Brad Feld

Back to Blog

Friend Integration – Phase 1 of 10

Dec 30, 2007
Category Technology

Facebook.  MySpace.  LinkedIn.  Plaxo.  Gmail.  Email Contacts.  Bebo.  Every individual social networking software product that I use (Dogster, Shelfari, …)

Oh how I friend thee.  Let me count the ways.

I’m already seeing "predictions for 2008" that it will be the year of "friend consolidation."  How exciting.

Phase 1 (of at least 10) is starting to appear.  You can now see your LinkedIn data inside of Facebook (but you can’t really do much with it – yet.)  And of course this isn’t an "official LinkedIn app – just something someone else put together.)  Or – using Fuser – you can now see your MySpace data inside of Facebook.  Again – you can’t do much with it.

The dynamics this time around are pretty interesting to me.  Usually data follows apps.  This time the apps are following the data.  And the data is proliferating very quickly.  While OpenSocial theoretically "solves" this, we know that there are at least 9 phases to go before we get to a happy place with this.