Obviously this doesn’t come as much of a surprise to many who have been expecting this call for a while now, particularly after the whole Stepneygate scandal that rippled through Formula 1 this season. To be honest, this was a vintage year in formula one. It had just about everything, on the track and off the track. So it all draws to a close with Alonso being dropped by Mclaren. Obviously this throws a slew of new questions onto the table. Who is going to replace Alonso at Mclaren? Where will Alonso end up?

The man’s options are pretty limited.

1. Ferrari is completely booked for this year.
2. Not Torro Rosso (hehe, back to where he started, as they are the ex-minardi team).
3. Not to India Force or whatever that last team is called this year and is bound to change sometime next year or the year after that.
4. Not to Toyota, as they’ve never been a contender…ever.
5. Not to BMW as they’ve booked their drivers.
6. Redbull could be an option. Got themselves some Ferrari engines. Got themselves and Newey designed car after he’s realised what went wrong with his latest one. Problem is that they’ve got to get rid of one of their two drivers. It won’t be Webbo, so bye bye Coulthard. Don’t know if this is really realistic, but stranger things have happened. But this would require people to be moved around.
7. Maybe to Honda, although can’t help but feel it’ll be a definite step back since they’ve really dropped the ball, back when it seemed like they might actually have gotten some momentum. They might reach a mid-field status in 2008 so I don’t see Alonso jumping to get there too soon.
8. Maybe Renault. Hey, it’s the team that he built things around him. The team that gave him two championships. They like him and I think respect him and well to put it bluntly, can tolerate his primadonna nature. Also they have seats available.
9. Williams is another viable option. And one that people are talking about more and more. Without a second driver, Alonso and Rosberg would make a pretty interesting partnership. Thinking about it, you’ve got two drivers that would drive the pants out of any car. Now hopefully Williams (whom I support btw) have learnt a lot this year moving into the next year. It’s been a good year all around considering the abysmal 2006 season. So they’re definitely on an upturn. Will they be able to challenge for the top seats? I can’t see that happening, but third place could most definitely be a possibility. So going to Williams wouldn’t be such a bad move for a year.

So he’s got really two higher probability options in Renault and Williams because they have seats available. He’s also got two other smaller options in Honda and RedBull although they would need to get rid of one of their two drivers.

To keep things on a relatively positive note, here’s that ad that the guys did sometime this year. While the acting is dreadful the idea is a good one. Too bad it really didn’t last more than a year. It was kinda fun seeing the squabbling on the track and reading the made up remarks online. Added another dimension to the sport.

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• Music to drink wine by: Vintner insists music can change wine’s flavors
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The nerdier nether-regions of blogland have been burning through the night with the news of the OpenSocial initiative spearheaded by Google and supported by what Chris so aptly calls the coalition of the willing.

Like Simon, I’ve been trying to get my head around exactly what OpenSocial is all about ever since reading Brady Forrest’s announcement. Here’s what I think is going on:

Facebook has an API that allows third parties to put applications on Facebook profile pages (substitute the word “widget” for “application” for a more accurate picture). Developers have embraced Facebook applications because, well, Facebook is so damn big. But developing an app/widget for Facebook is time-consuming enough that the prospect of rewriting the same app for a dozen other social networking sites is an unappealing prospect. That’s where OpenSocial comes in. It’s a set of conventions. If you develop to these conventions, your app can live on any of the social networking sites that support OpenSocial: LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo and many more.

Some of the best explanations of OpenSocial are somewhat biased, coming as they do from the people who are supporting this initiative, but they are still well worth reading:

• Anil Dash from Six Apart writes about OpenSocial, killer apps and regular people (a phrase that rubs Brian up the wrong way),
• Marc Andreessen of Ning describes a new universe of social applications all over the web,
• Ted Rheingold of Dogster lists 10 reasons why OpenSocial will be very beneficial and
• Jeremiah Owyang makes explaining OpenSocial to your executives a whole lot easier by providing some jargon-busting definitions:

  Social Network:

  An existing network or community where people of similar interest share. MySpace, LinkedIn, and Hi5 are examples.

  Mini-application, app, widget:

  These applications, created by third party developers or your company can sit on top of these existing thriving communities of connected people.

  Platform, Container, Social Network:

  Where the mini-applications sit on top of and interact.

  API:

  The common code shared among platforms and developers of mini-applications.

There’s no doubt that this set of conventions built upon open standards—HTML and JavaScript—is very good for developers. They no longer have to choose what “platforms” they want to support when they’re building widgets.

That’s all well and good but frankly, I’m not very interested in making widgets, apps or whatever you want to call them. I’m interested in portable social networks.

At first glance, it looks like OpenSocial might provide a way of exporting social network relationships. From the documentation:

The People and Friends data API allows client applications to view and update People Profiles and Friend relationships using AtomPub GData APIs with a Google data schema. Your client application can request a list of a user’s Friends and query the content in an existing Profile.

But it looks like these API calls are intended for applications sitting on the host platform rather than separate sites hoping to extract contact information. As David Emery points out, this is a missed opportunity:

The problem is, however, that OpenSocial is coming at completely the wrong end of the closed-social-network problem. By far and away the biggest problem in social networking is fatigue, that to join yet another site you have to sign-up again, fill in all your likes and dislikes again and—most importantly—find all your friends again. OpenSocial doesn’t solve this, but if it had it could be truly revolutionary; if Google had gone after opening up the social graph (a term I’m not a fan of, but it seems to have stuck) then Facebook would have become much more of an irrelevance—people could go to whatever site they wanted to use, and still preserve all the interactions with their friends (the bit that really matters).

While OpenSocial is, like OAuth, a technology for developers rather than end users, it does foster a healthy atmosphere of openness that encourages social network portability. Tantek has put together a handy little table to explain how all these technologies fit together:

portability	technology	primary beneficiary
social application	OAuth, OpenSocial	developers
social profile	hCard	users
friends list	XFN	users
login	OpenID	users

I was initially excited that OpenSocial might be a magic bullet for portable social networks but after some research, it doesn’t look like that’s the case—it’s all about portable social widgets.

But like I said, I’m not entirely sure that I’ve really got a handle on OpenSocial so I’ll be digging deeper. I was hoping to see Patrick Chanezon talk about it at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin next week but, wouldn’t you know it, I’m scheduled to give a talk at exactly the same time. I hope there’ll be plenty of livebloggers taking copious notes.

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Tagged with opensocial portability social networks

Awesome resource I stumble on once every six months and then forget and can't find.

Phew! Nearly didn't make it this week. I'm sure you don't want to hear about my troubles but it was a pretty shitty morning after a very late night working and the very welcome half day off that beckoned just added to my stress as the workload to time available ratio went off the scale. My am was brightened by a surprise package arriving in the post. It cheered me up no end, and will serve as the basis for next week's post. My pm was brightened by a family stop-off at the ubiquitous Starbucks on the way back from a shopping trip.

There's something about Starbucks that instills an uncanny calm upon our boys so we get to enjoy an extremely civilised coffee and bun.

But I digress. Back to FTF.

Found these aluminium stencils in a pile of miscellaneous tools and shed junk at a car boot sale. Not a full set but enough to make my heart pump a little harder when I opened the little box that hid them.

If you'd like to contribute to FTF, please send stuff here.

If you've sent stuff and I haven't posted it yet: very great thanks for taking to time, I will post them.

A quick note that I’m heading to Chicago for DUX (Nov 4-7) and Vancouver for UX Intensive (11-15). I’m interested in meeting up with local folks, and maybe doing on-site visits if appropriate! Email me at peterme AT adaptivepath DOT com.

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