The battle for the social web has been playing out over the past few months but much of it has been invisible to those that are less technical. Today, Google announced that they will begin providing limited access to an API for an OpenID identity provider. This means Google users will be able to login to sites that support OpenID with their Google accounts.

This is a significant announcement for Google and for the open web. While I could attempt to place some sort of arbitrary divider between the open web and the social web, for discussion purposes, the social web is working to make the internet more open. As such both are substantially integrated and can be used interchangeably.

How Does Google OpenID Compete With Facebook?

The battle over single sign on is a significant one. If you haven’t been following OpenID and the single sign on trend over the past couple years, here’s a brief summary: users are finding it hard to remember the logins for every site they register for. As such, companies are racing to provide services that make it easy for users to login with their regular email address.

Facebook is preparing to launch their Connect service to the masses, making it possible for users to register for a site by using their Facebook account and without disclosing any personally identifiable information.
The Pros
There are some clear benefits from using Facebook Connect. For one, websites get access to a user’s news feed and the ability to virally distribute content and user activities through that feed. Second, companies get the “benefit” of placing a Facebook login button on their site. Why is this beneficial? Well, Facebook is rapidly becoming one of the most recognized brands on the web.

The Cons
For any company, using Facebook Connect doesn’t solve all your problems. The primary downside of using Facebook Connect is that you don’t get access to personally identifiable information of that user. I want to have access to a user’s email address so I can contact them in the future. Unfortunately Facebook prevents that. If you want to read more on this check out my article from July about Facebook Connect as OpenID without email.

There Can Only Be One Login

So I really haven’t answered my last question which was: how does Google OpenID compete with Facebook? Well it’s in an abstract sort of way. When you go to register for a site, you are only going to register with one account. Soon enough, you will be able to select from a number of sites that you specify as the center of your identity. As pictured in the image to the left, this is how a theoretical registration form would look.

No longer will you have to enter all your information into fields, instead, that information will come from your identity provider. OpenID is supposed to tie your identity back to a URL but Google has implemented their own version in typical Google style. The point being here is not to debate Google’s implementation of OpenID though, instead to illustrate that your identity can be tied to external accounts.

We’re In it For the Long Haul

In November of last year, I wrote that the email would become the center of social networks. One year later we are seeing this happen as Google and Yahoo! implement new services for the open web. Yesterday Yahoo! announced their open platform which includes a single sign on-like feature and today Google has announced their own version of OpenID support.

This is just the beginning though and ultimately, much of this will require user adoption. I’m guessing that there will soon be a registration “widget” similar to the way that Disqus handles my comments, another party will handle my registrations. As long has I get to have my own database filled with user data, that’s all that matters.

It’s going to take some time but I’d imagine in the next 12 months there will be a huge shift toward a centralized registration system that everybody can use and developers can quickly implement. It’s exciting to see the big players getting involved and while each step can be criticized for its imperfect implementation, I’d assert that this is once again a big step in the right direction.

A few months back, Yahoo! announced that it would be opening up the site’s services to developers in a significant way. This afternoon the company rolled out a big iteration which has a massive social component. The service has a bunch of features that developers can use to detect any individual web user’s “social presence”. So what are the new component of this open platform and what does it mean for developers?

What’s Being Offered?

First, let’s take a look at what exactly Yahoo! is offering as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) 1.0 platform launch:

• Yahoo! Social Platform - “The Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP) consists of a suite of REST-based social APIs from Yahoo! including: Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status.” Sound familiar? It should. The service enables users to develop a new form of social application similar to Facebook applications or MySpace applications. From a technical standpoint the applications are much more similar to MySpace applications because they take advantage of OAuth and REST. They’ve also announced a PHP SDK that developers can use to start programming today.
• Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) - Remember FQL? If you don’t, it’s the language that developers can use to send SQL-like queries to Facebook instead of making standard API calls to retrieve user information. Yahoo! is releasing a very similar service but they are calling it the “command line version of Pipes.” Whatever they are calling it, this sounds to me a lot like FQL.
• Yahoo! Application Platform - Wait didn’t we just go over the Social Platform? Yes we did! The main purpose of the Application Platform in contrast to the Social Platform is that it provides a centralized distribution point for applications to Yahoo! users. Back in September I wrote that platforms are the new software distributors and this further supports my assertion. Applications will have canvas pages, landing pages, invitations, notifications, a chrome, updates, and a few other features.

Yahoo! Social Platform is an “Open” Facebook Connect Competitor

Facebook Connect appears to have the best odds of succeeding so far as they have had the most partners roll out sites for any company that we’ve seen so far. Honestly at this point much of the “success” will be determined by a PR battle since none of the technology has been rolled out except for Yahoo! which has now released what appears to be a terrific platform.

It’s clear that many of the features of the Yahoo! Social and Application platforms take cues from Facebook aside from the user interface which for now appears to be completely non-existent outside of the Yahoo! chrome. Just the other day I posted about John McCrea’s lessons from attending the User Experience Summit, which was make things look good (as well as a few other key components ;)).

Yahoo! has a solid chance at boosting their developers to the forefront with critical integration points which could in the future include a link to applications directly on the Yahoo! homepage, something any developer would die for. With so much potential, social application developers are now going to be pushed to their limits.

One additional interesting factoid about Yahoo’s new platforms is that they will be leveraging OAuth and OpenSocial, each open standards for the social web. At this point, Facebook is standing alone and while they still have substantial leverage, if Yahoo! can pull all the right strings, Facebook may be forced to comply. As the Facebook platform becomes more limiting, and social application developers are stretched thin, they are rapidly searching new opportunities for growth.

The Yahoo! platforms could very well be that next place they are looking for.

What Does This Mean for Businesses?

Your in the midst of planning the social media strategy for your company and you just learned about Yahoo!’s new Open Strategy platform. While you may not understand everything that it offers, it sounds a lot like Facebook Connect and now you are forced to take this into consideration when suggesting something to the boss. Or perhaps you are the boss but being an intelligent individual that takes all options into account, you are now considering Yahoo! as a distribution channel for your brand.

Well, the reality is that all of the things need to be taken into consideration. I wish I could say it’s more easy than that. The primary factors driving this decision should be:

• How large is your company? - If you are a large company, you should be able to come up with the funding to have a Facebook application, iPhone application, Android Application, MySpace application, Yahoo! application, and any other large platform application. Small businesses obviously can’t do that and that’s why they need to consider other factors.
• Who’s your target market? - In the U.S., the majority of Facebook users are still 18-25. That demographic begins to skew somewhat when you start looking at the other platforms. Considering the demographic biases of each platform is important.
• Ease of development - It’s easier to develop a Facebook application than an iPhone application. If you happen to have iPhone developers on staff though, it’s obviously a better decision to build on that platform. For those without resources, it’s clear that easier platforms will make it possible to make an application for less money.
• Other Options - Sometimes you may not have the budget at all and instead it would be best to figure out how to leverage the social features of these platforms at minimal cost. One option would be to integrate social features into your company’s website. For those with less resources it may be useful to examine all the other options out there.

It’s clear that the trend is toward an open web and any company standing in the way of that is not likely to survive in the long-run. Whatever your company decides to do, Yahoo! has just made your decisions just a little more complex.

Yahoo! Application Canvas Screenshot

Yahoo! Application Invite Screenshot

A little under a year ago, Yahoo! launched what was their attempt at an open social platform. The project was called Yahoo! Mash and in under a year the project was shut down. Simply put, trying to attract millions of users to yet another social network. Personally I thought the idea was stupid and it appears that Yahoo! came to the same conclusion in under 12 months.

Now the company is at it again trying to build their own social network but this time around they are targeting the youth. The site is called SpotM. What’s unique about this new site? Not much. Users can have “secret friends” which aren’t revealed publicly and you can have anonymous text message chats with other users. While these are two great features, they are nothing more than that: features.

It appears as though Yahoo! is falling victim to the same disease that many Silicon Valley investors have: the feature-as-a-product disease. Yahoo! expects to attract millions of youth to this new social network even though they have substantial competition on all fronts and all ages. Rather than attempting to acquire another social network, the company has decided to move forward with a site built around two useful features.

Will this site suffer the same fate as Yahoo! Mash? Well, it’s easy to say that it will since at least 95 percent of new products fail but it’s definitely a worthy attempt by Yahoo! If there is no longer a way to enter the social networking space as a broad social network that caters to everybody, they might as well attempt to start rolling out niche social networks. It also appears to be focused on the India market as Yahoo! India is the group behind this project.

Given that the product is called “SpotM”, I must assume that the company is focusing more heavily on the mobile component and less on the general social networking component. Fortunately for Yahoo! there is still opportunity in social networking for mobile but even they may be late to the game. The market is rapidly becoming saturated and many users may simply choose to stick with the mobile offerings of the larger social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

For now it’s too early to predict the future of this site but it’s definitely interesting to see that Yahoo! has yet to give up on the social networking arena. Best of all, the company isn’t afraid to start from scratch. Not so sure about the start from scratch strategy but then again, what strategy does Yahoo! really have anymore?

Well I can’t say that I didn’t see this one coming. Then again, it happened much earlier than I expected. Following the launch of the Facebook platform last year, Yahoo! went searching for a strategy to try to compete against the increasingly popular Facebook. The conclusion? Yahoo! Mash, a social network which embraced all open standards. Honestly, it was so open that it had practically no design to it.

Back in November I called Yahoo! Mash a poor attempt to compete with Facebook. Now, just under a year after the site launched, the site has been shut down as Techcrunch points out. Good call by the Yahoo! team to call it quits but it’s definitely disappointing for whatever team was working on making this happen.

So how does Yahoo! fit into the social networking space at this point? Honestly the company doesn’t for the most and is now behind AOL which acquired Bebo, Google which created Orkut and Microsoft which has …. Windows Live Spaces! While Facebook is blazing by all the old guard, Yahoo! is falling behind when it comes to social networking. So what’s next up for Yahoo?

It’s not exactly clear but if you want to get the rumor mill going, I would say that hi5, imeem and MyYearbook.com look like three great acquisition opportunities for the company. If the company can some how “mash together” (pardon the pun) all the other social services including Yahoo! Messenger, the company might have a shot of becoming a player in the social networking space.

For today the company will simply have to live with one more product headed to the deadpool. I guess it’s good to see that the company quitting early rather than beat a dead horse for too long!

Today, Yahoo! announced the release of the Address Book API which enables developers to interface directly with one of the largest “collection of address books” on the web. This is an incredible release moving forward the opening of the social web. So what can you do with this new API? “Once a user authorizes your application, you’ll be able to easily access that user’s address book and look for specific contacts.”

If you think of this in relation to a Facebook application, it is similar to having the ability to browse through who a person’s friends are and directly contact those friends. The only difference is that this API provides access to potential emails and phone numbers, something that Facebook has fiercely prevented developers from accessing. Currently no social platforms enable such open access and it is great to see Yahoo! take a leadership position in this movement.

One example of this in practice would be an invite form that enables a user to invite their friends to join them on your site. Rather than using the default invite form that Facebook provides within their walled garden, you can have users select email addresses and phone numbers to send out invitations to their friends. This means that you can take your contact list with you anywhere on the web.

When a user comes to your site they will simply need to grant access to that site to have access their Yahoo! address book by logging in via the standard Yahoo! login screen. Once they login they will be redirected back to that web site/application which will now have access to their contacts. This form of authentication is called BBAuth and you can read more about it via Yahoo!’s BBAuth documentation.

If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the Address Book API you can read about it via the Address Book Developer Guide. Also, I recommend watching the following interview with Joseph Smarr of Plaxo that John McCrea posted. Joseph is one of the most articulate people in the industry about social web standards.

Yahoo has announced that they will begin to support semantic web standards. These standards (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN) make it easier for users to share their personal information, contacts, blog posts, product reviews and other information easily among websites. This move is part of Yahoo’s broader drive to open up their services. We are about to witness the web become organized in an extremely short period of time.

While I didn’t speak with Mark Zuckerberg about open standards in my interview with him, Marshall Kirkpatrick did and states that “the Facebook CEO expressed disinterest in participating in the Semantic Web.” That’s a bad move by Zuckerberg and could potentially spell disaster for the company.

Conversely, just because the large search engines begin supporting semantic web standards, it doesn’t mean users will immediately begin to benefit from them. Look for web development tools and platforms (Adobe Dreamweaver, Wordpress, Movable Type, etc) to integrate these standards into their existing products, making it easier for users to publish their information even though they are not aware of the formatting standards. Eventually this will make everything much more efficient.

All social networks are going to be forced to embrace the semantic web standards. While it won’t be immediate, eventually users will have access to a single tool that enables them to list and manage all of their contacts. While Facebook is at the forefront of developing such a tool, not supporting semantic web standards will ultimately prove disastrous.