Social networking apps go location-aware

That's not Yahoo!'s only idea. Its forthcoming oneConnect, currently available as a preview for the iPhone, is a data aggregator that takes in your Yahoo! address book, your phone's address book and your social network contacts and puts them in a single application, bringing you status updates from whichever services your contacts happen to use.

It works in reverse, too, so you can update your status within oneConnect and cascade it across MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and your chosen Messenger applications. At the time of writing it supports Bebo, Flickr, MySpace, Dopplr, Friendster, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and YouTube.

Of course, Yahoo! isn't the only firm playing around with data portability. Microsoft and Google both have their own contact APIs, and Facebook and MySpace have enabled sites to access some profile data. However, as Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina of Portable Contacts point out, "Each of these APIs is unique and proprietary."

Portable Contacts offers an alternative, a "common, open spec that everyone can benefit from" that takes advantage of existing standards such as vCard, OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth and so on. As Marc Canter explains: "This standard doesn't have a logo and barely has a website. But it has working code and interoperability between Yahoo, Google, Plaxo, SixApart, MySpace and others. From day one, watch for huge benefits to end-users, bringing data portability to real life."

According to TechCrunch, AOL is redesigning its homepage to include "user-created bookmark links on the top left, links to third-party email services Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail, and links to outside social networks Facebook and MySpace". This is a very big deal: as ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, "With 60 million unique visitors monthly, AOL.com still gets three times as many visitors as Digg."

Yahoo! is going in the same direction. In September, it told the Associated Press that its forthcoming revamp will go widget crazy, enabling users to add content from the likes of Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. Even Microsoft is getting in on the act, with its Live Mesh platform designed to synchronise data from multiple sources across computers, phones and web browsers.

According to a memo from chief software architect Ray Ozzie, "The web is first and foremost a mesh of people … all applications will grow to recognise and utilise the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences."

Walled-garden social networks can be fun, but the open approach is much more exciting. The combination of data portability, location awareness and the ongoing quest by developers to mash everything up with everything else is enormous. For example, friends' book reviews, holiday reviews or restaurant reviews aren't much use on Facebook, but if you could see them on Amazon, on TripAdvisor or when you're 20 feet from the premises, they suddenly become much more useful. And that's where we're headed.

The first wave of social apps was all about bringing people to use specific platforms. The second wave is about bringing the platforms to the people.

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First published in .net magazine, Issue 183

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