Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Google I/O, a two day developer gathering in San Francisco. The first session I sat in on was OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web with Patrick Chanezon, Kevin Marks, and Chris Schalk from Google. The session aimed to answer “what does social mean?” and “how do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?”.

While APIs provide data for friends, profiles, and activities in social networks, different APIs make it difficult for developers. This is where OpenSocial comes in. Based on HTML+Javascript+REST+OAuth, OpenSocial was promoted in the session as an easier way to develop applications for a variety of participating social networks at once. With upwards of 275 million user distribution, OpenSocial can definitely be seen as an API that opens the flood gates.

While OpenSocial is great for developers, what do users get out of it? Chanezon, Marks, and Schalk explained that the users are able to then use more applications. More applications aren’t necessarily a good thing, however, like in the case of Facebook where many users are experiencing the fatigue of using applications that lack relevance.

Marks discussed how containers (e.g. social networks) don’t choose users – they simply grow through homophily and affinity, sometimes bringing unexpected user bases. Because of this, OpenSocial provides a sense that specialization is no longer required. Though the lack of specializing may benefit the developers, I think it may hurt the users in the long-run. A lack of application specialization based on each individual network often overlooks the intricacies and quirks that resonate with the individual userbase, thus creating a less-than-ideal user experience and a lack of unique value propositions. OpenSocial may represent progress for open standards, but not if it means an outbreak of “Zombies vs. Vampires” starts following you from network to network.

(artwork by Cindy Li)

The first ever CupcakeCamp (inspired by BarCamp and the constant cupcake gatherings in New York) is coming to San Francisco this Sunday! CupcakeCamp was created by Cindy Li, Lynn, Marianne Masculino and myself with support from the cupcake-loving community.

To RSVP to CupcakeCamp, go here. We also have a wiki here.

Cupcakes Take The Cake recently interviewed me about CupcakeCamp and my personal cupcake views.

Can’t wait!

Wow, totally did not expect today to be as overwhelming as it was. There are a lot of things being thrown around, some valid and others completely nonsensical, so I’d like to clear a few of them up (hoping to be less long-winded than my last post).

Twitter did respond, twice on Get Satisfaction, first here and then here. The general reaction seems mixed with some people satisfied by Twitter’s response while others are not. A lot of the friction seems to be around how Twitter should be perceived. A decent portion of Twitter users see the service as a community (similar to Flickr), while Twitter chooses to view themselves as a “communication utility” (similar to AT&T). But ultimately, this is an issue of accountability. And Twitter’s strategy of revising their Terms of Service rather than living up to the agreements they made with users is troubling.

To be clear, it wasn’t my intention to bring a mob with pitchforks to Twitter’s door. I don’t believe in mob-rule and again, I like Twitter and the people who work there.

It was my intention to speak out about a community management issue and to focus on the decisions a company made. I did not write this to “cry”, “whine”, or be “insecure” about being called a “c—”. To put it bluntly, I’m not and I certainly don’t let things like this ruin my day. I feel like it’s a prerequisite for any blogger or person who puts themselves “out there” to have a thick skin. Yes, the reality of the internet is dealing with these issues – Violet Blue has a great post called “Every girl online is fat, ugly and unsexy. Here’s how to get over it“. If I didn’t feel like I could “deal” with these issues, I wouldn’t be involved in any of the things I am.

The issue *is* about the decisions that were made and answers I was given directly from Twitter. It didn’t seem like they had a process or policy to their TOS and did not handle it as well as other services had. Overall, it came off as inexperience with community management issues.

Admittedly, a couple of Ev’s tweets were off-putting, but this was a rough day and I don’t think that anyone was very happy by the end of it. I feel that some of his frustration may be from the fact that a number of people (both publicly and privately) told me cases where Twitter had banned a user for more extreme violations. In my post, I outline that in my phone conversation with Jack:

I asked Jack if Twitter had ever dealt with stalkers or banning people before and he told me they never had.

It was pretty clear in conversation and I remember being shocked about that fact afterwards. Neither here nor there, it seems to be a miscommunication, and I’m glad people are sharing their different experiences with me.

This has generated SO many opinions, and I very much appreciate the critical and supportive sides to this. It’s extremely inspiring that people feel as passionately about these topics as I do, whether or not they agree with me or Twitter.

So, I’m not quite sure yet where this leaves everything. As stated earlier, it seems to come down to a disagreement over how some people view Twitter and how they view themselves.

(Note: I turned comments off on the last blog post, because after 276 comments and your own mother finally chiming in at the end, there’s probably little else to say that hasn’t already been said). (Comments are now closed on this post as well).

Update: Copying and pasting from my last post for those not wanting to click-through: This is already disclosed in the about section of this blog already, but I am stating it again here at the request of others: I am the community manager for Pownce, however, this issue started before I was working at Pownce. The opinions stated here do not reflect my clients/employers and I did *not* write this in the interest of them. It is well known that I am not a Twitter-hater (much the opposite).