Tag Archives: opensocial

Modular Innovation 201

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
10

image What is Modular Innovation?

Modular Innovation can be briefly described as the products and platforms consisting of or facilitating…

  • Relationships (people-people, products-products, people-products)
  • Control of Experience (from creation to storage to interaction)
  • Ownership of Content (personal content from comments to friend lists and more)

You can also see the trend, itself, being referred to as “Modular Innovation,” much in the same way the term “Web 2.0” is still used today.

The products and concepts that constitute Modular Innovation are those that connect, enable, produce, enhance, extend, and make use of these relationships and, in turn, users’ online experiences with them.

Modular Innovation is increasingly everywhere these days…
Facebook Connect
@anywhere
Crowd sourcing
FourSquare		 API’s
Expensify
Plugins
Chrome		 Data exchanges
SugarSync
Google Maps
PBWorks

… and many more products, forms, and methodologies.

For the rest of the article, I will walk us through the path of the online product from a time before the prevailing trend of Modular Innovation to today, and set the scene for what is to come.

Web Problems 2.0

It’s hard today to find an online product that hasn’t in some way been touched by Modular Innovation. You might look to the old blogs as a pre-Modular Innovation, with their initial incarnation as log-oriented websites, and the most rudimentary relationship common between website and website visitor of the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras.

Some products still holding fast to the ways of the Web 1.0 and 2.0 worlds…

Web 1/2.0 Products Missing Modular Innovation…
JD Supra
http://www.jdsupra.com/		 a forward thinking legal 2.0 product leveraging the UGC of the legal community, but starkly lacking a public API allowing for the accelerated growth of the community by way of 3rd party apps for participating
Turbo Credit Solutions
http://turbocreditsolution.com/index.php		 all the entered information is one way; there is no extracting of entered financial information or connecting to any of the services it purports to help with, nor any other desktop- or web-based financial tools
CommandShift3
http://commandshift3.com/		 fun and wonderful experience, but lacks any sort of ties to the outside world beyond its basic screenshotting functionality; it could, for example, allow for the creation of accounts, remember expressed views and comments, allow users to save these comments, allow for a widget that can be inserted on websites of recently reviewed / rated items

Interestingly … A Flickr

The very popular product, Flickr, launched at the start of the Web 2.0 age has prospered, in no short order due to its understanding of the importance of interconnectivity and relationships, built into its early foundation. Flickr demonstrated a unique foresight into what would propel it onward through Web 2.0 and beyond, by embracing many of the, at the time yet defined, underpinnings of Modular Innovation.

Building Blocks

Building upon the pre-Modular Innovation archetype of blogs, discussed in the previous section, the Modular Innovations that are blogs today are now seen with clear characteristics of Modular Innovation like…

Allowing bloggers to download / export their content (and often upload it to other locations and competing blog platforms)

Connecting Twitter and Facebook in various manners

Permitting bloggers to drop-in custom plugins and even full commenting sub-systems

In Web 2.0, we had looks, feels, AJAX and communities. Through Modular Innovation, we have relationships, modular products and other services that facilitate the relational parts… all the components, and the Internet environment within which they, Modular Innovations, thrive.

A Modular Innovation can be small, a feature or mini-mini-product, or large, a module-connector service, a social network. Modular Innovations alone, and more so when combined, lead to users’ information that is increasingly…

Portable
Shareable
Interoperable
Customizable
Redundant / Replicated
Accessible

…and, basically, their own, the users’, to do with as they wish, to control via the Modular Innovation(s) within their personally controlled online user environment —a user experience both open and dynamic.

Modular Innovation puts the people in control – of their content and their interaction with it. The people can easily share their data, export it, import it, customize privacy, across different social networks, products and other environments. Their data becomes modular, flexible, and portable. Users’ experiences consist of many modules that make up their total user experience. Content and functionality, with greater Modular Innovation becomes further decentralized across these modules, each providing a single, small or large, set of abilities or experiences, that together break down the walls (silos) that are the proprietary platforms, and empower the people, the users of the Internet, to be in charge of their data and their experience.

As modules leverage open standards, people are increasingly able to publish their content to multiple destinations, manage their content across a variety of products. As Modular Innovations relationally increase so too decreases, as is being seen by way of …

OpenSocial,
Facebook Connect,
Twitter @Anywhere,

… the need to re-find friends, or re-re-re-publish one’s content, as well as port and integrate their personal, content creations with other services, other Modular Innovations. Modular Innovations are increasingly empowering the user through the enabling of greater flexibility and control of interaction with the user’s own data. Data that, through more and more Modular Innovation, is becoming …

increasingly portable,
increasingly integrated,
increasingly customizable.

Products that are or facilitate Modular Innovation are the ones that have proven themselves among the most persistent and continue to gain increasing acceptance in the current evolution of the social and interactive relationships of the Internet.

Looking Forward

There already exist many complex frameworks actively being developed and evolved that will definitely be major influences in shaping the course of Modular Innovation. These modules, or Modular Innovations, can represent a single or group of features and functionality, or a service or framework that augments or allows for new inter-module relationships to be established.

A Modular Innovation often described as a framework that “allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.” aka Semantic Web

A Modular Innovation that represents an image oriented feature set that allows for the easy connectivity to and from other resources as well as the inclusion of the production functionality within and between other Internet products. aka Flickr

Through combining and connecting and customizing modules, an owner, a user, is in control to customize their full experience and interaction with their own content as well as that of others.

Through the connectivity and relationships of modules, users’ ownership of the content that flows through is also strengthened, as well as those relationships among the people with each other and the Modular Innovations with which each interacts.

As the tendrils of Modular Innovation deepen and spread, the user experience becomes progressively more defined by the modules and the relationships between the modules and the individuals using them, not the network or any single product (or feature).

Enjoy, Discuss & Tweet!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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Modular Innovation 101

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
19

bunch of modular innovation Modular Innovation (mŏj‘ə-lər ĭn’ə-vā‘shən) [noun]

  1. Philosophy and style of modular products and services consisting of the following principles..
    • Relationships between people and modules and the user empowerment that comes from such relationships
    • User control of experience, from creation to storage to interaction
    • User’s unrestricted control of own content
  2. Of, relating to, or based on individualized modules that can be personalized to a variety of tasks and the interconnecting means by which these modules can interrelate
  3. The act of introducing, creating, connecting to, building upon, or working with modules, glue (aka platforms), and/or data that either exist as or enable Modular Innovation(s)

What is Modular Innovation? A trend. A product. An evolution. A market. A process or approach. Yes, to all of these methods of describing and thinking about Modular Innovation. I coined the term Modular Innovation (def. 1) to fill a descriptive and philosophical gap in the language, thoughts, and discussions regarding the present, evolving, and future nature of the products of the Internet.

I have been using Modular Innovation to describe and assess products for some time. More recently, driven by popularity and the public nature of The Product Guy blog, I have been receiving many requests for further elaboration on the meaning of Modular Innovation. So…here it is. Enjoy.

Modular Innovation …. The Next Inevitable Step

In Web 2.0 we had looks and feels and communities. Through Modular Innovation, we have RELATIONSHIPS, modular products and other services that facilitate the relational modules… all the components, and the Internet environment within which they, Modular Innovations, thrive.

A Modular Innovation (def. 2) can be small, a feature or mini-mini-product, or large, a module-connector service, a social network. But when the Modular Innovations are all combined, they lead to users’ information that is…

Portable
Shareable
Interoperable
Customizable
Redundant
Accessible

…and, basically, THEIR OWN, the users’, to do with as they wish, to control via the Modular Innovation(s) within their personally controlled online user environment — not a user experience restricted, like today, but truly open and dynamic.

Modular Innovation (def. 3) puts the people in control – of their content and their interaction with it. The people can easily share their data, export it, import it, customize privacy, across different social networks, products and other environments. Their data becomes modular, flexible, and portable. Users’ experience consists of many modules that make up their total user experience. Content and functionality are fully decentralized across these modules, each providing a single or small set of abilities or experiences, that together break down the walls (silos) that are the proprietary platforms, and empower the people, the users of the Internet, to be in charge of their data and their experience. As modules, leveraging open standards (OpenSocial maybe being one of them) people are increasingly able to publish their content to multiple destinations, manage their content across a variety of products (no longer needing to re-find friends, or re-re-re-publish one’s content), as well as port and integrate their personal, content creations with other services, other Modular Innovations. Modular Innovations should increasingly empower the user through the enablement of greater flexibility and control of interaction with the user’s own data. Data that, through more and more Modular Innovation, will become increasingly portable, increasingly integrated, increasingly customizable. Products that are or facilitate Modular Innovation will be the ones that are sustained and will gain increasing acceptance in the next, and already beginning, evolution of the social and interactive Internet.

E.G.

Modular Innovation is about ownership of content through the connectivity and relationships of modules and, through these modules, relationships amongst people with each other and the Modular Innovations with which they interact. These modules, or Modular Innovations, can represent a single or group of features and functionality, or a service or framework that augments or allows for new inter-module relationships to be established. Through combining and connecting and customizing modules, an owner, a user, is in control to customize their full experience and interaction with their own content as well as that of others.

A Modular Innovation that represents a feature set can be seen in a product like Flickr that allows for easy connectivity to AND FROM other resources as well as inclusion of the Flickr production functionality within other and between other Internet products.

Another Modular Innovation (of many) in the flavor of service or framework for the enablement of inter-module relationships can be seen in the Semantic Web framework that “allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.“

A true environment of Modular Innovation is one wherein the user experience is defined by the modules and the relationships between the modules and the individuals using them, not the network or any single product (or feature).

Out There

Trends and other primordial indicators of the emergence of Modular Innovation can be found in many products that are out there, or in development, today on the Internet. I am constantly studying all forms of Internet products, at times, for fun, others for research or my consulting work.

I will be starting a weekly series wherein I will briefly highlight many of the products that at which I am looking. I will touch on the cool, summarize critical assessments / suggestions for improvement, and identify those products that are Modular Innovations, contain smaller Modular Innovations within, or may and/or can facilitate the proliferation and connectedness of other Modular Innovations. Some of the products touched on each week will also lend themselves to more detailed blogs or interviews with the people behind them. The ‘Modular Innovation Within’ series will act as a supplement, where everyone can quickly get a taste and overview of the latest breaking products on the Internet, from the perspective of The Product Guy and how they do or do not contribute to the emergence of an Internet world of Modular Innovation.

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

OpenSocial: Impediment or Catalyst?

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
4

opensocial OpenSocial. There is a great deal of excitement and hype behind the (gradual) release of Google’s OpenSocial. I have spent the last few weeks, since the release of OpenSocial, experimenting with, as well as speaking to the individuals involved with both product sides, widget and Container, and really digging into what is known, what is hypothesized to be, and wrapping myself around OpenSocial’s current and full potential.

What is OpenSocial?

OpenSocial allows websites and social networks (OpenSocial term, ‘Containers‘) to run mini-products (OpenSocial term, applications; aka gadgets, widgets). The mini-products can be shared across multiple social networks and leverage the existing content and data on the social networks (i.e. your existing friends). The Containers can host these mini-products as well as exchange information with other Containers, other social networks.

What does Google say about the Container a.k.a. OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI)?

“To host OpenSocial apps, your website must support the SPI side of the OpenSocial APIs. Usually your SPI will connect to your own social network, so that an OpenSocial app added to your website automatically uses your site’s data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. Soon, we will provide a development kit with documentation and code to better support OpenSocial websites, along with a sample sandbox which implements the OpenSocial SPI using in-memory storage. The SPI implements:

  • Adding and removing friends
  • Adding and removing apps
  • Storing activities
  • Retrieving activity streams for self and friends
  • Storing and retrieving per-app and per-app-per-user data “

Pasted from <http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/container.html>

The most exciting information can be found in the highlighted statement within the above excerpted quote from Google’s explanation of the OpenSocial SPI. It is the possibility of sharing, exchanging, porting information between DIFFERENT social networks, not tied down to any one social network, where the networks have to provide value-add and truly unique user experiences to keep a user. In an environment where a user can easily move all of their gadgets (apps, widgets, modules) from one network to another, as well as, and most excitingly, port their user created content and friends from one network to another, at will, is tremendous (or should I say, ‘will be’?) for the progression of the Internet environment and user experiences, and the evolution of the Internet towards one of all around Modular Innovation.

———–

A while ago I coined the term Modular Innovation to describe the next phase of the Internet’s evolution; one which includes, but is not limited to the layer of the Internet referred to, by many, as the ‘social Internet’ – highly relevant to this discussion of OpenSocial. The stage of the Internet’s development after ‘Web 2.0′ is the period that I refer to as Modular Innovation.

Modular Innovation. Where users are able to determine the user-facing modules with which they can interact. Where users can determine which location or locations the information that these modules use are stored. Where users are able to customize their total Internet interaction and user experience, without third-party restrictions placed on how they can access, share, or move the content that they, themselves, have created. All this is Modular Innovation — innovation of many parts, or modules, that result in a much larger, cohesive whole for the user.

The components and products that enable this time of Modular Innovation knock down the encumbering walls. They allow for complete control of one’s own content, through the ability to integrate with other Innovative Modules (services & products), incorporating flexibility, portability, and facilitating the total customization, and self-determination of and by users with respect to how they interact with their personal creations and those of other individuals and companies.

OpenSocial is Open & Social. Really?

Just a little bit. I mean, well, that is how much of OpenSocial has actually been released, despite all of the articles and press releases that everyone has been reading. To be fair, right now it is difficult to give OpenSocial a complete and thorough review with 100% clarity, since it is still not completely “out there.” Over the past few weeks I have spoken to people and organizations throughout the OpenSocial product chain from the developers to the companies themselves, and experimented with and studied everything from the widgets to the Containers.

The initial release of OpenSocial was on the widget-side of things. At the time of OpenSocial’s release, if I hadn’t been prudent in my assessment and given Google more time to see if they would be able to paint a clearer picture, I would have maintained, as also has been said by others, that OpenSocial would have been better labeled as the “OpenWidget” platform. The App (Data) and Container API documentation all remain very incomplete, often merely consisting of little more than a few bullet points to guide peoples’ expectations. However, I have of late had the opportunity to study parts of the OpenSocial Container API, albeit a very incomplete and far from concrete API, to build a firmer understanding of the total vision of OpenSocial that I can now more accurately, more confidently, share with you.

Where does Google’s OpenSocial fit in? Does it help or hurt the progress and emerging next phase of the Internet, Modular Innovation?

orkut Now! For the moment the biggest value in OpenSocial lies with its ability to drive new development and user adoption for Google’s social network — orkut. If you want to develop and test apps or widgets you are pointed right to orkut. The Container half of the OpenSocial system, the part where the widgets are actually used and users/friends are created and edited, is clearly the lagging half of the OpenSocial release, with much more support and documentation already out for the widget-side. Trying not to pose too cynical a question… what’s the hurry? The more time that it takes to get the Container support out the door, the more people are (strongly?) encouraged to make use of orkut for development and testing, the more people are curious about new OpenSocial apps they come across, where orkut is the primary place to check them out and experiment with them, the better it is for Google … for orkut.

Other places (Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING) will be implementing Containers and hosting these widgets, but not yet comprehensively. Full Container support and implementation will be a while in coming. The documentation isn’t there. And there are still plenty of questions on the app hosting and Container sides of the equations. So, for now, the bulk of developers’ focus is on widgets and apps — great news for orkut.

As a matter of fact, if anyone sees this move by Google as a purely altruistic offer to help the developer and the social Internet consumer, don’t lose sight of the fact that orkut’s U.S. market share, as of February of this year is a paltry 0.26%.

I would be remiss to not point out, that while orkut has been very successful internationally, they have yet been able to repeat that success in any meaningful way in the U.S., where the real advertising dollars can be found.

Will orkut, as a result of OpenSocial see a boom in its U.S. market share? You can count on it. This is indeed a very, very smart strategy by Google. I point this out not to slam OpenSocial, its ideas, or its strategy, which I find to be truly impressive, or the fact, that the slower they move on the Container-side, the greater the potential market share grab for orkut, which has been awesomely and intelligently executed, getting orkut competitors to buy-in (very impressive, Google), but to frame the logical, following question…

How much of OpenSocial and Google’s OpenSocial grand vision will come into being? Will it occur quickly? Or drag, and drag, and drag out over many years to come?

I ask these questions which, for now, can only be posed and re-evaluated as OpenSocial becomes more open, because my gamble, my interest, as well as the interest of everyone of the Internet lies in the visible progress of the technology and paradigms of the Internet. If something occurs to impede their progress, then it is best that everyone be on their toes and fully aware to address these issues and needs head-on, and with creative vigor and enthusiasm. It remains too early to draw any final conclusions.

Beyond orkut.

The OpenSocial environment is made up of (1) Applications (or widgets or gadgets) and (2) Containers. The Applications are independent modules that are able to display and perform actions based on the data fed into them — for example, list friends, latest friend activity, share restaurants you liked visiting with your friends, etc. Each module typically performs a specific, finite task, like mini-products, based upon a normalized set of input data. Each module can also communicate back to the parent, Container, what activities or other changes have occurred – e.g. new restaurant visited. Containers host, or run, the modules. orkut is a Container that early developers, and interested consumers, are able to use for testing their new modules to see how they work and how they interact with the data on orkut via the Container interface (aka API).

Creating the OpenSocial applications and modules that can run on every social network (that supports them) is nice – but hardly the exciting part. The part that is far from production ready, albeit starting to become available on places like hi5, Ning, and Plaxo, is the Container piece.

If OpenSocial lives up to the press releases and talking points, then OpenSocial just might be a positive catalyst in the world of Modular Innovation. If the walls of portability, access, sharing, self-determination of one’s own content remain, or if new walls spring up, or new cumbersome hindrances or restrictions emerge, then, what might be a positive influence may become the impeding technology, slowing progress of the clear eventuality where Modular Innovation rules the day.

For now, we shall all wait, continue to play with the pieces that constitute OpenSocial, the pieces that have been released, that eventually, will constitute the full release of OpenSocial — an event that we are all still anticipating.

Until then, myself and others will keep experimenting, observing and discussing Google’s OpenSocial to see just where it ends up; and waiting and watching for more Modular Innovations and noting those companies that facilitate the next phase of the Internet, and those that attempt to impede the inevitability.

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

P.S. and a Note to Google: In the future, try to not let the rhetoric get months ahead of the actual full release… starting out with unfulfilled expectations, sets the wrong tone for a product, a platform, that could have a huge impact on the future development of the product and the Internet, for good or worse (‘evil’ perhaps). This is valuable advice that does not apply solely to Google, but can be an educational learning point for all startups and companies releasing their products on the Internet. For Google and OpenSocial, we will have to wait and see.