IT Spot

Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with “Friend Connect” on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of “APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.”

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington reasons:

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).

With 70 million users, more than 20,000 Facebook applications, and about 350,000 developers, Facebook has a major scale advantage over Google’s Orkut. MySpace has the advantage of an even larger user base, but lags Facebook on the developer and application fronts.

However, Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

I spoke with David Glazer, Google director of engineering, in March about injecting the social graph and data portability into the core fabric of the Web. He said the big challenge isn’t the technology but applying existing and emerging standards, such as OATH (secure API authentication), OpenID (identity management) and OpenSocial APIs (application integration).

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet. Stay tuned for more details on Google’s Friend Connect and the next chapter of “The Making of the Social Web.”

See also:

Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’

MySpace announces ‘Data Availability’ project with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, Twitter

Yahoo rewiring itself from the inside out

Pizza time for OpenSocial applications

While Powerset is preparing for the public rollout of its unique, semantic search engine, Microsoft may be interested in acquiring the start-up, according to sources.

I asked Barney Pell, Powerset co-founder and CTO, whether there was any truth to a Microsoft-Powerset deal rumors. He said, “No comment,” and noted his policy of not commenting on rumors. Microsoft also declined to comment on rumors.

Powerset co-founder and CTO Barney Pell

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Bringing Powerset, which has no revenue and a tiny user base at this point, into the fold would be spare change for Microsoft compared with spending $45 billion to $50 billion on Yahoo. But, it could bring something useful to Microsoft–and Yahoo, if their union were consummated–in the battle for search users with arch rival Google.

Powerset raises the bar on search based on a preview that I had of the service last month. Powerset differs from the Google in that it extracts and indexes concepts, relationships, and meaning, rather than keywords. It’s able to create connections and pivot in some cases in ways that elude Google’s proficient engine, which favors more of a statistical approach.

Powerset uses a sophisticated natural language parser (licensed from Xerox PARC) to find subjects, verbs, objects, synonyms, and other elements for indexing.

Initially, Powerset is performing its magic on the 3 million pages of Wikipedia content, enabling a new kind of search and navigation experience on the popular information resource.

A next step would be to index the Web, which would be of great interest to Google rivals. Powerset has garnered $12.5 million in Series A funding from Foundation Capital, Founders Fund, and angel investors. Given the cost to scale up a semantically rich index of 20 billion Web pages, Microsoft would be a good match for Powerset. Then again, so would Google. Stay tuned…