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Potholes and the Geo Web

We have a very cool new site design that's slowly rolling out this week at outside.in (along with an entirely new database architecture and other back-end refinements), and given that it's almost exactly a year since we launched the original prototype, I thought it was about time I tried to write out some of my thinking about the geographic web as it has evolved over that time. So I've written a little essay called "The Pothole Paradox: Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It's Worth Doing":

The idea of requiring geographic metadata for information might strike some people as excessive, but I suspect in a few years we will look back at the first decade of the web and be amazed that we went for so long without it. Think about it this way: both email and the Web depend on standardized location information embedded in every document -- we call them email and Web "addresses" for a reason. It's a virtual location, of course, but without that universally recognized location data, the last fifteen years of online innovation would have never happened.

We are also increasingly standardizing metadata for time. One of the things that is not commonly said about the blogging revolution is that it has introduced machine-readable time stamps for billions of web pages. One of the things that made Blogger such a breakthrough product was not that it made it easy to put up a web page and publish your thoughts -- home page building tools had been doing that for years -- but rather the fact that it let you publish a reverse chronological list of your thoughts.

So we have widely adopted metadata for virtual location and for time. We just haven't made the same breakthrough for real-world location. This has resulted in a strange imbalance in the way we interact with information on our screens, and in our expectations about what should be readily available to us.

Anyhow, there's a lot there, so check it out and let me know what you think!

OpenSocial

A few quick thoughts about OpenSocial. As you can see here, outside.in is one of the launch partners for the OpenSocial platform. In fact, our developer Christian Niles was out at the GooglePlex earlier this week for a last minute Hackathon before the announcement. We're going to have much more to say about our OpenSocial application in the coming weeks, but obviously the great promise here lies in combining those two big mega-themes of the past few years: the social graph (as you're now obliged to call it) and the geo-web.

Interestingly, we did not know until a few days ago that the APIs would extend to other social network platforms -- our guess was that it would live inside of Orkut, but that Orkut would become more tightly integrated with other Google applications, like Gmail. Obviously, we're thrilled that the platform is going to be as inclusive as it is. And what a brilliant move by Google. (I suppose as a launch partner, I'm biased, but still: what a brilliant move.) That $15 billion Facebook valuation got a lot of abuse over the past few weeks, but in a way I thought it made sense. Obviously, there was risk involved, but if you thought that Facebook had a reasonable shot at becoming "the social operating system of the Web", then it was probably worth making the bet -- particularly given that Microsoft had other reasons to invest. A company that runs the web's "social operating system" could easily be worth $50B or $100B. But that seems entirely impossible now, just a few days later, thanks to OpenSocial. If there is going to be a social operating system, it's going to be the open one that wins out.

And the open nature of the platform also makes it much harder for Facebook to exploit lock-in, since it will now be much easier for consumers to move over to the next, coolest social networking site. Thus far, the history of social networks sites shows that they are way more vulnerable to the whims of fashion than, say, search engines have been -- no doubt because teenagers and twenty-somethings have been their primary audience. By creating a bigger platform, Facebook was trying to fortify itself against this threat, but OpenSocial will likely accelerate the cycles of social network fashion. Big new networks will pop up every 12 months, instead of every three years.