The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect
Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn’t involve openness or portability of data, it seems.
Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google’s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API:
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.
This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.
It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.
In the last paragraph of the blog post, Facebook says they want to work with everyone: “We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.” If that’s the case, this sure is an interesting start to a healthy working relationship with Google. Next up on the block list: MySpace and their Data Availability malware product, no doubt.
Thanks for the tip, Jesse.
Update: Facebook PR is pointing out Sections 2B(4), 2B(5) and 2A9(vi) of the Developer Terms of Service:
4) You may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook User for such Facebook Properties) to access or share the Facebook Properties without our prior written consent.
5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.
You will not use Facebook Platform or any of your Facebook Platform Applications, and your Facebook Platform Application will not be designed…(vi) to request, collect, solicit or otherwise obtain access to usernames, passwords or other authentication credentials from any Facebook Users, or to proxy authentication credentials for any Facebook Users for the purposes of automating logins to the Facebook Site.
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MySpace Wins Largest Anti-Spam Award in History
MySpace has informed us that on Monday it was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest anti-spam sum ever made under CAN-SPAM and apparently ever under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act.
The case was won against two notorious spammers, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines. Wallace earned the nicknames “Spamford” and “spam king” for having sent as many as 30 million spam messages per day during a period of time in the 1990s.
Wallace and Rines spammed MySpace by creating their own accounts and stealing the passwords of others. They then went on to mass message users an estimated 735,925 times. Each of these messages warrant up to $300 in damages under the 2003 federal anti-spam law CAN-SPAN because they were conducted “willingly and knowingly”.
MySpace has yet to collect the actual award and may very well not ever do so; it appears as though they don’t even know where two spammers are (the judgment was made in their absence after they failed to show up to court). Even so, they are charging ahead with another pending case against Scott Richter who also used stolen passwords to spam MySpace users.
The News Corporation-owned social network issued has issued the following public statement:
MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site. The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $233,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute. User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working. We thank the court for serving justice upon defendants Wallace and Rines and we remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.
More details can be found through the Associated Press.
Below is the court order:
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Three’s Company: Google To Launch “Friend Connect†On Monday
Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.
MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).
If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).
Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.
More details as they come in.
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Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect†On Monday
Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.
MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).
If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).
Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.
Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may - MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.
More details as they come in.
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MySpace Embraces Data Portability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter
MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.
A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.
The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.
But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.
The data sharing is dynamic, meaning it is updated constantly. And that also means user permission is not a one time thing. At any time a user can change or revoke the rights of a third party to access the data. Those third parties are “being held to strict terms of service,” says MySpace, which prohibits them from storing the data or using it once permissions are revoked.
For now, just the four launch partners will have access to Data Availability, and the features should go live in the next couple of weeks. More partners will be added over time, and MySpace says they eventually want to give even “mom and pop” websites ways to be involved.
What About Open Social?
MySpace is a partner in Google’s OpenSocial project, but this is being done outside of that framework. MySpace says they’ll adopt the Open Social APIs that evolve around data sharing once they are developed and announced.
The Center Of All User Data
Historically MySpace has lagged Facebook in terms of innovation. But they definitely “get it” this time. Sharing user data so openly (with user permission) is a terrific way to incentivize users to store all their core data at MySpace to begin with. Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share. We’re starting to see the floodgates open and the idea of data sharing become a reality (thanks largely to the efforts of Data Portability and other activists in this space).
By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner - meaning lots of people use MySpace as the place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.
See my post on “The Centralized Me” for more of my thinking on this.
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MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter
MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.
A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.
The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.
But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.
The data sharing is dynamic, meaning it is updated constantly. And that also means user permission is not a one time thing. At any time a user can change or revoke the rights of a third party to access the data. Those third parties are “being held to strict terms of service,” says MySpace, which prohibits them from storing the data or using it once permissions are revoked.
For now, just the four launch partners will have access to Data Availability, and the features should go live in the next couple of weeks. More partners will be added over time, and MySpace says they eventually want to give even “mom and pop” websites ways to be involved.
What About Open Social?
MySpace is a partner in Google’s OpenSocial project, but this is being done outside of that framework. MySpace says they’ll adopt the Open Social APIs that evolve around data sharing once they are developed and announced.
The Center Of All User Data
Historically MySpace has lagged Facebook in terms of innovation. But they definitely “get it” this time. Sharing user data so openly (with user permission) is a terrific way to incentivize users to store all their core data at MySpace to begin with. Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share. We’re starting to see the floodgates open and the idea of data sharing become a reality (thanks largely to the efforts of DataPortability and other activists in this space).
By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner - meaning lots of people use MySpace as the place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.
See my post on “The Centralized Me” for more of my thinking on this.
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Weakness At MySpace
During yesterday’s News Corp. earnings call, Rupert Murdoch and COO Peter Chernin talked a little bit about the weakness at MySpace. They expect Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, and other properties) to miss its $1 billion revenue goal by the end of News Corp.’s fiscal year next quarter. Instead, they expect FIM to reach $900 million for the fiscal year. (No surprise there. We predicted the shortfall a month ago). And in the quarter they just reported, revenues for FIM were actually down 10 percent, from $233 million to $210 million.
The culprit: There is too much inventory, and not enough clickthroughs. As a result both brands (and, more importantly, “friends” on MySpace) remain skeptical. Dumping ads on MySpace without targeting them simply doesn’t work.
Google is also partly to blame, as its ad deal represents about a third of FIM’s revenues. Altough, Google is working on the problem. Google founder Larry Page said as much during Google’s last earnings call:
On social networking monetization, it is an area where we have tried a lot of new technologies. Demographic targeting has been successful. The challenge and the opportunity is that there is a lot of inventory. Part of it is just getting the advertising ecosystem built up and targeting in a way that makes sense. We have made some improvements but there are more improvements to be made. It takes time for advertisers to [get up to speed].
(That’s right, Larry. Blame the advertisers.)
It wasn’t all bad news coming from MySpace, though. It continues to make improvements in bringing in branded advertisers (up 21 percent), revenues per user (up 49 percent), and audience. Traffic and time spent continues to rise at a healthy clip at MySpace, MySpace TV, Foxsports.com, PhotoBucket, and IGN.
The bigger issue for MySpace is that the longer it keeps missing targets, the less incentive its top executive talent has to stick around. Compensation for top executives is tied to meeting profit targets at the business. If they don’t meet those targets, nobody gets paid any upside. And for these folks, it’s all about the upside.
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Two Years Later, MySpace Karaoke Launches
MySpace Karaoke launched today. I had actually forgotten about this, but the site is powered by kSolo, an online karaoke service that MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media acquired back in April 2006. Yep, it took them two years to rebrand and relaunch it.
This is why you’re supposed to be drunk when around performing or listening to Karaoke.
kSolo joins Newroo as the other startup Fox acquired in 2006 that has sort of languished. After acquiring Newroo in March 2006, MySpace sat on the asset for a year and then beta launched MySpace News. It was and remains a bit of a ghost town, with little integration with the main MySpace service.
MySpace Karaoke may not do much better. kSolo, which has remained live during the 2 year development cycle, has little traffic (nor does its competitor, SingShot, which shut down).
It’s U.S. only for now, with international rollout in the coming months.
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MySpace Apps Moves Out Of Beta
MySpace Application Gallery, MySpace’s app directory which launched in limited beta back in March, is now fully live and open to the public.
The MySpace application gallery allows users to browse applications and integrate them into their MySpace page and profile, giving what MySpace describes as “a more engaging and entertaining online experience.”
The biggest difference between todays launch and the beta launch is a link on the main MySpace page to the app page: minor in words but major in promoting MySpaces apps to MySpace’s user base. Users will also have one-click access to the Application Gallery from their home page through their individual control panels.
Since the beta launch, the MySpace Application Gallery has resulted in over 2.1 million installs from over 1,000 approved applications.
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Fox Interactive Media To Miss Revenue Targets; Chief Revenue Officer Out Amid Reorganization
Amidst all the excitement over the MySpace Music announcement today is another story about the fate of parent company Fox Interactive Media, the division of News Corp. that controls MySpace, IGN, Scout Media, Photobucket, Fox Sports, AmericanIdol.com and other properties.
FIM, under President Peter Levinsohn, will miss their revenue target of $1 billion the current fiscal year ending June 30, multiple sources say. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp., first gave revenue guidance for FIM in June 2007:
“…we are forecasting that MySpace alone will generate in excess of $800 million in revenue in fiscal ‘08. Overall, FIM in fiscal ‘07 generated revenues of $550 million and a profit of $10 million, even after absorbing $80 million in retention and amortization costs. We would be surprised if FIM revenues this fiscal year do not exceed $1 billion with margins well above 20%.”
Actual revenue is estimated to come in at around $900 million (2007 revenues were $550 million). And the $200 + million in expected operating margins is also likely an illusion. The division as a whole, with more than 2,500 employees, will be much closer to break even.
The impact could be far reaching for the organization. All employee stock option plan tied to profits. This includes MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Co-founder Tom Anderson, whose compensation is heavily weighted towards the plan. If there are no profits, there are no payouts.
Some insiders say the projections were impossible to meet. Nevertheless, News Corp. has a fall guy: Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett, who was hired from Time Warner in 2006, has been either terminated or was offered an inferior position and resigned. Barrett was rumored to have had a very strained relationship with DeWolfe, who named Jeff Berman, currently MySpace EVP of Marketing and Content and a former public affairs executive, as head of MySpace sales and marketing.
Barrett is at least the seventh senior executive to leave FIM in recent history. Former COO Mark Jung (now CEO of Vudu), Chief Strategy Officer Jim Heckman (now CSO at Zazzle), CEO Ross Levinsohn (now a Managing Partner at Velocity Interactive), SVP Heather Harde (now CEO of TechCrunch), EVP Sales John Trimble (now EVP, Sales at Glam), and EVP Corporate Development Mitchell Chun (now at Zazzle with Heckman).
In addition, FIM is moving some assets from MySpace and other properties into two new groups:
Platform: The group will control software and services to be sold internally and to third parties.
Monetization: To be led by Adam Bain (EVP of Technology and Production). The 250 person group has already moved out of FIM headquarters in Beverly Hills to a former Yahoo building in Santa Monica. The group, which is largely built on the 2007 SDC acquisition, will sell ads into FIM properties (after Google and each entity’s direct sales group) and will also sell advertising for third parties, including MySpace platform widget providers and other web services. The entity is reportedly also close to making another acquisition in the advertising space and may take the acquired company’s name as their brand. Revenue from this group is rumored to be about $150 million in the current fiscal year.
The main FIM properties, MySpace, IGN, Scout Media and Photobucket, will remain under their current heads, and will all have direct sales groups to sell primary advertising space. Also, AmericanIdol.com, currently under FIM, may move to Fox.
FIM declined to comment on this story.
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