The Web of (Social) Objects and People

At USV, we have long believed in “Social Objects."  In the real world when people talk they often form a connection around objects, such as sharing a common interest in a movie.  That was our thesis behind investing in GetGlue.  Alex and the team there have done an amazing job delivering on that idea.  When you have the Glue extension installed in your browser, you can connect with friends and discover new people around "social objects,” such as movies, books, etc.  The power of Glue derives from the fact that it recognizes these objects and so it doesn’t matter on which web page people interact, as long as the page is about that object!

A while back GetGlue started promoting the AB Meta markup as a way for pages to indicate what they are about.  If you look at Facebook’s OpenGraph markup, you will find quite a bit of similarity.  As Alex points out in his great post today over at RWW, both formats RDFa based, are easily human readable and have fairly minimal requirements making them easy to implement.  With Facebook putting the weight of 400 million users behind this initiative, it is likely that a lot more pages will start to add this information.  That’s good because it will bring us closer to the ideas behind the semantic web.

But there are a couple of important issues here.  First, the standard for marking pages up semantically should not be controlled by one company.  It would be great to see Facebook bring others into the process for evolving the OpenGraph protocol.  Second, there is a big agency problem around people marking up their own pages as soon as there is money (or nearly equivalently traffic) associated with it.  There is an incentive to claim that a page is about say a popular movie when it isn’t.  So what is really needed is a way for third parties to express an opinion as to which social object a page is about.

GetGlue actually has done the hard work of recognizing many pages around the web already.  If you want to make your application aware of the interactions around social objects, the Facebook API is not your only choice.  GetGlue also has an easy-to-implement API.