Microsoft showed off two social-networking projects at TechFest on Tuesday that show that the company wants to do more in this area than just invest in Facebook.
One project, known as Salsa, aims to use one’s corporate data to piece together their social network, or at least their network of co-workers. In its current form, the software is a plug-in to Outlook that shows social-networking information such as a photo and profile next to an incoming e-mail message. The program also pieces together a list of “friends” based on e-mail frequency and other data.
“When you start looking there is a surprising amount of information that gets locked in e-mail,” said Shane Williams, one of the Microsoft Research team that worked on Salsa.
Lili Cheng, the Microsoft veteran who heads the social-computing team at Microsoft Research, said that part of the power of Salsa is simply putting a human face on e-mail. She said her own use of the site has borne out the power of that, noting it is harder to argue with a colleague when she sees a picture of them with their cute kid or pet.
“E-mail can be very dehumanizing,” Cheng said.
Cheng said that in addition to deploying it inside Microsoft, she’d like to see how Salsa works within one or two other large companies to see if it is more broadly useful.
In another project from Cheng’s group, known as C2, Microsoft researchers have created a Windows application that pieces together contact data from a variety of social-networking sites. For the purposes of Tuesday’s demonstration, the researchers focused on Windows Live Spaces and Facebook. Researcher Steve Ickman said he chose those two because they represent among the most open (Spaces) and closed (Facebook) when it comes to data sharing.
Although Facebook is notoriously restrictive when it comes to members scraping their data, Ickman said that he believes he was able to stay within Facebook’s terms of service by grabbing only approved data from one’s own contacts and not caching the information long-term. “It’s totally legal, at least at this point.”
The project is more of a technology demonstration than anything geared toward a specific product, Ickman said, adding that he hoped it would demonstrate to the product teams that they can be more ambitious. “We tend to cancel things because they are too hard,” he said.
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Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place.
Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.
What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing – namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.
This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.
But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.
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Though almost everything Google touches seems to turn to gold, there is one project that never quite became ubiquitous (at least here in the U.S.). Orkut may have found a following in Brazil and Asia, but I don’t know anyone who uses the service. As Erick Schonfeld reports in TechCrunch, that may be about to change.
Known internally as Maka-Maka, the project will provide a means for all of Google’s existing applications to work together within a social-networking landscape. Google is also building a series of APIs that will allow developers to integrate their own applications into the Google universe.
Schonfeld describes the Google initiative as an attempt to “‘out-open’ Facebook” and predicts that the APIs will roll out for Orkut and iGoogle before percolating down through the Google universe.
All eyes will be on Google, but don’t expect anything too earth-shattering straight out of the gate. Many of these apps will be copycats of what is already available on Facebook (just as the very first apps on Facebook were ported over from other parts of the Web). This first go-round, Google will just be trying to match Facebook’s ante. Remember, even on Facebook, the best apps didn’t emerge on Day One. And now Facebook has a six-month lead.
Given that Orkut seems to have already lost the battle for social network supremacy, I have doubts that a barrage of borrowed Facebook apps will inspire anyone to switch. But if other Google properties begin to incorporate social-networking elements, then it seems like Google may succeed, if only through its near-complete Web saturation.
As I see it, the biggest shortcoming of social-networking sites is their inability to play well with others. Between MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tribe, Pownce, and the numerous also-rans, it seems as if maintaining an active presence at all of these sites could erode into becoming a full-time job. If Google can somehow create a means for all of these services to work together, and seamlessly interact with the Google family, then perhaps this is the killer app that people don’t even realize they’ve been waiting for.
On the other hand, if Google delivers a platform that simply mimics Facebook, while opening up the API just a little bit further, I have doubts that it’ll go anywhere. The business of social networking has been a bit of an enigma for many of the larger companies. Whereas Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook were practically born in dorm rooms and garages, their success has dwarfed anything that Yahoo or Google have been able to accomplish. Perhaps that’s all about to change, but amongst each segment of the population, there is usually only room for one social-networking portal, and Google will have a rough road ahead of it trying to convince kids, teens, and adults alike that this spot should belong to Google.
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