Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

What does Facebook's support for XMPP mean to the enterprise?

Blogger: Mike Gotta

If you are a enterprise organization rolling out instant messaging and presence platforms from IBM or Microsoft, then the roadmap that Facebook revealed does not alter what is going on behind the firewall all the much. Organizations involved with unified communications based on SIP/SIMPLE are not going to significantly change their minds or direction because of Facebook per se.

But, a couple of points are worth mentioning. First, this announcement adds further credibility to XMPP as a worthwhile standard that IT architects and infrastructure planners should be aware of - and actively monitor. Second, XMPP should become a core requirement for organizations implementing gateways that federate their internal instant messaging and presence systems with public networks and other platforms (such as Facebook). Third - not only is Facebook supporting XMPP but Twitter is also aligned with XMPP. There have also been on-and-off discussions on possible synergies between XMPP and Atom/AtomPub. Perhaps at no other time has XMPP looked so interesting to so many different audiences.

For IBM, I would expect someone from IBM's unified communication and collaboration team to realize that this is a great marketing opportunity. At some point, I expect IBM to aggressively pursue interoperability between Facebook's XMPP system and the Lotus Sametime Gateway. 

For Microsoft, this news presents them with a problem - they are in a position that is almost impossible to defend. There is absolutely no technical reason why the current Microsoft gateway does not support XMPP today. It is simply a political decision (in my opinion), by the folks at Microsoft as they compete with Google. Granted, GTalk does not have the market share of other public networks (Yahoo!, AOL), but even so, the strategy is clearly not customer-focused at all.

While promoting anything that helps Google might be difficult to accept, Facebook's implementation of XMPP might prompt Microsoft to reconsider. Facebook has a credible install base and its position as a leading social network site, (coupled with Microsoft's partnership with Facebook on other fronts), might likely persuade the company to finally support XMPP within its IM/presence gateway. Such a move I believe would be well-received by many of Microsoft's customers.

Using Facebook Chat via Jabber

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:

• Communicate with their friends
• See which of their friends are online and view their profile pictures
• Set their statuses

Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.

Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News

Facebook Is Correct...

Blogger: Mike Gotta

When you agree to the terms-of-service of a social network site, don't be surprised when that site seeks to apply those policies to its members and to applications that operate within that environment. While a credible case can be made that a user should be able to export their own data - relation data (the data jointly shared between members) cannot be systematically harvested or shared without some level of consent or as defined by the terms-of-service. If Facebook, or any social network site, deems that a systematic method for its members to share and/or export information in a manner that circumvents the terms-of-service, that site is perfectly within its rights to act in a stewardship manner to enforce such terms and protect the confidentiality of that jointly owned data.

As I outlined in an earlier post on my personal blog ("federated social networks") - there needs to be some type of an intermediary entity through which such systems operate at a relationship level (Google's FriendConnect exposed within Facebook's environment in this case). There is probably a good case for some type of content filtering to occur (perhaps based on microformats) that allow certain social network fragments (small data structures) to be be shared or exchanged with other parties.

Two points: (1) members need to adhere to the terms of service of the social network site they join and (2) relation data that is jointly owned needs to be shared/exported in a way that adheres to the terms of service and probably consistent with some type of consent model between the people that jointly own that relation data. 

Privacy and openness go hand-in-hand – as we open up, we have to make sure that users always have control of their information, and understand how and where it’s being used. We’ve maintained that trusted environment while opening up Facebook Platform and the social graph to external developers by requiring third-party application developers to treat user information with the same respect we do. All Facebook Platform developers agree to the Developer Terms of Service, which strictly limit the collection, use, and redistribution of user information. We have technology and a team to ensure applications abide by those policies.

We’re excited that our industry partners are taking greater steps toward openness and enabling users to share their information around the web. We hope, though, that we can collectively find a model that allows users to share data while protecting the privacy of our users’ data and ensuring that the user is always in control.

In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News

Free Web Analytics: Google, Microsoft, and Now Yahoo! Offer It

Blogger: Guy Creese (cross-posted on Pattern Finder)

On Wednesday, April 9, 2008, Yahoo! announced that it was buying IndexTools, a web analytics vendor. On the following Tuesday, Dennis Mortensen, the COO of IndexTools, announced on his blog that, "Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement."

In other words, at this point, three large vendors--Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!--now offer web analytics packages for free. Furthermore, they are not watered down versions, but functional products that any small- and medium-size business (SMB) would die for:

• Google (Google Analytics): Executive dashboard, custom reporting, map-based reports, search engine marketing cost analysis, landing page optimization, user segmentation, scenario analysis, and detailed help.
• Microsoft (Microsoft adCenter Analytics [currently in beta]): Summary reports, custom reporting, campaign reporting, user segmentation, and scenario analysis. 
• Yahoo! (IndexTools): Executive dashboards, path analysis, custom and comparative reporting, workflow, search engine marketing cost analysis, campaign management, user segmentation, merchandise reporting, scenario analysis, and detailed help.

If you're an SMB and don't analyze how visitors behave on your website--how long they stay, where they come from, what pages do they bail from--then I'd encourage you to look at all three, pick the one you like, and use it.

If you work in a large enterprise, you probably use a different package, but investing twenty minutes in reading the Microsoft blog, the Yahoo! datasheet, and watching the Google video is a great way to get a mini-tutorial in web analytics. This is especially true if you've heard the web analytics term bandied about and either don't know much about it or are trying to figure out if you can do more with what you have.

If you're a Burton Group client, I'd encourage you to read two Collaboration and Content Strategies reports I've written on web analytics:

• The Current "Suite Spot" of Web Analytics (Market Landscape, 23 pages)
• Avoiding the Data Pitfalls of Web Analytics (Technology & Standards, 26 pages)