Digg Goes Deeper with Social Networking

With its audience expanding and interests diversifying, the popular site is launching new features to help users find like-minded friends

by Catherine Holahan

When Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose launched Digg three years ago, the Web site attracted a community of like-minded people. Digg users were technophiles, not unlike the company's founders. Rather than pay attention to the news dominating the national headlines, many early Digg users were more apt to respond to articles that Rose posted on new Web companies, open-source software, and even stories about mental illness that can haunt mathematicians after they solve complex puzzles.

But, with Digg's audience expanding to millions of monthly users worldwide, the techies have seen their preferred stories pushed from Digg's front page in favor of business news, sports write-ups, and bizarre comedic articles. This diversity of interest has led tech-minded Digg users to criticize the worthiness of popular articles and even accuse influential users of colluding to unfairly promote stories. "Now that nontech stories have exceeded the tech stories," says Adelson. "The challenge is on us to provide what our community needs."

Open for Discussion

What Digg's users need, says Adelson, are social-networking tools. On Sept. 19 the company is launching a host of new features that might seem more at home on Facebook or News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace than on a Web site where users post links to online articles and other media. The intent is to make it easier for users to find others who share their passions by enabling them to form small groups of "friends" and create fuller personal profiles. "This is really the first time that we have enabled communications between users," says Rose.

Instead of submitting stories for review by the larger Digg community, users will be able to send—"shout" in Digg terms—story links along with messages to particular Digg friends. Friends, or small groups of friends, also will be able to chat or discuss stories on their personal pages with posts to a message board, a feature akin to the "wall" on Facebook.

Stronger Identities

Digg's new emphasis on user profile pages is also designed to let users better define their presence on the site by posting multiple photos, personal interests, biographical information, and even links to a member's personal blog, social network profile, or Web page. With the addition of these features, it will also be possible to control whether that content can be viewed by all Digg users or just designated friends.

As before, the profile pages will still feature those stories that an individual user has submitted to Digg as well as the site's overall tally of how many users also "dug" that story. But in addition, readers will be able to view a history of an individual user's comments on stories. The new features are "going to give everyone a bit of an identity on the site," says Rose.

Community Engagement

The changes are just the first in a series of new features slated to debut by yearend. In October, Digg plans to add a section dedicated to images. The plans also call for a new function that will suggest stories, or potential Digg friends, to members based on the articles they have read. "There is going to be a section where you will see these suggestions of news items and pictures and videos based on what you have been looking at," says Rose. "It will find connections—people you constantly agree with and just don't know it."

Rose and Adelson hope the new social-networking capabilities will encourage users who only read articles on the site to become more engaged with the community. Currently, 15% to 20% of Digg's audience are registered users. The vast majority of the 20-million-plus users, by Digg's count, just read the posted stories. Adelson believes the ability to share information with a select group of people and craft a personal identity will encourage more passive users to get involved. "We are creating this in-between world for people who maybe don't want to share information with the whole planet," says Adelson. "We all have a short list of probably 5 to 10 people whom we feel compelled to share certain information with."

Microsoft Connection

For Digg, more registered users mean more people whose interests the company knows enough about to show them targeted advertising. In July, Digg announced that Microsoft (MSFT) will be the site's exclusive provider of targeted ads for three years (BusinessWeek.com, 7/25/07). The deal came after a year of talks with various ad providers, says Adelson.

Of course, it's still an open question whether the site's new social-networking tools will prove popular with users. Digg knows better than most that, when dealing with communities, even slight changes can cause an uproar. But Rose says the community has been demanding more personalization and privacy for a while, even going so far as to build Digg applications for Facebook where they can discuss articles with smaller groups. Adelson and Rose first began discussing the features more than a year ago, but they decided to move slowly to ensure the applications would be robust enough to withstand the Digg community's well-worn reputation for overwhelming Web sites with traffic. "We have to build them to survive the Digg effect on themselves," says Rose.

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.

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We Are Opening the Social Graph

继续Open Social Web的话题，用OpenID, hCard, XFN, FOAF开放控制每个人的social graph
s

Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them. OpenID, which was born at Six Apart less than two years ago, was successful by embracing a similar philosophy: no one company should own everyone’s online identity. 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

We believe in openness. We were early supporters of RSS and Atom for content syndication. We pioneered the use of the metaweblog and Atom publishing APIs. We developed the Open Media Profile for OpenSearch standard, which makes it easy for tools to both syndicate and consume custom search results. We helped create, and then quickly deployed the rel="nofollow" microformat to help limit the impact of comment and blog spam. Most of our code is open source, and we've announced a GPL distribution of Movable Type that will be available later this year.

Two of our platforms -- Vox and LiveJournal -- are social blogging applications. In developing and running those products, we hear from our users and customers all the time about the challenges they have around discovering new social networks, registering as a user and identifying people they already know on these new services. We believe that the problems our users are facing are not unique, and that there is an opportunity to use open standards to simplify and streamline the user experience when joining a new service that has social features at its core. This isn't just about making our services better; it's about helping you manage your social network on all of the services you use.

We've been working on solving this problem, and instead of just talking about it, we want to show you what we've learned so far. The final screencast in this post shows an experimental tool we've created at Six Apart to visualize public online relationships.

Sign Up and Sign In with OpenID

Most services you visit require that you choose a username and password when creating an account. Beyond the security issues of using the same password everywhere you go, there are many services that only want to know that you're the same person who visited a week ago. Commenting on blogs is a great example of this; as a blogger I want to be able to build rapport with my commenters and reader community. On LiveJournal I can easily allow my friends who don't have LiveJournal accounts to view my protected content and comment on my entries by logging in with their OpenIDs.

OpenID makes it easy to sign up for a new service, by removing the hurdle of creating a new username and password combination, and entering in your name, email address and other personally identifying information again and again. It is estimated that there are well over five-thousand sites that support OpenID and close to 120 million OpenID enabled URLs.

In this brief 40 second screencast, you can see how easy it is to sign up for BackPack and sign in to Dopplr using OpenID.

Invite Your Friends

Once you've signed up with a new service, one of the most important next steps is typically finding friends who are already there and inviting new friends to join.

Many services today, such as Facebook, allow you to log in and upload your contacts and friends from other services on the web. Facebook allows you to enter your email address and password from Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo! to extract all of the email addresses you've exchanged messages with. While you may not think of this as a security risk with services you trust such as Facebook, a few weeks ago it was shown that giving someone easy access to your email address books can have very unanticipated consequences.

Quechup.com launched a few weeks ago as a new social networking service. With little context for the new service, many people happily gave their Gmail username and password to check to see if their friends were already members. What many of those people did not realize is that Quechup could use that information to email invitations to join Quechup to everyone in their Gmail address book. Lots of unwanted email, and embarrassed apologies, followed.

Once you think about it, it's easy to see how an email address and password can be the key to compromising a lot of other personal data. With their shared login system, a Google Account allows access not just to Gmail but also to a PayPal-like Google Checkout account, managing your advertising via AdSense, and viewing traffic to any of the sites you're tracking via Google Analytics. If your Gmail username and password is given out to a rogue service it might mean that your bank account is wiped, you've started displaying distasteful ads, and the confidential traffic statistics to your site are now fully public.

One of the realities of today's web is that with the proliferation of services, users often share usernames and passwords across accounts. This creates a potential risk: if you provide your Hotmail username and password to find friends in your address book, a rogue service could try to use that username / password combination to log into your broader MSN identity and harvest more personal information about you. OpenID can help solve this problem by reducing the number of passwords you have spread across the web, and potentially adding additional strength at your OpenID Provider such as the services offered by VeriSign, MyOpenID, and Vidoop.

While OpenID helps to solve these problems, the problem itself is larger than just reducing the number of accounts you manage online. Getting to the point of it being common practice for a service to request your email password to invite your friends really illustrates just how bad this problem has become.

Manage Your Network

We think that the best way for you to manage your network is to stop thinking about all of the little pieces and to start focusing on the big picture: you and the people who matter to you. We think relationships mean more than email addresses or which service you're signed on to at the moment. So we've created an experimental demo based upon open technologies OpenID, the Microformats hCard and XFN, and FOAF that allow you to see your entire network of relationships in one place - across services, across platforms, across the entire Web.

Interested? Let's see how it works.

Describe Your Relationships

While some services discreetly search social networking sites for profiles given an email address (and then republish that information), that isn't the only approach for discovering people around the web. "Blogrolls" have existed for many years and are a simple way to link to your friends. But you could also use a "blogroll" to link to other places you are on the web. Our own Mark Paschal has done this on his site, creating a list of links on his sidebar that point to his profiles elsewhere on the web. We're currently building a simple Movable Type plugin that will help you create and manage your own "elsewhere list." You can imagine this feature appearing on Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad as well.

These lists can use XFN (a simple HTML microformat) to make these public relationships machine-readable. Once they're machine-readable, web services can make it easier for users to discover friends in a transparent and decentralized manner.

This 40 second screencast shows just how easy it is to use XFN even if you know nothing more than basic HTML.

Finding Your Friends

Sharing your numerous online profiles is great, but real value comes in finding your friends on all of your social networks. This is made possible through the combination of technologies like XFN and FOAF, which together can describe who you know and how you know them. TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox produce FOAF (and soon XFN) automatically, and Movable Type has always had this capability. But it's not just our products -- services like LinkedIn, hi5, Twitter, Yelp and Last.fm all support these technologies.

This minute long screencast shows an experimental tool we've created at Six Apart to visualize these online relationships.

Knowledge is Power (or, why openness helps you take control of your privacy)

At this point, some of you are asking "Why would I want anyone to know all of this about me? What about my privacy?" Those are the right questions to ask. But it's important to keep in mind that our demo shows only relationships that have been already explicitly linked through use of hCard, XFN and FOAF. These technologies don't follow you around on the Web, "invisibly" tracking your every move. This is not spyware. This is not data mining. The social graph of your relationships already exists - our demo simply lets you see it. Wouldn't you rather be able to see what already exists so that you can better manage those relationships?

We believe that some people will see this as a powerful tool to take control of their privacy and, while we can't predict what forms those controls may take, we think that making the social graph visible is a powerful and necessary first step to freeing people from managing their network of relationships one piece at a time. At Six Apart, we pride ourselves in providing you the best tools for sharing your lives with the people that matter to you, and privacy plays a big part in doing that. Vox and LiveJournal have content privacy at the heart the service, and we are looking at how to provide you with easy-to-use tools for controlling the information you share about your identity, your life and your activities. We recognize and understand that as more interactions move online, not everyone wants every aspect of their life to be exposed to the world.

The Conversation Needs to be Opened

While this is academically interesting, we're working on making these technologies real in our products. We're exploring the many different ways we can integrate what we've demonstrated here into Movable Type, Vox, LiveJournal, and TypePad. For example, imagine using Movable Type to define your accounts elsewhere around the web, and then allowing your friends on those services to comment using OpenID and bypass your comment moderation queue. Or using Vox to easily republish the content you've created on Flickr, Twitter, and other such services and share it in one place with your neighborhood.

Finally, if you manage a social networking service, we strongly encourage you to embrace OpenID, hCard XFN, FOAF and the other open standards around data portability. If you use social sites, we encourage you to think about what tools would be most beneficial to your online experience and to blog your thoughts with the tag or category "socialgraph". You'll also find us speaking at various upcoming events including the Web 2.0 Summit, Digital ID World, Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, and Graphing Social Patterns and we'd love to continue this conversation in person. You can also follow these technologies on our product blogs for Vox, LiveJournal, TypePad, and Movable Type. No matter the venue or format, we're excited to move this conversation ahead and look forward to feedback and your thoughts.

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The Water Cooler Is Now On The Web

With a nod to Facebook, large companies are starting in-house social networks

大公司开始打造，适合工作环境的，内部使用的SN系统，challenging and risky but beneficial too

Like many twentysomethings, the workers at Starcom MediaVest Group spend a portion of their workday on a social network. So in April, executives of the ad-buying firm figured, why fight it? They launched a network of their own, for employees only, called SMG Connected. Today, a little more than a third of the company's workers, or 2,060 people, have signed up for their own pages where they can create profiles that outline their jobs, list the brands they admire (Nike (NKE )? Starbucks (SBUX )?), and describe their values by choosing from words such as "creativity" and "humor."

The service even winks at how people use MySpace.com (NWS ) or Facebook to put themselves at the center of the universe: Search for someone--say, with digital experience in Mexico--and you show up as a pushpin in the center of a bull's eye, with surrounding pushpins representing people who fit the bill. Says Starcom Vice-President Pam Daniels: "Giving our employees a way to connect over the Internet around the globe made sense--because they're just doing it anyway."

Plenty of big, mainstream companies look at the fast-growing social network scene as a place to market their products. But many are also adopting the same Web technology to create internal networks. It turns out to be an efficient way to mine for in-house expertise, discover new recruits, and share information within their own walls. Setting up a corporate version of a social network has its own challenges, as well. Companies have to build in safeguards to ensure that they can track the discussions and document sharing, to be certain that employees comply with government regulations and don't tumble into legal hot water.

Corporations are being nudged along by employees, and not just the digital-savvy Generation Y that's now entering the workforce. More 30-plus employees are signing up with Facebook to trade daily updates with colleagues and friends. They're also building lists of contacts from among the 13 million professionals on LinkedIn. At Ernst & Young alone, 11,000 workers now have Facebook accounts.

That translates into a juicy new sales opportunity for tech companies that sell networking products. Everyone from IBM (IBM )toMicrosoft (MSFT) and on down to startups like intro Net-works, Awareness Inc., and Jive Software, are offering applications and services. One company, SelectMinds, has created social networks for 60 companies, including Lockheed Martin and JPMorgan Chase. And SharePoint, the Microsoft software that lets companies set up MySpace-like profiles, blogs, and collaborative Web sites known as wikis within the confines of their firewalls, is one of the fastest-growing server products in the company's history. "At first people were slow to adopt this; they were nervous. But now we're seeing a bunch of adoption," says Rob Curry, director of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server software. Both Microsoft and IBM are using their own offices as labs for their products.

Executives have legitimate concerns about spending time and money on something that could be just the latest techno flavor of the week. Remember knowledge management software? That product, designed to handle a lot of the same tasks as today's corporate social networks, was one of the hot buzzwords of the late 1990s. But the systems proved overly complicated and demanded hours to transfer information into databases.

BLOCKED ACCESS

Executives also worry about losing control of information or opening up their networks to security breaches. The whole "open" ethos of the social Net--sharing pictures and music and letting "friends" know your every activity--goes against the instincts of big-company chief information officers. That has led some, especially financial institutions such as Citigroup (C ) and Lehman Brothers (LEH ), simply to block employee access to those public social networks. In an online survey in July of 600 workers by security firm Sophos PLC, 50% said their companies block access to Facebook.

Regulatory or disclosure issues put a crimp on openness. Accounting firms, for instance, have to ensure that members don't provide tax or accounting advice through their networks. Some software lets management limit who can see what data, and tracks who looks at certain documents. Awareness, a company that creates networks and blogs for 100 companies, including Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, tracks network posts and sends any potentially inflammatory words into "moderation boxes" to be reviewed by a manager.

But companies also see a chance to harness the positive aspects of social networking--especially where it opens a door to a new demographic. Dow Chemical Co. (DOW ) faces a shrinking workforce as baby boomers start leaving the labor market en masse: About 40% of Dow's workers will be eligible for retirement in the next five years. So the 110-year-old company is pushing hard on hiring and retention. It plans to open four internal social networks in December for women, retired workers, current employees, and alumni who have left for other jobs. In an alumni network, for instance, current and former employees can create profiles and get information about full-time job openings. Another Dow social network is aimed solely at helping the company stay in contact with female employees as they leave the workforce for maternity leave or cut back their hours. "We want to keep in touch with the brainpower of past employees, and frankly, it's also a great group to consider for new hires," says Julie Fasone Holder, a corporate vice-president for human resources and marketing at Dow.

REDUCING E-MAILS

Some of the new social networks look a lot like the old company Web sites. KPMG set up an alumni network this spring, signing up around 10,000 former and current employees. The front page lists company news, networking events, and job openings. But look closer and you can see some social-network DNA: On the right-hand side, each member has a profile box, just like on Facebook, which they update with photos, information about their job or home life, and a list of contacts. Each member builds a contact list by searching on the service for people who are already signed up or eligible to join. KPMG credits the network with helping it hire 137 former employees, or around 14% of the company's total hires, since the service started, up from 72 people in the three months prior.

By luring employees into a network, companies hope to leverage their skills and contacts. But they also hope that all that collaboration will cut out time that's now spent mailing documents and e-mailing comments. In Los Angeles, the Film Foundation is using Lotus Connections, an IBM product, to help manage an educational film program. Workers can archive research documents, share calendars, chat, and blog. A team of 60 researchers, writers, teachers, and filmmakers is putting together a curriculum, distributed free to schools across the country, that teaches students how to understand the visual language of films. By having members brainstorm, review each other's work, and prepare budgets on the network, the Film Foundation believes it can cut by half the amount of time it takes to create the materials.

By Heather Green

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Google to Envelope All Knowledge on November 5th, 2007

Michael Arrington has convinced several high level sources to disclose discussion at a top secret Google meeting where the company discussed plans to release on November 5th a new set of APIs. Those APIs will make access to the data it holds fundamentally open to outside parties, starting with a limited number of Google applications and expanding. Arrington framed the discussion as aimed at making Google more open than Facebook but I'm not so sure that's what's going on. There's good reason to feel positive about this move, but there are also a number of reasons to be very concerned. This is about putting Google all the more at the center of our lives by plugging outside applications into it and making it the key reference point for applications that want access to us.

I don't think that a meeting like this was held 6 weeks before launch in order to develop the plans; I think they got industry luminaries together to talk messaging. That's something Google needs some help with.

Recall the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a May interview with the Financial Times:

We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation...The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ 

What's at Stake

Google holds our search histories, our email, our calendars, the view of earth from the heavens (soon sharper than ever!) and the meaning of our spoken words. Google's invested in Sergey Brin's wife's gene cataloging startup and they've prototyped software that will serve up content online that's contextual to the ambient audio from the room your computer is sitting in. Steve Hodson pulls out the requisite Cory Doctorow dystopia excerpts in a post on his blog.

The Openness

So bring on the new openness! We and others have long called on Google to open up our own data to our own access. These new APIs may be a way to do that. Will they be read-only APIs, limited to letting 3rd party applications leverage (with our permission) the information that Google holds about us? Or will they be read/write APIs that allow outside third parties to write to our Google profiles as well?

That Brad Fitzpatrick, the Father of OpenID, is said to be a guiding force behind Google's efforts is a good sign. Google's activities in China, like Yahoo! and Microsoft's recent self-discipline pact, is not a good sign. Ultimately, Google's only responsibility is to its share holders.

Is Facebook Really The Issue?

Michael Arrington says that the analogy literal target here is Facebook, but I'm not so sure. (Update: He says that was very clear, so it sounds like I'm in part wrong here.) The recent opening of Facebook to outside applications stirred no end of excitement, but in reality the vast majority of those applications so far have been of objects of trivia sitting unused on public profile pages. There's a lot more at stake with Google than a couple of pokes and some music sharing. Facebook's momentum with huge amounts of users is because of privacy controls (so far) and the brilliance of the news feeds - almost in spite of the applications, which have been widely derided as MySpace-ish.

We Need OpenID, Not GoogID

Arrington says that Google's social networking software Orkut is what will lay over the top of all its services. I think what's needed is a federated ID system like OpenID to tie everything together, not one corporate body that can already claim near omniscience. We need the attitudes of Brad Fitzgerald's old employer, Six Apart, not the arrogance of Google.

I don't want to ask Google, "What shall I do tomorrow?" Ultimately, even with all my own shortcomings in data processing and rational thought, I only want to ask that of myself.

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Google's Shared Stuff

Based around their contacts system

if Google's going to try to play nice with other sites like Del.icio.us, Furl and Facebook (you know all of them are being indexed) then I want these recommendations from users all across all these other sites.

The Good News

There are a number of things that Google has done well already. It's hard not to compare this product to Del.icio.us in particular, the Yahoo! acquired product that most people would agree currently dominates the social bookmarking world.

Compared to Del.icio.us, Google Shared Items has great user profiles. No one fills out their del.icio.us profiles and it always drives me nuts. Google has a nice big profile section that screams out for info about you. See mine here. A photo, multiple links associated with your account and more room for text to describe you are all very nice touches.

There's no direct access to cached pages. Furl.net offers a personal copy of every page you bookmark, in case it changes or goes away. Google might not want to get into that, but they have a cached copy of all public pages - why not provide me a link inside my bookmark archive?

Speaking of Del.icio.us and Furl, the team behind Google Shared Items is obviously proud of their "support" for tagging items in Del.icio.us, Furl.net, Facebook, Reddit, Digg and SocialPoster. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually cross post anything, much less to multiple accounts ala OnlyWire. It just links out to your other accounts in a new window. If you want to post to Reddit, you might as well just use a Reddit button and skip Google.

The term label isn't used, "a historical accident" the Google team recently called it, tags are here to stay. There's just an empty field for tagging, though. Did I say this was the good news section?

Finally, though the "article preview" button too often doesn't actually provide a text preview of the article, it is nice. It's a straight rip-off of Facebook's image capture feature, allowing you to flip through the images on the page you're referencing to chose one to associate with that page. To be honest, Facebook borrowed the feature from elsewhere as well.

The Bad News

The worst thing about Google Shared Items is that it doesn't really work. I know that by now, for example, lots of people in my GMail contacts have saved something using the service. They must have. Yet I only see one person's single shared item on the page for friends' items. Likewise, I don't know how to get to any kind of general page, most popular or anything. I'd guess that Google didn't want anyone to use this service yet, but it's live and emailing friends about it is quite prominent.

The private bookmarking option doesn't appear to work yet and the ability to "preview my shared items page with this item on it" is just silly.

I'm sure all of those things will be fixed. Here are some criticisms with more substance.

There's no integration with Google Reader Shared Items. Everyone's mentioned that. There's also no search. It took years before search was integrated with Google Reader.

There's no data export. This is an all-too-typical violation of Google's responsibilities with regard to my data. It's my data, if the option to take my ball off your field and go home isn't available - then I'm not even going to start playing.

The metadata is a mess. The RSS feeds look awful. Item descriptions come through as item titles, there's no easy way to see the actual title of the page or the full URL you're considering clicking through.

Why is all of this going on outside the existing Google Bookmarks service? Perhaps they will be combined at a later date.

Hopes for the Future

You know what Google could do to absolutely blow everyone else out of the water? They could offer an awesome, cross-site recommendation engine. I'd like Google to look at my bookmarks and tell me what I'm missing that people with similar archives have bookmarked. More than that, I want to know who that I don't know has interests similar to mine - and I want to know who is the fastest at finding the items that fit those interests.

Finally, if Google's going to try to play nice with other sites like Del.icio.us, Furl and Facebook (you know all of them are being indexed) then I want these recommendations from users all across all these other sites. Give me that and give me the ability to export my data and I may never use Del.icio.us again. Joshua Schacter, the founder of Del.icio.us, says that a recommendation engine is on its way there (better than before) but who could scale that better than Google?

Summary

All in all, I'm excited that Google is investing more into this space - but it's a pretty tepid engagement so far. I wouldn't recommend spending time on the service until something really groundbreaking happens.

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