the launch of social platforms), we have been able to think about people. We have finally looked beyond the keyboard to the person behind it. The web is not just about information. The web is about people. Right now there has never been a more awesome time to work on the web. The building blocks are there to build social applications on the internet. The social graph is there and facebook is one of the companies trying to help sort it out. Now we can. Now we can build the experiences we have always wanted to build.
Facebook Connect is one of the first steps in enabling people to become social all over the web. Facebook is breaking down the traditional walls of a social network and giving you the opportunity to give users the power to connect, share and be more open on your site.
This is happening in 3 ways: Identity, Friends, and Feed, are the core of what makes Facebook the way it is today. To make a great social experience on your site follow these three ideas:
Identity: Give your users identity, the control to be open. Give them the ability to be open with themselves online. User Control is the core fundamental behind this. You have to give the user control. Facebook Connect enables the privacy controls that are found on Facebook to go with you, wherever you go.
Friends: Give your users the power to connect. Link up friends on your site in a way you have never done before. Social Context is the most powerful filter for the web. The best way to give users new content is by making their friends the filter.
Feed: Give your users the power to share. Give your users actions on your site that they can share with each other and on Facebook through Feed.
At Facebook we’re taking new steps towards openness. And, we recognize that Openness is also not just about technology, it is about people. So we’re taking steps to give users the power to connect, share and be more open in more places by working hand in hand with the community towards more openness.
Openness is about giving users control and giving users choice while giving the power to connect and share. And fundamentally it is about giving users and developers the ability to be more open through control and choice.
To this tune we’ve joined the OpenID Foundation Board, and held the second OpenID User Experience Summit at Facebook HQ. This summit produced an awesome leap forward in how we think about OpenID User Experiences which have been posted for the community on the OpenID Wiki. We also held one of the first Activity Streams Meetups at Facebook and are looking forward to hosting the next one and leading the conversation forward.
We also recently released several new open APIs as a part of Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Including APIs for status, links, notes, and video. We’re excited to see the amazing experiences that can be build for the web, mobile, and desktop using these new open APIs.
So, what is the future of social? Since we are at the Future of Web Apps I think it is important to say a few things about the future. Two weeks ago at TED, Tim Berners Lee said, “Put your data on the web.” He asked us to create more “Linked Data.” I ask you to consider an additional idea: Put yourself on the web. Last night I sent out a tweet saying: “Every URL & every piece of data, on the web or in an operating system should be linked to the URL of a person. THAT is the future of social.” Consider a web where people and data are linked with the power to control who information is shared with. The web is not about information or just data. The web is about people. People are more than data, people are human. Be more open and help your users connect and share. The side effects of sharing and being more open are vast.
