Interesting things are going on in social networking right now, with all the major players trying to extend their services beyond their own sites to third-party sites (see here and here). One interesting thing about Google’s Friend Connect offering is that it allowed you to access your Facebook friends, as well as friends from other social networking sites. Now, in the name of ‘privacy’, Facebook has banned Friend Connect from doing this.

The basic issue here is whether social networking platforms want to compete with each other as ‘closed’ platforms, where a user of a platform can only access users of the same platform, or as ‘open’ platforms where a user of a platform can access users of all platforms. For competition between similarly-sized platforms, openness actually reduces the intensity of competition, and so platforms should prefer to be open. With open platforms, a price rise hurts the platform that raises its price less than with closed platforms, since the users who do not switch to a competitor as a result of the price rise can still access those who do switch, so the value of the platform to the remaining users does not fall. Openness increases the incentive to raise price (softens competition), which should increase profits. Of course, social networks currently compete in non-price dimensions for users, but the basic idea still holds.

On the other hand, openness makes the industry more stable and less prone to ‘tipping’ towards one platform or another. Thus while openness softens competition, it also makes it less likely that a single network will emerge as dominant. Whether a platform wants to be open with its competitors or not depends on whether it thinks it can win the battle for dominance in the long run. If not, better to be open with your competitors and accept a slice of the pie rather than no pie at all. If yes, better to be closed so as to try to force your competitors out, and eventually you might get to eat the whole pie.

It’ll be very interesting to see how this plays out. Expect to see a lot more strategic manoeuvring before it’s over.

Google spreadsheets has added forms, which allow web users to input data into a spreadsheet that you’ve created. This makes it perfect for running simple surveys. Here’s a quick run-down on how to do it:

First go to Google Docs and create an account if you haven’t already got one. Then make a new blank spreadsheet.

Next, share the spreadsheet by clicking the share button at the top right corner:

You’ll be prompted to name the spreadsheet, and then you get some sharing options. Choose the forms option, then click “Start editing your form”:

Then you’re presented with a form editor which is pretty self explanatory. You can enter a title for the survey, some explanatory text, and then questions which can be short or long text input, multiple choice (with an “other” option), checkboxes, or selection from a list. You can add, edit, delete and re-order questions easily.

When you’re done with the questions, click “Next, choose recipients”. Then you’re presented with various options for giving the survey to people. You can email it to specific people by entering email addresses, and if you like you can embed the form in the actual email (if the recipients can handle html email). Alternatively you can click the “Embed” link at the top right to embed the form in any kind of web page. Just copy and paste the code that’s provided into your web page.

And that’s all there is to it. Columns corresponding to the questions will be automatically created in your spreadsheet, and any data that people enter will appear in the right place, with a timestamp. One thing lacking is data validation, so you can’t check at the input stage to make sure that people have entered appropriate responses, and you can’t have mandatory questions. It also lacks conditional branching questions, so all respondents will get to answer all questions. Despite these limitations, Google Spreadsheets are a very quick and convenient way to run a simple survey or other data collection exercise.

To keep track of new data, you can periodically check the spreadsheet, or you can add this gadget to your iGoogle homepage, which will automatically inform you when there are new entries:

So now Google is jumping on the Social Operating System (SOS) bandwagon with Google Friend Connect.

One way this will work is sites like mine, for example, will be able to add a widget so that site visitors can “friend” the site itself (like a fanclub), and can also access their own social networking friends in some way (perhaps to recommend the site), without having to go back to the parent Facebook/MySpace/Orkut website. For a website like mine, this should be very useful — I’d love to know who my readers are. A 26econ Facebook group would do basically the same thing, but I doubt that many people would bother to go to Facebook and join it. A widget-based version directly on a third-party website would be much more convenient for users.

From Google’s point of view, supporting social features on third-party sites should help with targeted advertising. Currently their Adsense ads are targeted towards the site’s content. Having a network of site-specific friends would allow Google to use both site and user characteristics to target ads, which should be more effective. For Facebook and MySpace, generating revenues is more problematic, because they are geared towards selling advertising on their own sites. The most logical thing for them to do is to build their own advertising networks for third-party sites to compete with Adsense.

The other interesting thing is that this adds an additional ’side’ to social networks. The formerly two-sided platforms (users; advertisers) just became three-sided (users; websites; advertisers). Previously, the basic metric for a social network’s success was pretty much the number of users that it had. Now the number of websites counts as well. It’ll be interesting to see how the SOSs compete in these two dimensions.

From Felix Salmon, upon getting a dull email from Google’s customer support:

I guess it’s inevitable that when a company grows to be as big as Google now is, it will revert to this kind of overlawyered corporate-speak. Is that evil? Maybe not, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.

I agree. Their customer support is the weakest part of their business, in my experience. Today I got an email telling me that I must accept some new terms and conditions for Adsense. They concluded with this:

Unfortunately, we’re not able to further interpret the meaning of the Terms and Conditions for you. If you have additional questions, you may wish to contact an attorney.

Contact an attorney? Come on … Adsense is aimed at small websites who don’t have the budget for that sort of thing. Google can surely do better.

Remember back in math class when the professor was talking about Eigenvectors and you thought that it was kind of pointless? Well check out the 25 billion dollar Eigenvector. (Yes, it’s about Google …).