This is only a problem if people want these services to collaborate, but there certainly seems to be sufficient desire and opportunity to make this happen. I also think that the social web – chock full of personal and dynamic information, collaboratively maintained by an army of “ordinary people” is a good testbed for the techniques which may be applicable in other applications such as Electronic Health Records.

The Gnip approach to the challenge is to provide a type of ESB in the cloud. The basic functions of an ESB – transport and mediation – is applied to the various protocols which are exported or imported by popular social applications.

Dare worries that this approach puts Gnip in the middle of the social network as a “single point of failure”. This is the classic problem with the ESB and the source of much derision about “ESB in a box”. You’re not solving the problem of protocol/api/schema proliferation, you’re simply pushing the mappings into a central logical component which – depending on its architecture – may be a single point of failure. So what are the alternatives?

One approach would be to standardize the interfaces so as to minimise or completely eliminate the need for mediation. One might refer to this as a service-oriented architecture, but I hesitate to use such an unfashionable term. But there’s the rub. The social web is a dynamic, anarchic frontier on the bleeding edge of information technology. What effect would standardization have on that eco-system? Would it slow down or block off avenues of innovation? Would new business models be choked off, trapped in a proprietary cul de sac? Maybe! These are the dangers of premature standardization which are best applied to mature technologies and processes.

Even if you could standardize to the required level of completeness, how do you coordinate dozens of different companies to support the standards? It’s pretty much impossible. We’ve struggled with this inside the firewall for decades. For example how do you get Siebel and Metasolv and Retek and Primavera all standardizing around the same set of services? Well in this case, they all get acquired by Oracle and it becomes Oracle’s problem.

The first step in the standardization of the social web has been taken by Google with OpenSocial. If standardization of the social web ever happens I think it will be a long time before the requirement for mediation disappears. In the meantime we have Gnip, and Friendfeed and…watch this space.

Related posts:

1. Thylacines and Wolves
2. Push versus Pull