The movement to open up social media #

The openness of social networking sites, which began with Facebook's release of its developer platform, is accelerating. OpenSocial, led by Google, emerged as a counter to Facebook. While Facebook was moving to base its own services on proprietary platforms, Google, with the help of a large coalition of others, created a standard for the platform.

These two approaches have in common the idea of incorporating external services as if they were part of the SNS.

SNS Aggregation Service #

In Japan, when we think of SNS, we tend to think of diary-sharing sites like Mixi, but SNS can also be used to refer to sites that allow one-way "following" like Twitter, or specialized genres like Flickr and Lastfm.

Recently, services like FriendFeed have emerged that specialize in aggregating these various social networking sites. By providing the service with your social networking IDs, the feeds are aggregated, allowing users to access linked services only when they need them, as long as they follow the site.

Since the advent of social networking sites, the direction the web is heading has shifted to the idea that even if an ID is spread across the web, there is only one user and the same friends, so it's fine to just combine them all.

DataPortability

DataPortability is a movement to free up data that is being tucked away in each social networking service and make it mutually accessible.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Although I don't fully grasp the details, the key players are now in place: MySpace's Data Availability, Facebook's Facebook Connect, and Google's Friend Connect. I'll introduce the features of each in due course.