Welcome, Instapundit readers...and everyone check this out as well...
Let me pull something over from my professional life for a second, because I think it's consequential enough that you folks ought to know about it. It's not something I've done but something I've been reading about.
Google and other companies (Six Apart, among them) are going to open their API for social graphs.
The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.
What's a 'social graph', you ask...it's a map of the connections between people and between people and content.
These graphs are deeply meaningful because they are not random; they are full of meaning because they track our behavior, contacts and interests.
When I was designing my version of Pajamas Media, I wanted to construct a social graph connecting readers and blogs and use that data to predict what new blogs people might like, and to cluster ad placements to targeted groups of readers. I thought - and still think - there's a ridiculous amount of value in that data. There is also a series of problems with that data, and they are at root problems of privacy.
Because the tradeoff for the usefulness of having someone suggest new blogs I'd find interesting is that someone has to know what blogs I read. And to the extent that I read blogs that I don't want people to know about - blogs about sex, psychological issues, political positions antithetical to my public persona - that's potentially a problem.
I thought I had an elegant solution to the problem for my PJ's design (hey, I can't tell all my secrets), but still saw (and see) this as the crux issue a system like this will have to get around.
But now much bigger fish are stepping into the market, and they are doing it with data much more serious and personal than your blog-surfing habits.
Google is announcing that it will create a series of open API's (data interfaces) that will allow other people to write systems that will allow them access to an undetermined set of Google's social graph data. What data does Google have? Well, pretty much everything. My email from my Gmail accounts; my search history; my blog posting and links if I keep them on Google tools; the links to and from my blog if the Google spider is set to capture them; the YouTube videos I watch, and so on...
Now the folks doing this are serious and smart people. They have explicitly talked about the issues of privacy. here's Six Apart's David Recordon:
An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.* You should own your social graph
* Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
* It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
* Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn't always be connected
* Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems
* We're going to release code and demos soon
The privacy and security implications of this are pretty staggering, if I'm interpreting this correctly. They are solvable - I did a baby solution as noted when I designed the system for PJ's, and I don't doubt that the horsepower of this group can propose useful solutions.
But I'd be a helluva lot happier of they had started with the basic principles and mechanisms for ensuring privacy and announced those first - before releasing working code modules.
I'll be digging into this more deeply, and may have some posts here to talk about it. Meanwhile, discuss among yourselves, and personally note that I welcome our new Redwood City overlords...