

The interoperability of social networks - jeremyrwelch
http://cdixon.org/2010/11/10/the-interoperability-of-social-networks/

======
kmavm
Here's what Google had to say last year about exporting emails from their
social network, Orkut:

"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a
user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to
send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other
addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now
exclude email addresses from the CSV export file."

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-
to-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-facebook-
by-making-friend-export-tool-nearly-useless/)

This is almost exactly what Facebook says today, while Google PR fakes a
stroke in front of every blogger who'll pay attention. What was different was
that, in 2009, Orkut was still the network of choice in two important markets
(India and Brazil); "openness" of the sort that Google is advocating for its
competitors would have actually been expensive.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well,

I'll call Google as wrong and bad here while they are correct in demanding
interoperability for Gmail vs. Facebook.

I would hope that sunlight in these areas would force everyone to be open
rather than allowing everyone to be closed.

------
btilly
In a wide variety of circumstances the right law is n * log(n). See
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-
is...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong) for
an explanation.

~~~
ssp
Summary of that article:

Metcalfe's law assumes that when you add a new person to a network, he will
communicate equally with everybody, so that he contributes 1 unit of value per
existing node, leading to O(n^2) growth.

But that is wrong. Instead his communication is more likely to follow a Zipf
distribution such that he contributes 1 unit of value to the existing node he
communicates the most with, 1/2 unit of value to the one he communicates the
second-most with, 1/3 to the third-most and so on. This means each new member
contributes O(log n) additional value, leading to O(n log n) growth.

------
joe_the_user
_"Google might very well genuinely believe in openness. But it is also
strategically wise for them to be open in layers that are not strategic
(mobile OS, social graph, Google docs) while remaining closed in layers that
are strategic (search ranking algorithm, virtually all of their advertising
services)."_

I don't think can call Google "open" or "closed" in the sense of
interoperability with respect to page rank. No one else puts information into
pagerank. Google's search software isn't open source but that's a different
question than social-network/email interoperability.

