Getting through customs without removing my shoes?
After adding some new stamps to my passport last week, I was reminded of a blog entry I wrote several months back about the frustration of not being able to move between worlds without the equivalent of a strip search, or a complete disrobing. We give up our names, our possessions, our reputation….you name it.
But today I was pleasantly surprised to see this article on the rumors of Google’s Social Graph API . Now I’m sure people will say that this has the possibilities of Google knowing more about your life than it already does, but I see it as having other possibilities.
The opportunity is that access to the social graph will become freely available, so companies could focus more on “user experience” and uniqueness of the application. It’s a little bit like start-ups using Amazon’s Web Services to run the back end of their company while staying focused almost entirely on the business-model, application and experience.
If nothing else, it will make alot of currently silo’d “communities” (MySpace, Second Life, etc.) think about how interconnected we’ve become and the business opportunities or threats associated with it. These companies will have to do some serious thinking about how they will evolve or survive
I’m not sure virtual worlds have reached those interoperability and interconnected tipping points yet, but they would be well served to begin thinking about these types of possibilities.
Posted by Brian Gracely at 02:53PM PST
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