MySpace. Home to some of the greatest user-created eyesores on the Internet. Inflictor of immeasurable pain upon web developers employed to shoehorn hacked and mangled code into custom profile layouts—creations of which Dr Frankenstein would be proud. Plagued by reliability problems and exploited by dangerous user-created scripts.
That’s my view of the social network, at least.
On MySpace’s developer site, the long preamble to OpenSocial on the MySpace Developer Platform is a gem of autobiographical prose which presents an entirely different (and patronisingly worded) perspective on MySpace’s code pedigree. A view from the inside, perhaps, where everything we thought MySpace were doing wrong was actually what they were doing right; where the apparently well-deserved repercussions of their shoddy code and lax security were no less than unwarranted assaults on their pioneering social “utopia”.
And a view where MySpace’s inevitable catching-up to Facebook’s well-executed application platform is varnished over with a smug account of how MySpace got there first:
MySpace has a very interesting history with applications written by users. You, gentle reader, may very well have participated in that history.
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Through a little known technology known as “cut and paste”, users could “install” applications they liked on their own profiles.
There may be more to come here about MySpace’s application platform as I try to develop for it in the near future. If this introduction was supposed to repair relations with developers for whom MySpace has long been a source of mirth, however, it’s had the opposite effect on me.
I’m excited about the potential of the budding SwitchABit platform.
It shows promise of breaking the monopoly that various social tools hold over certain types of social content. It will also help to mitigate one of the causes of these monopolies—the network effect; the runaway success of a particular service once its user base reaches a certain fraction of its market.
We already have services and tools which ease our simultaneous use of the many discrete social tools by helping us to post the same stuff to more than one place. A very simple example is the Twitter Facebook application, which solves the problem of many people using Twitter and their Facebook status for the same purpose by automatically updating their Facebook statuses whenever they tweet.
Most of these existing tools, as far as I’ve seen, require us to feed our data into the helper tool first in order that it can distribute it for us, or that the helper tool (e.g. the Twitter Facebook app) be controlled by the service from which we want to set free content (in that example, Twitter). If I understand it correctly, the paradigm shift in SwitchABit is that the helper tool becomes a transparent intermediate layer, distributing our social content without us needing to know how, or from where, it works.
I recently started using Dave Winer’s TwitterGram: Flickr-to-Twitter service, which has just been ported to become one of the first applications on the beta SwitchABit platform. Flickr-to-Twitter scans my Flickr photostream for me and finds photos which I’ve tagged with a ‘twitterthis’ tag. It creates a tweet-friendly TinyURL for the full Flickr URL of a photo, then tweets the photo’s title and the URL from my Twitter account. Simple steps, but ones which are tedious to perform myself at best, and downright awkward if I’m using a mobile device. Now I can email a freshly snapped photo from my iPhone to Flickr and see it tweeted to my friends very shortly afterwards.
I can’t wait to see more transparent helper tools like this come together to form a pervasive medium for the diffusion all sorts of social content.
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