Fireside chat with the Social Web team

Fireside Chats, Social Web – David Glazer, DeWitt Clinton, John Panzer, Joseph Smarr, Sami Shalabi, Todd Jackson

Social is quickly becoming an integral part of how we experience the web, and this is your chance to pick the brains of the people who are working on Buzz, the Buzz API and the underlying open protocols such as Activity Streams and OAuth which are an essential component of a truly open & social web.

Session type: Fireside Chat
Tags: Social, Social Web, Buzz
Hashtag: #fireside-socialweb

Date: Thursday May 20
Time: 2:15pm-3:15pm
Room: Fireside Chat Room

Q: Why isn’t OpenSocial mentioned much here?

A: I just came back from a discussion on OpenSocial in the enterprise, use it where it makes sense, and work with others working with it, keeping it in sync with the standards. Its multiple pronged approach. Everyone knows its a throfting messing and frosting of many overlaping standards. When we have this discussion internally. Its amazing to see how fast things are evolving for the SocialWeb. When we created it, the coolest thing was putting someone’s site on your site. Now its just one of many important things. The technology the opensocial community invested in really solves that problem (e.g., with Orkut, with linkedin, or with iGogole or with enterprise suite like with Atlassin). But the social web has become bigger than that one problem. More tools.

Q: How is working with OpenStandards?

A:The decision was made early with Buzz. To go all in with open standards. Implementable by everybody. Even when it was a little (or a lot at times) more difficult for a community lead standard … its worth it. Knowing that what we’ll end up with is a network of sites rather than just Google. No regrets. Oauth 2.0 with all of its use of private data. Its really cool. We get lots of benefits from working with the Open Standards.

Q: What about data access expiring? How long its retained?

A: You can extend Salmon with requests in how its treated, like expiring etc, but there are no guarantees they’ll respect your requests.

Q: When Salmon for Google Buzz?

A: Its our plan. Implemented all the other ones. Other API’s that are not in Google’s control. We are big fans of it.

Q: What is the difference of Wave and Buzz?

A: Wave is for collaboration in real time. Buzz is for messaging. Both are communication tools we’ve invested in, but with different flavors. Also, they don’t share code but do barrow ideas from each other.

Q: What’s going on re: social networking fedeation?

A: The island session, getting islands speaking common tongs and then letting them travel around and work with each other. Jack and Jill story. Things should follow you where ever you go. Its how email evolved. Its how cell phones work. Its about open standards and choice. These technologies are all bridging the islands?

Q: When will buzz support OpenID as a login option.

A: WE already do this for a lot of enterprise customers that link up their existing apps. We are trying to use our own dog food and it may makes its way to the consumer space.

Q: What about the relevance thing, can I use it outside of Google products. How can that experience be portable for others to use in their external apps?

A: We are working on it. Now its sorted chronologically to capture the conversational nature of blog. We are in the process of rethinking it. We want conversations to come up to the top when its interesting to you. The combination of activities you’ve done that makes it come to the top. Its called Bumping and Personalized Bumping. We want to give multiple ways to view Buzz based on preferences. We are passiionate about this and we’ll explore it a lot.

Q: When are you going to hook up to the other silos on the web? Like checking into Foursquare? How can I meet people and discover them by their authority based on their activities on a subject? How do you build this “malleable” social graph, and how do you let people discover you … etc. Ask by Scoble.

A: Yes. I think its important. I want my activities and friends on Foursquare to be used elsewhere. The more there is two way data flows the more everyone wins. By letting the data be open, you let other people remix it for you. You’ve seen that a lot by the Twitter ecosystem. They take the time based presentation and others do things like location based views. Etc.

Q: Twitter has lists as a solution, do you think you’ll do this too?

A: things like filters and such are important. Using things like Salmon would allow federation of activities (e.g., friend liking something, etc). We have theories what the answers will be. If you have ideas and what we are building doesn’t make that available … please reach out to us to tell us. The beauty is that everyone can innovate, we’ll try to help support that.

Q:What about the 500M person elephant in the world? Would you ever put a FB Connect button on google, how work with them, how they work with you? Etc. Opengraph? Etc.

A: There was a grassroots social group this weekend. Facebook is one of the biggest players there contributing. Its a positive direction things are heading. There are Google apps today that are well integrated with Facebook, like Youtube, we do it by a product by product decision. Its in Google’s best interest to work with all the elephants, to figure out what the common protocols could be. And work together to make the web more social. We don’t do well if we get the world to use a google branded web. Having everyone using the same protocol, that is a win. We’ll go out of our way to work with them. What’s good for the web is good for Google. The web is much bigger than Google, its much bigger than Facebook. We all personally believe this. It motivates a lot of us personally. Its better as users when all your stuff works together. It would drive me nuts if I couldn’t call verizon people from my ATT phone. Email used to be like that, they had to invent the @ sign. Also – its amazing to look how far we have come. We have atom containers, web fingers, hubbub, etc. From a couple of years we’ve gone from zero interoperability, and we are almost there now. In a very short of time we’ll have this holy grail. I should be able to mention Joseph from a different place on Buzz, etc.

Q: What about context?

A: Its important. You don’t want to just lump everything together. You may not want to start over each time you go someplace, or you may want to deliberately do it. The challenges is not having things auto correlated when you don’t want them to be. Also, its tough when its two ways. There is what you want vs. what your friends want.

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000001238 StartFragment:0000000457 EndFragment:0000001222Q: What about filters in Buzz like in Gmail? Like political topics?

A: Thats a good question. We are thinking about that type of thing…

Q: When does the advertising team talk to the social team? Will they work together?…

A: When we think it makes things better for users. There are ways they can talk together where its bad for users and times they can’t talk when its good for users. There are risks and we are not going to rush out. There are times when its good for users. The full answer is more complicated since there is good and bads.