Last 10 tweets from @brij

 Retweet: @stevebaker Tim Berners-Lee: “You can look at a blog, but what’s impacting the world is the blogosphere.” at 06/18/2008 09:47 PM

 [PHOTO] One rape every 29 minutes. Shame India! Watching news at Indian restaurant in Cupertino.
http://messagedance.com/message/show/ad5866ab145a91dcc01b523464b54c72 at 06/18/2008 08:22 PM

 Child abduction drill, reporting live from the streets of Wellesley, MA http://www.messagedance.com/WPDPhoto at 06/18/2008 07:43 PM

 [BLOG POST] Reddit goes open source with CPAL license, probably caused major LOL in Diggnation Reddit is releasin
http://www.onemoreidea.org/reddit-goes-open-source-with-cpal-license-probably-ca… at 06/18/2008 07:33 PM

 1and1 customer support emails can put Colbert show to shame. Time to move on. I had to chase down their CS head on LinkedIn at 06/18/2008 05:33 PM

 RBS - all chickens come home to roost! [u]
http://messagedance.com/message/show/262d76d580ccf3f0458e7a88e6975832 at 06/18/2008 04:17 PM

 [PHOTO] Type in about:robots in FF3 to see this - thanks @danishkhan
http://messagedance.com/message/show/292854f0c22533033b5cebbc490a8f90 at 06/18/2008 05:44 AM

 What is common between Daily Kos, MichelleMalkin, BetaNews, HotAir etc? - Bipartisan willingness to AP-ee at 06/18/2008 05:24 AM

 for events like this, media units should have dress code as well http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7460005.stm at 06/18/2008 05:21 AM

  @danishkhan better luck next year. I can feel your pain #LakersFor2009 at 06/18/2008 04:32 AM

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Two weeks, three announcements and wild west world of social networking is all topsy turvy.  Following Myspace and Facebook announcement, Google today gave a preview announcement of FriendConnect. Goals of FriendConnect are:

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

I will see what more comes out of scheduled press conference. This is getting very interesting and options for developers are growing. In a true sense, walls are coming down and data is flowing across gardens :)  Now I need to go and dig into APIs and make MessageDance dance across these newly discovered openness.

Update: TechCrunch has more details on the story:

So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend’s list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them.

Friend Connect is geared at the Long Tail of small sites that don’t even have any user information. It allows them to tap into bigger sites and piggyback on their user sign-in and registration, list of friends, and interactions between those friends. It takes advantage of many existing standards, including Facebook’s (it is not an official partner, but it Google is taking advantage of its published APIs). Of the many standards emerging, Glazer thinks that OAuth is the way to do it right.

Glazer admits that Friend Connect is but one small step towards the larger goal of being able to connect to any friend on any application, on any site. But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.

So its a still in work in progress. I think iFrame level integration is a bummer. Oauth seems to be gaining traction so that’s good. Atleast developers will see their efforts protected around Oauth. Oauth is primarily used by service providers to allow user to give Server A permissions to use data residing on Server B. Like the way MessageDance user grant permission to MessageDance to go fetch Blogger credentials from Blogger service. (OpenID is different from OAuth in the sense that it’s more of a user browser context to server side communication. Users use openID to identify themselves and login to various web services. It’s not between services to services, which is what OAuth does).

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

In computer programming, a widget (or control) is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts, e.g. virtual buttons that can be clicked with a mouse cursor, vs. physical buttons that can be pressed with a finger. Widgets are often packaged together in widget toolkits. Programmers use widgets to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs)

Google AdWords is the most widely used widget out there. It shows highly targeted text-ads right next to the content. Publisher’s motivation is to make money via Adsense and advertiser’s motivation in reaching out to highly targeted audience.

Google has stitched together a brilliant relationship between search relevance and AdWords-driven ad targeting.

INFORMATION SEARCH = INFORMATION WIDGET (AD)

Now lets talk about social networking space. Where search experience is replaced by SOCIAL EXPERIENCE. Experience is the main motivation for users to go to Faceook and Myspace. Dating, catching up with friends, discovering new people are all part of that experience.

How can companies tap into this experience network? Enter experience widgets. Slide, Rockyou and many others provide this experience widgets. They allow users to share photos, videos and all sorts of creative mixing. At the end of the day they are widgets which taps into the new currency called social experience.

SOCIAL EXPERIENCE = EXPERIENCE WIDGET (AD)

So companies providing these experience widget will be competitively valued vis-a-vis Google. No? I am not sure myself but I think that’s what is going on in the minds of Slide investors. Obviously people are surprised at the valuation.
Adam cites $1.40 for each installed application user. Which provides one way to analyze this number.

Key is in figuring out the right metric to justify the valuation. One way is to tie-in with Facebook valuation, other is to tie-in with Google search revenue. So there are many ways to PLAY this market.

My guess is all companies have somehow tied their projections to Google’s search revenue. If Google can do X using Y then in new social-graph driven era we can do 10% of X using 10% of Y.

Do you think that’s what Slide did with this funding announcement?