Software engineer Kevin Marks has helped push Google's social efforts for years, working on diverse products like the company's Orkut social network, its user profile feature, and the OpenSocial social web standard. Now, he's leaving to work on other projects, including opening technologies he has been helping to spearhead -- and maybe a startup.
Google hasn't always had a clear strategy for how it could partake in the popularity of social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Marks has played a big part in making its efforts more clear. After helping to launch OpenSocial in the fall of 2007, he became a Google-based open web standards evangelist -- participating in the slow but steady evolution in how people can share their data around the web. He's also managed to fit in numerous speaking gigs (like our DEMO conference in March) and events around Silicon Valley. Here's more, from his blog post today:
I've spent most of my time working on building and promoting open web standards, both inside the company and out. I helped launch the Social Graph API, promoted OAuth and OpenID, helped converge Portable Contacts with OpenSocial, and explained how the Open Stack fits together. I helped promote Microformats within Google and without and am very pleased to see them showing up in Rich Snippets in search. The Activity Streams effort continues this web-wide work to build social infrastructure to make the web more social.
Non-developers may not know the names of all of these web standards, but the results are beginning to show. In OpenSocial's case, Google developed it as a set of standards so any social network could provide a platform that any developer could build applications for. Build one application for OpenSocial, and it can, without too much rejiggering, work on any network that supports OpenSocial. While Facebook still seems to get the single largest amount of developer attention, OpenSocial has helped competitors create their own and so it has become a sort of industry standard. Companies like MySpace and hi5 now have their own ecosystems of third -party applications, especially social games. MySpace's platform is notably now a competitive second to Facebooks, with some developers telling me they make even more on that site from things like virtual goods sales. Hi5 has meanwhile refocused much of its business from advertising to various types of virtual goods sales, and it is beginning to implement new OpenSocial features like a way for virtual currencies in game apps to work across social networks. Other web companies have also used OpenSocial in their own ways -- business network LinkedIn has a platform, but just for a few high-quality apps allowed in, that specifically cater to LinkedIn's professional user base.
More generally, as Marks has told me, when other companies can use social data to build better web services, more people use the web more often. This creates more opportunities for them to use Google's search engine to find information.
Google's social efforts will, of course, continue, with veterans like Joe Krauss and David Glazer continuing to lead product development at the company. Marks, an engineering veteran in his own right with time at the BBC, Apple and Technorati, says he'll stay involved with the web standards groups he's already a part of -- but he's well-poised to get his hands dirty in a startup. As he told TechCrunch about the move: "Over the last two years, we have built out the infrastructure for the social Web. Now it is time to build things on that infrastructure."