The Social Operating System: A Reader

For the sake of my pal Valdis Krebs, I am collating a list of posts I’ve made in recent years on the idea of a social operating system. The basic notion:

Stowe Boyd, Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter

The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core.We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our friends, and tossing observations and hopes and insights into the wake we leave behind, spreading out to all that think we matter.

So here’s some links to pieces I’ve written mentioning the idea:

Please send along any references to other people writing on the subject.

As Deal With Twitter Expires, Google Realtime Search Goes Offline

Danny Sullivan via

Yesterday, we reported that Google Realtime Search had mysteriously disappeared. Today comes the reason why: Google’s agreement with Twitter to carry its results has expired, taking with it much of the content that was in the service with it.

The details are interesting, but the lines are being drawn: Google+ is a direct competitor to Twitter, and so the orientation of Google as a whole to the streaming service will change.

It is starting here, in Google’s real-time search offering, but that’s just an initial foray, with Google decreasing the central role that Twitter plays in the real-time communication space, and trying to elbow Google+ into parity.

More important in the long run will be the nature of Twitter’s relationship with Apple, because the long-term battle is the social operating system war between Apple’s iOS/OS X and Google’s Android, with very different and potentially incompatible social worlds built in.

Google’s Eric Schmidt Says He ‘Screwed Up’ on Social Networking - Sam Gustin

via Wired, Sam Gustin

Google chairman Eric Schmidt took responsibility for the search titan’s failure to counter Facebook’s explosive growth, saying he saw the threat coming but failed to counter it.

Speaking at the D9 tech conference outside of Los Angeles Tuesday evening, Schmidt said that for five years, he’s been aware of the competitive threat posed by upstart social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Schmidt even wrote internal memos about the threat, he said, but was so focused on running Google’s day-to-day operations that he didn’t give the issue the necessary attention.

In an interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, Schmidt described Google’s social stumble as his biggest regret.

“I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it,” Schmidt said. “CEOs need to take responsibility. I screwed up.”

Pressed by Swisher and her co-host, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, about why he didn’t focus more on social networking, Schmidt had a simple answer:

“I was busy,” he said.

The most expensive error of all time?

Schmidt is looking more like a Steve Ballmer or John Sculley type: a suit occupying the front office while the business loses its way in a world of unprecendented innovations.

Let’s see if Larry Page can make up for the five years of social misteps that Schmidt oversaw.

There is still time to make Android a social operating system, and not miss the next generation of innovation, Larry.

And this is not some sideline: Google’s core business is search, and as we move into a world based on social connection the nature of search is shifting very quickly:

We’ve moved out of scarcity-based search, where there were few results for searches. In a time of super-abundant information, the problem becomes ‘who do you want filtering for you?’ Google’s foundational method is counting incoming links, weighted by a reputation, derived again on incoming links. From this it derives a position in search results.

But in an era where we can connect directly to others in social networks, we can rely directly on our connections to filter the immense web, so meaning is the new search:

Increasingly, we will switch to a social connection mode to filter and find for us. Our networks will become engines of meaning, as Bruce Sterling said.

Everything we want to find has been found, and will find us through our social connections. Like head colds and happiness.

We will find everything through social relationships: what washing machine to buy, or the best Thai restaurant in Beacon NY, or the company that makes those horizontal corduroys. People that care about these issues, and to who we matter, will share meaning with us: they have beliefs that they can justify, also called knowledge.

Google is only the echo of our linking behavior, a second-order derivative of our combined gestures. But generally, we would be happier with fewer results from trusted sources, and the rise of social tools makes that almost as fast as Google search.

Google must plan to adapt to the social revolution or fall into the spam darkness.

Is Twitter Going To Be The Social Layer Of iOS 5?

There are a number of rumors swirling around that suggest 1/ Twitter is getting into the photo sharing business, and 2/ Apple may be integrating that solution at a fundamental level of the new iOS 5, to be announced next week:

MG Siegler, Twitter Getting Photos In Order Ahead Of iOS 5 Integration

Yesterday, we first reported that Twitter was on the verge of launching their own photo-sharing service. That report has since been confirmed by Liz Gannes, who happens to work for All Things D, which is hosting a conference where Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was planning to announce this news. So, yeah. “Sources familiar with the matter.” Confirmed.

[…]

We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device.

Apple announced today that they plan to show off iOS 5 for the first time at WWDC next week, confirming a report of ours from March. Now you see why Twitter would want to get this picture service out there ASAP. And why they’d want their own service.

As usual, John Gruber is way out ahead of the industry news folks, and wonders at a grander scale:

So close to the bigger story, but yet so far. Imagine what else the system could provide if your Twitter account was a system-level service.

I’ve been hand waving about the coming of a social OS for a long time, and suggesting that iOS is the perfect place for Apple to take control of the future. Here’s one mention from six months ago:

Stowe Boyd, Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter

The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core. We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our friends, and tossing observations and hopes and insights into the wake we leave behind, spreading out to all that think we matter.

So, yes, browsers will be social in that new social world, but so what? Everything will be.

And another, even older:

Stowe Boyd, (Social) iTunes In The Cloud

Perhaps Apple is going to make social interaction a fundamental aspect of next generation operating platforms, so that global user identities will be used for more than logging in, and actions like following people and posting to your streamlings will be primary to the user experience, not implemented in a hundred incompatible ways by applications.

Could Twitter become part of that new social OS infrastructure? If so, why would Apple want to allow Twitter to operate as an independent company?

Yes, sure, it is possible to idealize Twitter as just an API, a service layer of a new architectural stack, that could — in principle — be replaced by some other implementation. In that way, Apple might abstract away from needing to possess Twitter.

But Twitter isn’t just the implementation of some collection of API calls: it is an existing and growing community of users.

If Apple wants to launch a next generation operating platform based on social principles, it would help to have a community like Twitter’s as your baseline for adoption. It’s filled with the world’s journalists and technocrats, for example. And it’s seething with revolutionary power and impetus.

So, maybe Jobs is going to announce an acquisition, and not just an integration?

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3 Reasons that We are Moving Away from Facebook as a Platform - Zuupy Official Blog

Zuupy is a daily deal service, and the CEO has announced they are rejecting Facebook as a platform:

Here are some problems with Facebook:

1. The Facebook API changes too often. The plug-ins are buggy, the API changes without notice rather often, and there are too many rules constraining how developers can use the API in building applications. As a platform, it is unstable, period. It may be a good idea to use Facebook as a platform for consumer applications, but it might have been a mistake for us to use Facebook as a platform for an ecommerce application.

2. Facebook is overhyped. Personally, even though Facebook actually has 600 million active users, developers still tend to overestimate how many people actually 1) have a Facebook account, 2) use it regularly, and 3) are comfortable using it as a third-party authentication method. Many consumers across different niche markets are simply not familiar with how Facebook works; developing Facebook-only applications marginalizes this segment of users, who may be substantial in number.

3. Facebook is still mainly social for most, and exclusively social for some. We are still not completely convinced that Facebook can be an effective platform for ecommerce or any commercial activity, i.e. does anyone even care about commercial offerings on Facebook? Low sales on so-called f-commerce platforms seem to support our view. Some businesses may be too quick to assume that, just because Facebook works for games, it will work for ecommerce. Of all the new variants of ecommerce, the one that might actually take off is, in our view, mobile commerce.

I wonder if this is the start of the inevitable trend away from Facebook — which is a social network — toward social operating systems? Apple, Google and Microsoft are more reasonable places for social platforms to scale out.

A Step Closer To A Web-First Operating System

Looks like Mac OS X Lion will bring Apple one step closer to a webbed OS. It seems that pre-release builds are already be delivered that way to developers through the App Store.

- Neil Hughes, Apple to release Mac OS X Lion through Mac App Store

Utilizing the App Store will allow owners of the new disc-drive-less MacBook Air to easily install the latest version of Mac OS X without the need for a physical disc. Apple ships its redesigned MacBook Air with a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard reinstaller on a USB thumb drive, rather than a DVD.

Making the App Store a central component of the Mac experience will also allow Apple to remove disc drives from future hardware as the company looks toward a future of computing without the need for physical media. Removal of SuperDrives from devices like the MacBook Pro is expected to take place over the next 12-18 months, paving the way for even thinner designs with more internal space for a larger battery.

Apple has even moved to limit shelf space for software in its retail stores, allowing greater room for more profitable hardware to be sold. In February, it was rumored that the company actually plans to cease the sale of all boxed software at its retail locations.

Even smaller Macs, more room for batteries, and the imminent demise of the DVD as a distribution mechanism. These are all evidence of the rapid move to a web-first OS.

Yes, Apple has made some false moves on Mac OS — like Ping and mobile.me — but it will smooth those out in later versions of iOS that will support both families of devices.

I wonder when Apple will offer built-in access to the cell network — a la iPad — for the Macbook Air?

Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter

The tech world is awash in stories about Rockmelt, a newly debuted start-up, that has announced a social browser, based on Chromium, the open source browser code developed by Google.

Robert Scoble wonders if the company is philosophically correct (Does RockMelt (a new social browser coming tomorrow) have the right startup philosophy? — Scobleizer), which is an odd angle, but he is correct in his observation that it will be hard to move folks from the browser they know, and the ways that they use social tools like Facebook and Twitter already.

Om Malik echoes Scoble’s philosophy comment, wondering why the twitterati seem negative about Rockmelt:

Why is there such a negative reaction?

Change is hard, but there’s something else: advanced users have a framework of WHERE they’ll accept change. I call it “battlefronts.” Places where the industry is actively fighting it out. Right now I expect a LOT of change on mobile apps, for instance, but not much change on my desktop or laptop computers or operating systems. Browser wars? So 1996. But 2010? We’re in a mobile phone war, for gosh’ sake. Too much change in wrong place and it gets a blowback.

Tonight I’ll have several videos, for instance, from companies who are doing apps for Windows Phone 7. Those will be very well received, I expect, compared to RockMelt.

So, why do I care about RockMelt? Because social continues to radically change everything about my life. Look at Foodspotting, Foursquare, Tungle.me, and/or Plancast. Those are radical changes to how I live my life. I want a browser that integrates those into my Facebook and Twitter experience. So far that hasn’t arrived. Will RockMelt bring it to us in the future? Possibly, but today they haven’t and have aimed at slower adopters.

I think that’s a strategic mistake. How about you? In the interview RockMelt covers why they made the bets they did at 19m 40 seconds into the video. “There are 2.1 billion people who use browsers…that’s a lot of people.” Listen to their answer.

Is it the right philosophy for a startup to have?

Maybe Scoble and Om are circling around this philosophy thing, looking for a handhold, trying to grasp Rockmelt. But it’s like a bowling ball with no finger holes.

I think Rockmelt might turn out to be the equivalent of Tivo for the social web.

Tivo is a response to the established way of watching TV, making time-shifting and and ad avoidance possible. The idea caught on, and a lot of people bought DVRs. But the devices did not have a big impact on TV programming or even user experience, in the big picture. It’s a small idea, really.

Contrast that with iTunes/iPod impact on the music business. Or the changes in the entertainment business coming from Netflix streaming. Did you know that 20% of US prime time internet traffic is Netflix streaming movies today? That is going to lead to a wholesale change in all corners: user experience, TV devices, business models, and the future of theaters. Everything.

So Rockmelt, like Tivo, is pointing in the right direction, but it just doesn’t get you there. And what is that direction? The coming social operating system.

The future is apps, not better browsers. The browser is a kludge, in a way, providing a gateway to the web for operating systems that were designed with no web in mind. We are beginning to see the emergence of new operating environments — most notably iOS from Apple — that are based on the notion of an always on, connected web with billions of devices attached to it, and with people using those devices to communicate.

As more and better apps are built that are based on the premise of a connected web, browsers will be used less, until their use will become something like the Mac OS Terminal app: a way to get into the guts of things, used mostly by developers.

And these connected apps will take advantage of the metaphors and magic conjured up by the platforms they run on. And the most interesting and compelling metaphor to arise from today’s web is the social revolution.

The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core. We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our friends, and tossing observations and hopes and insights into the wake we leave behind, spreading out to all that think we matter.

So, yes, browsers will be social in that new social world, but so what? Everything will be.

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Phone 7: Let’s Drop The Windows, Please

We should ignore the Windows brand extension on Microsoft’s new Phone 7 OS, and instead focus on what it actually offers.

It looks to me like the first of the next generation of operating platforms, mobile or desktop, in which social capabilities are treated as foundational:

Ian Williams, Microsoft unveils Windows Phone Series 7 OS

According to [Joe] Belfiore [vice president of Windows Phone], the primary focus of the Windows Phone 7 OS is “aggregating discrete sources of data into a centralised repository that’s fun and easy to use.”

As a result, the OS includes six hubs, each of which pulls together content and services based on a particular theme.

peoplescreen-web

The the first four hubs are: People, which combines contact and status information from the address book, social networks and server locations like Microsoft Exchange; Pictures, which grabs photos on the phone, those synced with a PC and web services like Flickr or Live Gallery; Games, which combines locally stored mobile games with Xbox Live details including your avatar; and Music + Video, which is a direct port of the software that drives the Vole’s Zune media player and has a PC linked content library and online music including streaming services.

Not entirely forsaking its work ethic, or rather its PC applications cash cow, Microsoft has dubbed the fifth hub Office, which brings together access to the Vole’s standard Microsoft Office suite as well as Onenote, Sharepoint and Outlook. Somehow it apparently seems to think that people are going to want to work with those fully-fledged PC applications, beyond just email and text messaging, on their relatively small phone screens.

Last is the Marketplace hub that taps into Microsoft’s app store, which so far has failed to impress.

The question is: what will the winning metaphors of social engagement on these platforms?

I don’t think it’s Facebook, but in the absence of interoperable standards for following, liking, and reposting, Microsoft chose Facebook. In fact it’s as if Microsoft built Facebook’s phone for them. But the ‘People Hub’ is just a sophisticated client, and Windows 7 has put social interaction in the foreground, but not built in at a fundamental level in the OS.

But the real answer is a next generation OS. I am expecting that from Apple, though, as a slow ascension of features in iOS, then finally reflected back into a future version of Mac OS.

The ones that could do something radical is Google, with Android, but they aren’t, either. Brian Chen is gaga over Microsoft’s attention to managing its hardware partners:

The crucial part of Microsoft’s new phone strategy is the quality control it imposes onto its hardware partners. Rather than code an operating system and allow manufacturers to do whatever they want with it — like Google is doing with Android — Microsoft is requiring hardware partners to meet a rigid criteria in order to run Windows Phone 7.

Each device must feature three standard hardware buttons, for example, and before they can ship with Windows Phone 7, they have to pass a series of tests directed by Microsoft. (As I mentioned in a feature story about Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has created new lab facilities containing robots and automated programs to test each handset to ensure that features work properly and consistently across multiple devices.)

I don’t buy that as some tremendous advantage over Android. It sounds like an attempt to get some of the bang that Apple gets from not licensing its stuff out to anybody.

If Microsoft is going to have a hit with Phone 7 it will be as a Facebook device. Period. And not because of relative quality differences over Android.

 

Facebook Building Sociality Into A Phone OS?

Arrington reports rumors about Facebook’s plans to build a mobile phone, in which the social features of their platform are lowered into the operating system for the device:

Facebook Is Secretly Building A Phone

Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.

[…]

So what might this phone look and feel like? We don’t know yet. When will it be announced? Don’t know. But I’d speculate that it would be a lower end phone, something very affordable, that lets people fully integrate into their Facebook world. You call your friend’s name, not some ancient seven digit code, for example. I’d imagine Facebook wanting these things to get into as many hands as possible, so I’d expect a model at a less than $50 price. Pay your bill with Facebook Credits. Etc.

I’ve been nattering about the coming merger of social applications and the operating systems of the near future (see Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future, and (Social) iTunes In The Cloud?).

Obviously, Facebook isn’t going to sit on the sidelines and wait for Apple and Google (and maybe Microsoft) to streak ahead in what will prove to be a critical battle for software dominance, and a turning point in computing.

Facebook’s motivation is dead-on; they are strategically challenged in their dreams for world domination by their lack of an O/S, and mobile is the place to develop innovative O/S’s now.

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