Implementing the Social Graph + Apps (aka web3.0)

(this post is meant to be quick and dirty to quickly capture my thoughts in a more-or-less-coherent way, it will be updated, amended, corrected and enriched in the coming hours as the discussion evolves)

Jeremiah Owyang makes some interesting commentaries on “How the Social Graph will be implemented”

First of all, we have to acknowledge one thing:

The Social Graph is important. It clearly matters.

But where I differ with Jeremiah is on the word “implementation”.

There’s probably a topic that can be better discussed getting some advice from the guys who actually implement.

That’s the techies, a very specific kind of techies who are more aware of the implications of the different architectures, involved technologies, and years carrying bloated baggage … a.k.a legacy stuff.

Some considerations I’d like to introduce:

The Social Graph is important, but it’s not nearly as important as the apps that run atop of it. Right now we have the apps, but we don’t have the social graph integrated. Facebook has the social graph, but doesn’t really have the real apps.

Whatever comes next has to take BOTH things into account. And that is not Facebook, not Firefox, and certainly not Flock.

(even though some like Jeremiah and Fred Wilson saw promise in Flock, Flock does some integration but doesn’t allow for ad-hoc mashups atop the Social Graph, you get what you get and that’s it, Flock is nice, but it’s not the future… in its current incarnation at least, extrapolating from what we have today is an excercise best left to the reader)

It’s something else we haven’t witnessed yet.

A glimpse of what this would look like has been demoed by Adobe and their AIR platform during the AIR Bus Tour. More hints: look online for a Q&A session with Eric Schmidt and what he answered when someone asked “what will web 3.0 be like ?” Eric Schmidt almost gets this right.

(and sorry… not Calacanis, and not twine.com … it’s not what you say it will be, too little, too déjà vu, too late)

I personally dislike the 3.0 versioning number, but let’s de-buzz the question as…

Q: What will be the next fundamental, important change that will evolve the web into a new, different kind of thing ?

A: Mashed up applications atop the social graph.

(in the words of Schmidt: small apps pieced together can run on any device very fast, customisable and furthermore virally distributed by social networks and other systems)

By definition, no sole company can do that on their own. And it’s possible not a single product can. There’s also underlaying technologies that need to be integrated, major integration work.

Nowadays, you can’t really make a Java app to coexist peacefully with a CLR app in a mashed up user interface.

We have this old kind of glue called HTML and Ajax, but it’s patch technology, transitional technology, that has a huge number of sevee limitations for these purposes. Eventually, there will have to be a standarised runtime system that allows the general public to run mashed-up applications written in whatever language the author fancied, mixed together atop the social graph.

Today… that would probably mean asking Facebook and Myspace to open themselves more, and making some sort of pact with the devils at Sun, Microsoft and Adobe. (with their products Java JVM/JavaFX, .NET CLR and its languages, Flash/Flex/AIR… respectively)

Mozilla is the other incumbent in this play, with Prism and Tamarin. (Tamarin was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and they jointly steer that project)

In this arena, Adobe has gained important customers like Salesforce, Google, Yahoo and eBay, and has a good headstart with the Flash player installed in a 98%+ of desktop computers in the world. Microsoft got a good foot in the Social Graph door with the Facebook deal.

But all of this is of course, not the last word, given the importance of all the other incumbents in play.

Summing up…. we don’t yet know what will happen, and how it will be implemented.

But one thing is for sure: it will be amazing :-)