Google's Social API went public on Friday but didn't get much play in the news due to a certain company offering to buy another certain company.  Here's the official Google Post on it and here are some great posts by Dare Obasanjo and Tim O'Reilly.  I quote from the Google post itself...

So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know. You could ask them to search for and add all their friends, but you know that every other app is asking them to do the same thing and they're getting sick of it. Or they tried address book import, but that didn't totally work, because they don't even have all their friends' email addresses (especially if they only know them from another social networking site!). What's a developer to do?

One option is the new Social Graph API, which makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful. You can make it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new website and as a result, users will spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time giving your app the love it deserves.

Here's how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people's accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they've said they're friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.

I don't really know what to say about this.  I'm not sure there's anyone out there who would argue against this idea and of all the companies in the world there's none better suited to execute it than Google. 

What is interesting will be how other Social Networking companies react to this news.  Allowing Google into your walled garden when it doesn't threaten you is one thing but allowing Google in when they are engineering a way to destroy your lock-in is quite another.  Especially when they own their own Social Networking site (Orkut) which will undoubtedly use this API to gain users. 

It seems like more than a coincidence that we didn't hear about this until after Google had made a deal to provide search data from Facebook.

For all the talk about Data Portability the reality is that Social Networks currently survive on their lock in.  They've literally bent themselves into a "pretzel of hypocrisy" trying to justify how they crawl other sites to get info but won't allow other sites to crawl them for that same info.  I can't imagine they're going to now lay down and let Google run away with that data. 

The question is whether they'll be able to do anything to stop it.  Once you open up its very hard to make the case for going back to a closed system.  Should be interesting to watch...

Addendum: For the record, I don't think Google is doing this for Orkut's sake.  Above I was portraying what a competitor would think not what my thoughts on the issue are. 

My opinion is that Google has become the public web in many ways.  It is the de facto portal to the web and as such it is the one company that benefits the most from the web being open.  So while I don't think Google is doing this for Orkut I do think they're trying to open up Social Networks to benefit from it. 

I don't think it matters if you use Orkut or another network they just want to open it up completely.  Because when the social networks are open completely they become just another part of the web and Google is, as mentioned above, the de facto portal to the Web. 

About a month ago I wrote this post about KGBY, my favorite Sacramento radio station, firing all their DJs and switching to a completely automated format.  Its still a point of curiosity to me and this post on radiomatthew.com reminded me that it had been exactly a month since my last post which seemed like a good time for a follow up.

This is barely tech related so I'll ask forgiveness as I stray a bit. 

The first thing I have to grudgingly say is that I don't think the mix is that bad.  I don't know how much user input had to do with it but the station does manage to produce a good song more often than not.  Beyond that the station hasn't changed much.  Its still just songs with a robotic voice following each song to tell you what the song was and who was singing it.  I thought they'd try to mimic JackFM more in that Jack does a really good job of imbuing the station itself with personality (using sly ads with callers who call in to say random things to "Jack") but My92 seems to think the completely automated approach will work instead.  We'll see. 

On the website, it has changed quite a bit. 

One of the things Clear Channel has done right (at least conceptually) is to create some generalized content and then create local web sites around that content.   Most music news for example is universal no matter where you live so there's no point in having each station make their own web site.  

That said, I think its a mistake in My92's case.  If you are going to push your station as an interactive one and specifically mention your web presence than you need to have a specialized web site. 

So that, in a nutshell, is what I think of the new My92.  Still a poor excuse for everything it said it was trying to accomplish but not a terrible radio station when all is said and done.  That said, there's an old adage in the radio business that says people claim they want radio without DJs but always stop listening when the DJs are taken away.  My92 isn't a bad mix but I'm not sure its dramatically better than its competition and its competition has actual people on the air.  So I'm real curious to see the ratings book for the next quarter. 

Addendum: I wanted to throw out a couple things that just really shocked me while listening but were too random to fit the flow of the post...

Things that surprise me

Employing former DJs in lesser positions: I don't want to be too critical of this, it is nice of them not to put her out on the street, but I have to admit to feeling a little weird about the former mid-day host Heather Lee now being the traffic reporter.  Its sort of like firing your Senior VP and then offering to hire them back as the Janitor.  There's nothing wrong with being a Janitor but if you used to be the Senior VP in the same company it feels more like kicking sand in the person's face.

Former DJs doing Commercials: Call me crazy, but if I'm going to fire all the DJs from a station then I'm also going to get my sponsors to re-record their Ads even if I have to pay for it out of my own pocket.  Listeners already feel a little disloyal for not leaving the station when their favorite DJ was fired so having the disembodied voice of that DJ on a commercial every 1/2 hour only exacerbates the guilt.  I know it made me want to turn the station off.

Contests: Something about having no people on the air and still having contests seems contradictory to me.  Contests and DJs are sort of interlinked and having contests without DJs seems to draw attention to the mechanical nature of the station. 

My Midday MyPod: The station's primary contest seems to be the "Midday MyPod" where a listener gets to pick 5 songs that are played at noon.  I find it kind of funny that a radio station is tying its branding so closely to the iPod being the reason most people rarely listen to the radio anymore is because they have iPods.  Seems counterproductive to me. (on top of that, the one time I listened specifically for this contest they didn't start until about 12:15pm which is just sloppy)

The Asian My925: The station goes by "My925" but a quick trip over to www.my925.com shows the domain is actually owned by a jewelry store in China.  They actually re-branded their station, which is supposed to be interactive with a focus on the web, with a name that they couldn't get the web address to.  That's stupid.

I'm back from vacation (having driven most of the morning to get from Northern California back to my home in Southern California).  It was an interesting trip and one that brought up a few issues that I'll be tackling here in the next few days.  But to start off I wanted to bring up something that happened today.

When I was a kid I spent a lot of summers in Sacramento, CA and one of my favorite radio stations was Y92 a.k.a. KGBY Sacramento (Yes, I liked Soft Rock as a kid, sue me).  This morning, as I headed home at 6am, I got to hear Y92 go off the air for the last time as it switched formats and was replaced by My925 FM moving from "Adult Contemporary" to "Adult Hits" (Goodbye Elton John, Hello Foo Fighters). 

The change wasn't just skin deep as the station fired all of its on site talent (some of which had been on the air for 20+ years) and decided to go with a JackFM-esque automated format.   Matthew of radiomatthew.com (which I read regularly) has the official blurb on his blog.   To quote from there...

Introducing: My92.5. As speculated, My92.5 will feature harder alternative styles from bands like Led Zeppelin (perfect in time for their comeback), Red Hot Chili Peppers, No Doubt, and Santana. There will be no jocks or on-air talent; instead, the station will deliver a playlist driven by station listeners. My92.5 will become one of the first stations in Sacramento to utilize the Internet and the social networking atmosphere to create on-air music diversity.

Now as much as I loved the old Y92 I obviously love technology so as soon as I got a chance I headed over to their site to see what this new "Social Networking based Radio Station" had to offer.  What I found was this...

The actual station itself is equally unimpressive with songs being played one after the other with a voice that sounds a lot like the lady you get when you dial a disconnected number announcing the title and artist after each song.

If there was ever a template for how to badly re-launch a radio station while badly launching a social site this is certainly it.  The web site gives no explanation of who they are, why they need the information they're asking for or what they are going to do with it once they get it.  Yet they are asking anyone wanting access to hand over all their contact information from Cell phone to IM Screen name upfront. 

Beyond that they're collecting the information badly.  If you want to run an automated station you probably should have some way of putting the user's songs directly into a database (like for example fields for "Artist of Song #1", "Title of Song #1", etc...)  To have the user enter the songs in to a text box and then pay an actual person to transcribe them manually is a waste of time. 

Anyway, Not wanting to judge the book by its cover I coughed up my personal info to see what they had (or the personal info I give sites like this at least).  What did I find?  The above shown site...I kid you not...is their entire web site.  Once you enter your info it redirects back to the page you see in the graphic. 

If this is all that Clear Channel, the largest radio station owner in the U.S., can put forward when it comes to interactive programming than it reinforces my feeling that radio is a dead medium.  More over, if you are going to try to use the Internet to boost a dying property you should really find someone who knows what they are doing in the space and team with them rather than embarrassing yourself like this. 

I certainly don't agree with everything a guy like Mark Cantor has to say but there's no doubt he could have done something a thousand times better than this and almost certainly done it cheaper (since there are resources he'd have available from previous projects).  Rest in Peace Y92, I suspect your predecessor will be joining you on the scrap heap before too long. 

A personal pet peeve that I've developed over the last few months is to be dismissive of Twitter.  I have to be careful in that I think I've gotten to the point where I automatically disagree with all Twitter hype at this point and automatically disagreeing with anything is not a good sign (at least it isn't if you are trying to be open minded)

The problem I have is that the hype so rarely reflects the reality at this point and that makes it difficult for me to take Twitter proponents seriously. 

So when I saw David Armano's post entitled "Why is Twitter Exploding? ..." I couldn't help but roll my eyes.  Before I get into his article I'd like to present a little graph...

(and yes, I know Alexa isn't the most accurate but on big sites its a decent indicator)

Now, the first thing to notice is that Twitter is still relatively low in the grand scheme of things.  Wordpress is probably the most viewed Blog network in the world but it still doesn't get anywhere close to your mainstream social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook in traffic.  So the fact that twitter pales in comparison to Wordpress should tell you that it isn't exactly exploding.

Second thing to notice is that their traffic hasn't really moved in the last 3 months.  That twitter line is about as straight as a real life graph line is going to get. 

Back to Mr Amano's post he points to Jeremiah Owyang, a Sr. Analyst at Forrester, for validation of his "Exploding" claim.  Mr Owyang says...

Web Strategy Theory to know before you go forward
If you’ve not already figured it out, the corporate website is becoming less relevant, and web marketing (and support) has spread off your domain and google results. You also know that prospects trust the opinions of existing customers (who are ‘like them’) far more than marketers, and Facebook let’s these communities of practice assemble, your brand is decentralized –embrace! If you don’t understand these concepts, it’s hard to move forward, please re-read those posts above.

Given that quote I have a challenge to anyone who might run across this. 

Explain to me how Twitter provides an advantage over a Blog (with comments and RSS/Atom feed) when communicating to customers.

I don't think you're going to come up with a compelling answer. 

Let me be clear, I'm not against Twitter nor am I saying that people shouldn't keep an eye on it but the reality is that the Blogosphere tends to distort the things it likes into looking bigger than they are.  That's why you get talk of Facebook all the time when Myspace still dwarfs it in size.

I do think Twitter has its place I just don't think its where some people think it is and I don't think the service is big enough to have that place be set in stone.  Early adopters don't always determine how a service will turn out especially when they are using something for a purpose that it wasn't originally designed for. 

I have a lot more to say here but it will have to wait for another time.  For now I'll just say that I think Twitter was far better off and far more useful in its original goal which was to help friends keep track of each other.  I think there's a lot more to that than there is to turning it into a cut rate blogging platform.

Caroline McCarthy covers social networks for CNET over on her blog (aptly titled "The Social").  Today she has a post entitled "News Corp. reportedly buys something--but it's Beliefnet, not LinkedIn or Digg".  In the post she says...

There must have been something afoot in the crisp, early-December air that hinted News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch was in the market for a new Web acquisition. But, contrary to rumors, it isn't social news site Digg or business networking hub LinkedIn.

Rather, the media conglomerate is rumored to have purchased religion and spirituality site Beliefnet, according to a report from the FishbowlNY blog at Mediabistro. The blog received an "anonymous tip" that prompted a call to Beliefnet, resulting in an odd no-we-won't-deny-it comment that convinced FishbowlNY editor Noah Davis that it was pretty much a done deal.

It amazes me that people are surprised by this.  There's no question that we have a secular culture in the United States but that doesn't change the fact that roughly 87% of the population actively believe in one religion or another.  The fact that most of the mainstream tech industry scoffs at this market is exactly why Beliefnet (from what I've seen a rather weak entry into the Social space) does so well. 

I'll make the point even clearer: In the World there are 2.04 BILLION more Christians, 1.44 BILLION more Muslims, and even 840 MILLION more Hindus than there are Facebook users. 

The idea that targeting a market that big would be surprising shows a prejudice on the part of the tech community that is both unseemly and naive. 

Mary Jo Foley has the story on a  new Windows Live Toolkit from Microsoft.  This release is just a CTP but you can expect Microsoft to push this into production fairly quickly.  For the most part the article is just the standard "Microsoft is releasing X" article but one part did interest me...

When Microsoft first shared its plans for the Windows Live toolkit in September, officials said to expect the new add-ons to work a lot like the Facebook Developer Toolkit that Microsoft announced in May 2007, given that the new Visual Studio Toolkit for Windows Live was being developed by Microsoft’s Doug Handler, who did a lot of the work on the Facebook toolkit.  

Microsoft has always been a better competitor than they are an innovator but this may very well be the one arena where it isn't quite appropriate.  Say what you will about the "thousands of Facebook developers" out there it's still a miniscule number when compared to Microsoft Developers and Micrsoft still has far more experience in dealing with developers.  Don't get me wrong, I suspect this is just good PR ("hey Facebook developers, we're cool too!") but if it isn't Microsoft should really reevaluate their priorities.