Dave Morin

This week at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas we announced Facebook Connect for iPhone. This brings together the worlds most advanced social platform with the worlds most advanced mobile platform. And, for the first time ever, you can now bring your friends with you to your favorite iPhone apps. The social web is finally here, enabling you to connect and share with your friends no matter where you go.

Here’s the video from my keynote titled “The Search for a More Social Web” where we made the announcement.

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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.

I’ll post the video from the team at Carsonified after they get it live. Additionally, I’ll also be giving an expanded version of this talk at South By Southwest in two weeks in Austin, Texas. Hope to see you there. Enjoy!

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.

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This morning, here at the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami, prolific 37Signals founder Jason Fried made a call to the web community: “Please start charging for your applications. Free is not the future.” Jason’s essential thesis was that we have spent too much time building free applications on the internet. And, that if you choose to charge for your application, you will out-last your free competitors.

I couldn’t agree more. I was thinking pretty extensively about this last week as it relates to one of my favorite web applications, Dopplr. They are doing incredible things with their community, their experience, and their brand. They’ve also got one of the most talented engineering teams on the planet, led by my friend Matt Biddulph. Their most recent investors are world class, including Joi Ito, Esther Dyson, Tyler Brule of Monocle, and the guys from Index Ventures.

Since their launch as a niche travel social network for frequent travelers, they’ve consistently added features and content value that continues to surpass many other experiences on the web. Last year included an awesome Facebook Application, a focus on increasing travel serendipity, and This year has seen the addition of some amazing new features such as travel tips, travel questions, groups, and the ability to keep track of all of your trips retroactively.

Late last year they took it to a new level, blurring the lines between Web and print, by creating a personalized PDF for every user called a “Personal Annual Report.” The report was beautiful, fit to print, and Matt mentioned to me that it took them almost a week to run the script they needed to run in order to deliver it to everyone. And, they just recently launched a fantastic Dopplr Shop featuring great stuff for frequent travelers.

Suffice to say, Dopplr is one seriously bad ass web brand. And, I would pay for it.

As someone who is constantly traveling the world doing the work of an Internet citizen, the value they provide me of connecting me to similar travel oriented people, their opinions, and incredibly high quality (and truly) unique content, is invaluable.

I pay a $125 yearly subscription fee for Dopplr investor Tyler Brule’s new magazine Monocle for very similar reasons. Incredible brand, high quality content, community and experience. And, involvement from terrific people. All pointing to a brand that I can invest in for the long term.

I would gladly pay a yearly subscription for Dopplr at a fair price point. So this is my call to the Dopplr team. As I look out across the web landscape, they are the shining light that could help start an important trend. I urge them to consider.

Posted from Miami, Florida

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We are at Future of Web Apps Miami for the first half of this week talking about making the web more open and social. Ryan Carson and his crew at Carsonified puts on one of the highest quality most engaging conferences available in the world of the Internet. We’re very excited to be here giving two talks:

Keynote
The Search for a More Social Web: Facebook Connect, Openness, and Beyond.
Dave Morin

Workshop
Making Your Websites and Applications Social with Facebook Connect
Josh Elman

If you’re here in Miami, we look forward to seeing you and talking to you about what makes you passionate about building awesome things on the Internet. If you’re interested in following along with the fun via the Internet, check out hashtag

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This week we launched the first Social Widget for Facebook Connect, Comments. With Social Widgets, you’ll be able to make any site you’re working on social by simply dropping in a few lines of code. In this video, we show you how to add the Comment Widget to your site in 5 minutes. Click here if you’re interested in learning more.

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