Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.

“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”

Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.

“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”

I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.

Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media.  As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.

We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

Why am I part of a Facebook class action in the first place?

The social network got sued for using you as a product pitchmen for “Sponsored Stories” without your permission. For instance, if I “Liked” Justin Bieber’s page, my Facebook friends might have seen a big ad saying “Jeff likes Beeb’s new eyeliner.” Today, Facebook can still do that because it changed its privacy terms — it’s the earlier ads it’s on the hook for.

How do I collect?

Go to the settlement page and fill out the claim form by May 2.

So how much will I get?

Facebook is paying $20 million all-in to make this go away. Under a revised deal (the judge rejected the first one), Facebook users are eligible for up to $10 each — so long as there’s enough money to go around.

Oh, and that $20 million isn’t just for Facebook users. The lawyers are asking for nearly $8 million. Then there are people like the “escrow agent” and the “settlement administrator” who get a cut too. If the judge okays all this, it will be more like $10 to $12 million to go around.

To look at it another way, if there is $12 million left after the lawyers, there is enough money left to pay 1.2 million Facebook users.

Well, what if more than 1.2 million people make a claim?

You have to share. If 2 million Facebook users sign up, everyone would get about $6. If 2.4 million sign-up, it’s $5. If more people than that sign up, everyone gets nothing.

So what are my chances to get some money?

There are about 165 million Facebook users in America. If even 2 percent decide to make a claim, you’re likely out of luck.

Well, that doesn’t seem fair. Who gets the money then?

The class action says it’s not very efficient to cut $4.99 checks to everyone. So, if too many people are eligible, they’re just going to give the money to your friends at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and the EFF instead. These groups will then use your money to advocate for privacy.

Well, damn it. It was my privacy that was violated — don’t I even get to be involved?

That’s a good question. This keeps happening again and again — Google, Facebook, etc. violate everyone’s privacy and the money from the resulting lawsuit goes to lawyers and a bit of it goes to “charity.”

To be fair, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Many of the privacy advocates do good work and the class action lawyers, even if they’re in it for themselves, do keep the tech companies on their toes.

The bigger problem here is that these legal deals don’t do a good job of involving the people who are affected. Nor do they produce solutions such as a “pay-for-privacy” option. Would you pay $5 a month for an ad-free, non-creepy version of Facebook? I might. But the class action settlement doesn’t allow us to raise these sort of options or to ask Facebook directly about what they’re doing.

If I don’t get any money, does any good come out of this lawsuit?

A bit. The settlement claims it will force Facebook to create a tool to see which products you’re endorsing and to remove your endorsements. But we’ll have to see if this tool will be easy to use in practice.

It works like this: simply send the email address of your friend (or enemy) along with an obituary showing a similar name and, voila, they’re on the other side. In the case of BuzzFeed, the site killed off its New York reporter John Herrman by sending Facebook an obituary for a 78 year old Nebraskan “John Herrmann” (two N’s) from last June. Such pranks mean your victim must spend hours or days persuading Facebook that they’re still here.

We can assume Facebook is scrambling to fix this mess and, to be fair, this isn’t really the social network’s fault since this sort of trick can be played off-line too (for instance, Israel’s Mossad has printed obituaries of still-living militants it was hunting). But the Facebook prank does illustrate yet again how the social and legal rituals that accompany death in the real world can carry over poorly to the digital realm.

Other examples include the impermanence of photos as well as licensing rules that mean you can’t pass on iTunes and other digital content in your will. It may be a matter of time before state governments — who have long made rules about things like wills, cemeteries and death certificates — begin to update these rules for the era of social media. But for now, many death rituals will be determined by the young men who run tech companies.

(Image by Stocksnapper via Shutterstock)

Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller revealed the acquisition on Punchfork’s website today, though he didn’t disclose a purchase price. Pinterest confirmed Punchfork is its first acquisition in its short history, and given the Pinterest community’s obsession with food pins, it seemed a natural fit for the rapidly growing social network. “People come to Pinterest to find inspiration for their everyday lives and we think Punchfork’s mission aligns with this well,” spokesperson Annie Ha said in a statement.

Punchfork is one of the growing number of recipe aggregation portals on the web, but it’s distinguished itself by building an API which food bloggers and independent recipe sites can tap into to bring their recipes and culinary musings to Punchfork’s growing audience. Punchfork has also developed social and analytics tools that help those bloggers track the popularity of their dishes. While Punchfork has used that API to grow its own membership, it’s also shared it with Evernote, powering the note-taker’s new Explore Recipes function on Evernote Food.

With the takeover, though, Punchfork will shut down its website, mobile apps and API, and the Punchfork team will devote itself to bolstering Pinterest’s already impressive recipe discovery boards.

To give you an idea of how popular food is on Pinterest, community recipe portal Allrecipes.com has reported that in three months after it added a “pin it” button to its pages last summer, 50,000 of its were pinned, generating 139 million impressions. An Experian survey of Pinterest users early last year found that 70 percent of account holders said they pinned recipes and used Pinterest for cooking inspiration, beating out home decorating, fashion and crafting.

Like Pinterest, Punchfork positioned itself as a visually oriented “cooking inspiration” site versus the many more nuts-and-bolts recipe aggregators out there like Paprika, Pepperplate and BigOven. Rather than allowing customers to find their own recipes and store them in their own private recipe collections, Punchfork aggregates recipe content from a broad selection of partners, using its service as a dish-discovery engine.

Other startups have adopted similar strategies. Gojee is even more visually oriented than Punchfork, presenting its dishes in luscious full-screen photos. Evernote competitor Springpad has also taken a page from Pinterest’s book, making the visual organization of recipes a key focus.

In a ruling issued Thursday in San Diego, U.S. District Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo dismissed an antitrust complaint filed by Sambreel, a controversial advertising company that offers products with names like PageRage that let users tweak the look of their Facebook page.

“We are pleased by the decision,” said Facebook’s lead counsel, Craig Clark, in an email statement. Sambreel’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The companies got in a bitter fight earlier this year after Facebook “gated” users who had downloaded the Sambreel products — meaning the users had to remove PageRage software before they could log on to the social network. Sambreel responded with an aggressive legal and public relations campaign, arguing that Facebook broke antitrust laws. Judge Bencivengo, however, was having none of this:

One of the first major complaints came in a piece in the New York Observer that accused the social network of being “broken on purpose.” Not long afterward, a blog called Dangerous Minds wrote a long polemic about how what the social network was doing was “the biggest bait-and-switch in history” — since users (including brands) were enticed to use the service on the understanding that they could use it to build up a giant fan base, and were now being charged for the right to reach those same fans. The cost to do this by paying for sponsored posts, the blog said, was just too exorbitant:

“We simply can’t afford to pay Facebook $2000 to $3200 a day and we can’t afford to do nothing, either. Their shockingly greedy business plan offers us no alternative and we’re not alone.”

Hiding valuable content or blocking spam?

In response to this criticism, Facebook explained — both in a post by one of its engineers and in comments to TechCrunch and Ars Technica — that the newsfeed filtering was designed to eliminate spam and noise, and that it was constantly being tweaked in order to show users things they were actually interested in, not just things that brands wanted them to see. The message seemed pretty obvious: don’t be spammy with your posts and lots of your users will still see them for free. And if you want to spam them anyway, you will have to pay for sponsored posts in order to do that.

This didn’t stop the criticism from flowing, however: one user wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, complaining about the moves by the social network and urging the founder and CEO to remain committed to his stated goal of “giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Actor George Takei responded to this letter with a Facebook post, saying he was devoting a chapter in his upcoming book to the issue. On Tuesday, Mark Cuban — who had been posting complaints on Twitter for days about Facebook’s behavior — unloaded to Dan Lyons at ReadWrite about the impact that the changes were having, and how he wasn’t going to stand for it any longer. The sports mogul and star of TV show Shark Tank said that he was shifting the focus not just of his own presence or that of the Dallas Mavericks but all of the other businesses in which he is an investor to other platforms, including MySpace:

“We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook. We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first. We have already pushed more to Twitter. The new Myspace looks promising.”

Filtering is necessary for Facebook, and for users

As Wired points out in a response to Cuban’s complaints — and App.net founder Dalton Caldwell also does a good job of explaining — this kind of criticism makes little sense, unless you assume that Facebook is supposed to be a utility of some kind, broadcasting the messages of its users far and wide without any kind of filtering whatsoever. The reality is that a proprietary platform like Facebook is very much a double-edged sword, and Cuban and Takei are feeling the sharpness of that alternate edge: yes, it reaches a lot of people, but it is also a business that faces significant financial pressure.

Do Cuban or any of Facebook’s other critics really think that Twitter or MySpace are going to be any different? Twitter started off as a much more open platform than Facebook — which is one of the reasons that users like me have responded so negatively to some of the restrictions it has been imposing on external services — but it is heading down the same inexorable path. In order to justify their multibillion-dollar market value, both companies have to find new sources of revenue, and traditional advertising just isn’t going to do it. Sponsored content is the future, whether we like it or not.

It’s one thing to excuse George Takei for not realizing the implications of this, but Mark Cuban is a notoriously sharp businessman who routinely criticizes entrepreneurs on his TV show for failing to understand how markets work. Facebook is a business, not a charity or a platform for social well-being — and it provides that platform free of charge, on the understanding that users agree to be marketed to in a variety of ways. The idea that it should somehow allow Cuban to spam all his followers with marketing content for nothing is nonsensical.

Not only does Cuban’s criticism not make much sense from a business standpoint, but as even social-media evangelist Robert Scoble points out, what Facebook is doing by trying to tweak its filtering algorithms is arguably in the best interest of users as well, since they are already being overwhelmed by noise and marketing spam. From that perspective, Facebook has to do what it is doing or it will suffer a lot more damage than some angry emails from celebrity users. We can argue about how it is filtering and the way it is communicating that to users, but the fact that it is doing so seems inevitable.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and See-ming Lee

But those same kinds of disruptions are moving into new areas, and education is one of them. From university classes via YouTube and startups like Udacity to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, there are more ways than ever for children to educate themselves, even in remote villages in Ethiopia. Despite the inevitable criticisms such efforts get both from within the education system and outside it, it’s part of a powerful and growing phenomenon.

One example: At a recent conference on emerging technology at MIT, Nicholas Negroponte — the former head of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the OLPC project — talked about what his group noticed about the villages in Ethiopia, where some devices were dropped off. The Motorola Xoom tablets, which were distributed along with a solar-charging system, were delivered in boxes to two isolated rural villages about 50 miles from the capital of Addis Ababa, where Negroponte said the children had never before seen printed English words — not even packaging or road signs with printed letters.

Even with no teachers, students taught themselves

Although the OLPC founder says the group expected most of the children to spend their time “playing with the boxes,” in a matter of minutes they had powered up the devices and, within days, they were using a number of apps included with the system. Even more remarkably, within weeks, they had figured out how to “hack” their way around restrictions built into the software to change the laptop’s display background. Thanks to the tablets, they were singing ABC songs and even spelling words in English. Said Negroponte:

“Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera.”

Negroponte later admitted that this small test in two villages wasn’t enough to reach any hard conclusions about the success of such an effort, but, as several commenters at MIT’s Technology Review — and in a discussion at Hacker News — noted, this is not the first attempt to do such a thing: Dr. Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, launched a project called the “Hole In The Wall” in 1999 in the slums of New Delhi that provided a single computer to children nearby. With little instruction and no formal background in computers, they were able to learn a surprising amount.

In fact, Mitra’s experiences were one of the inspirations for the OLPC approach in Ethiopia, according to OLPC’s chief technology officer Ed McNierney. And, while the experiment has drawn a fair degree of criticism on a number of fronts — from those who believe the money for such projects should go towards teachers and schools instead of laptops, or from those who question whether OLPC can scale large enough to make a difference — Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy says that she has seen laptops in use in places like Colombia and Rwanda, and they have changed lives for the better.

“I’ve actually seen OLPC laptops being used on the ground in countries like Colombia and Rwanda — and when you see lives so dramatically changed by something, it’s pretty hard to dismiss it as not world-changing enough.”

Education even finds a way around governments

A second example of how a seemingly innocuous technology like YouTube — especially when combined with a social network — can change lives comes from Time magazine, which wrote recently about an 11-year-old girl in Pakistan who was taking an introductory university-level physics class through an educational startup called Udacity. Unfortunately, just as Khadijah Niazi was about to complete the final exam for the course (along with 23,000 other people), her country’s government cut off access to YouTube, which Udacity uses to distribute short instructional clips.

In less than an hour, according to Time, a young man who was taking the same class in Malaysia started posting descriptions of each video and the test questions involved. Meanwhile, a physics professor taking the same class in Portugal tried to find a way around the YouTube blockage — and when that failed, she downloaded all of the videos and then uploaded them to a non-censored site that Niazi could access, a process that took four hours. The next day, the young girl passed the exam with flying colors and became the youngest ever to complete the Udacity course. As Time describes it:

“None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But, after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.”

Udacity and the OLPC project are only two of the many startups and other ventures that are trying to change the way education occurs — not just in North America, but everywhere. There is also the Khan Academy, which started with Salman Khan using YouTube videos as a way of teaching his young niece about mathematics and now has delivered more than 200 million individual lessons. And there is Coursera, which is designed to allow any educational institution to offer online instruction. Although the latter ran into a brief regulatory roadblock in Minnesota, there are signs that these kinds of innovative efforts are being accepted: Udacity courses are now being approved for credit by some universities, including one in Colorado.

Whether it’s moribund educational institutions or governments or just bureaucratic red tape, what examples like these show is that the disruption of education continues whether such entities like it or not. Students will find a way to learn if they are given the opportunity, and technology and the social web are providing some powerful ways of doing that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Vince Alongi and One Laptop Per Child

Perhaps it’s no surprise for the Harvard-trained virologist, who traded in a promising medical research career to launch the social network for scientists. But still, in a world where the impact of social networks is usually measured by how many news headlines they can generate, he prefers success stories that have a more direct impact.

Take the example of Rafael Luque, a chemistry professor at the University of Cordoba in Spain. Luque found a collaborator on ResearchGate that he’d have never come across in the real world: a post-graduate student in the Philippines called Rick Arneil Aracon. After using the site to connect and discuss some ideas, together they discovered a novel new method of helping to make biofuels from the leftovers of corn cobs.

The technology is still in development, but it’s evidence of real impact for the site — and a hint at the substantial change that’s happening in the way scientists can work online.

“When we started, people told me you have to get all of the big professors on board,” says Madisch, as we sit in the company’s Berlin headquarters.

His answer was precisely the opposite.

“No,” he says. “If you get all the people who will be professors then it will succeed. We have people who joined four years ago who now say they use ResearchGate for communication in their lab: that’s what I want.”

It’s been a big few weeks for the network, which recently announced that it had broken the two million user barrier. That marks a serious milestone, even if it seems small in comparison to the billion citizens of the United States of Facebook.

It may be dwarfed by Zuckerberg’s empire, but Madisch and his team — including former Facebooker Matt Cohler, who sits on the company’s board — think that they can punch way above their weight with a much smaller community. Why? Because their couple million users are all professional scientists and academics who are all trying to change the world.

So what’s next?

“The next big thing,” says Madisch, “is reputation.”

“We want to try out a community review system: I’ve had it in mind for years now, and I want to see if people will accept this way of reviewing data and sharing data.”

In the end, he wants ResearchGate to be a place where researchers publish their papers, make their full results accessible and gather reputation. That in turn, he thinks, could make the site’s ratings a reference for outside funders, governments and the science community at large.

“My goal is that at one point I’ll talk to the larger funding agencies, and if they are accepting our score at some point, every scientist can think ‘should I publish in Nature and pay a lot of money for it and only get reputation for part of the data I created’ or ‘should I publish it all on ResearchGate and get reputation for everything?’.”

Most German startups are ‘shit’

It’s a big ambition, and one that goes way beyond the scope of many German internet startups — many of whom are happy to coin it in with clones or copycat services.

This is a problem, says Madisch, and he doesn’t mince his words: whether or not unoriginality is ethical, he believes the fact that so German startups are built by MBAs rather than passionate experts is dragging the country’s web scene down.

“Most of it is shit,” he says. “If you look at the people who are founding companies in Germany, you have many people who come from the business world, and they think as business guys: What models exist? What can I do efficiently the same way without changing a lot? If you look at other countries, especially the U.S. or England, the people are coming from the industries: they know what they’re doing.”

He feels particular kinship with the other exciting consumer-focused startups graduating out of Berlin’s over-hip scene: the likes of Soundcloud and Gidsy. They are building services that do new things, not copying the examples set elsewhere — and they have a lot to share with each other.

“We talk to each other,” he says of the cadre of CEOs now operating in the city. “We talk and we meet regularly for coffee or dinner, we’re somehow in constant conversation if we need something or if we think we should talk at some point.”

Still, ResearchGate has benefited from the clone culture, albeit indirectly: it hired a significant number of staff members from StudiVZ, the Facebook copycat that imploded spectacularly earlier this year. Their loss is his gain, and it’s perhaps a sign of what might come after a generation of engineers graduate from building copies and start branching out on their own.

But while a big vision may be unusual for Berlin, ResearchGate is not alone in its ambitions to upturn the stuffy and defensive world of scientific publishing.

Mendeley, another scientific startup with German origins, is also trying to use data to disrupt the existing academic structures.

However, the fact that there are two major rivals in Europe both around the same size is not a concern to Madisch.

“I’m more afraid of the ones coming than the ones who exist already,” he says. “And I’m more concerned about what the publishers will do in the future than really having competitors in the online world.”

This is a much more ambitious goal than just cloning Twitter or duplicating some of its features. And while Caldwell has beaten many people’s expectations by even getting funded in the first place, it remains to be seen whether enough users and developers will be willing to pay for the service to make it an effective resource — especially since similar efforts to create an open ecosystem for the social web have mostly failed. Are there enough supporters of an open standard to make a difference, or is the social web doomed to be a world of competing proprietary walled gardens?

App.net wants to be a platform, not just an app

Orian Marx, the creator of New York-based startup Siftee, does a good job in a recent post describing the difference between what the alpha version of App.net looks like now and the broader ambitions of Caldwell and his partners. What you see when you go to the site appears to be a very stripped-down version of Twitter, but with far fewer users and features, and that has led many to dismiss it as a short-lived clone — one that will die because it won’t be able to compete with the kind of network effects Twitter has developed (although Caldwell argues network effects can be a negative as well as a positive). As Marx describes it:

“App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications.”

In other words, the alpha is more like a test case or prototype of what could be built by using the platform App.net is trying to construct — one that uses open standards such as PubSubHubbub and ActivityStreams and other protocols that make it easy to distribute information through multiple networks, as well as allowing users to find and “follow” other users, and other things that we associated with Twitter or social networking in general. One comparison would be to Amazon Web Services, which is a collection of tools like the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 that developers and companies can use to build services on top of.

Another way of thinking about what App.net is trying to do is to think about what email used to look like, or (for those who aren’t quite as old) what instant messaging used to be like. There were competing platforms and competing standards, and nothing like an open API or any of the other things we associate with allowing different services to exchange information. Users of CompuServe Mail couldn’t easily send mail to other mail-hosting services, and later on users of ICQ or AOL’s Instant Messenger couldn’t easily chat with users of other competing platforms such as Microsoft’s MSN or Google’s GChat.

As Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures notes in a recent post about the potential benefits of App.net, what the social web lacks is a way of tying together various standards and protocols that allow anyone to integrate or exchange information easily with any other similar service — in the same way that anyone can send email to anyone else on the internet:

“It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.”

Will the promise of an open platform be enough?

While Twitter has become a powerful information-publishing system and a kind of real-time newswire, it is still a private corporation with its own commercial interests, and as it expands its attempts to control more of its network — in order to monetize it more effectively — it is clamping down on the use of its API in ways that have caused friction with both developers and users. Much of the impetus for Caldwell’s project came from that dissatisfaction, and the feeling that Twitter at some point gave up on its desire to be an information utility and chose to become an advertising-based media entity instead. As one App.net supporter put it:

“[App.net] provides a solid API platform that is less likely to be yanked out from under our feet when the VCs get antsy and want to see a profit or acquisition.”

There have been other efforts to create a kind of open platform for the social web, however, and most have not ended well: one was an attempt to create a public standard for social connections called OpenSocial, which was driven by Google but designed to be an open protocol. Although the project still exists, it made very little headway, and was more or less doomed when Google recently killed off its Social Graph API. Rightly or wrongly, the project was seen as Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook — but its efforts have since been diverted to promoting its own Google+ network (which ironically still doesn’t have a fully open API of its own).

In some ways, Caldwell’s App.net also has similarities to FriendFeed, the federated social network that former Google staffers Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit (one of the original developers of Gmail) created in 2007, which allowed users to pull in messages and updates from multiple networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. FriendFeed was eventually acquired by Facebook in 2009 for $48 million and Taylor became the company’s chief operating technology officer and one of the architects of its market-dominating “open graph platform.”

Will App.net ultimately wind up on the scrap heap along with other attempts to create an open social ecosystem, a victim of the market power of incumbents like Facebook and Twitter and/or the ambivalence of users? Or will it gain enough support to become a real alternative to the walled gardens that currently make up the social web?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee