“It was constant troubleshooting, testing, research, posting to the Google Apps forums and so on. Plus there’s the emotional strain of wondering whether you completely screwed up by moving everyone to Google Apps as our sole e-mail system. That’s what freaked me out: Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”

[via Gmail leaves Google Apps admins nervous on InfoWorld, my emphasis]

In the higher-education-institution (HEI) community I have seen a fair amount of debate recently about whether or not institutions should be looking to embrace the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and, in particular, making use of all remote those Web 2.0 services. Why run local services, when you can simply find a remote service to provide for your needs?

Perhaps this is a model for the future. But is the right model for the present? There is a growing, commonly-held belief that we are about to enter a global recession. Just the fact that the assumption is commonly held may be enough to make this a reality. Clearly there is a degree of economic uncertainty. Is this a good moment for HEIs to begin a brave experiment with outsourcing services to remote companies?

Now, Google are clearly not a fly-by-night company – their size now makes them a fairly safe bet. But the vast majority of Web 2.0 companies are a fraction of the size of Google. As it is, many Web 2.0 services appear to exist with no visible means of support, other than venture capital. I imagine that venture capital can become harder to find in a period of economic down-turn. Much Web 2.0 service delivery is supported through an advertising model, relying on a revenue stream coming from a small percentage of advertisements ‘clicked’ on. Again, perhaps people are less likely to respond to advertisements in a recession….?

Chris Adie, who spoke on ‘Managing the Risks of Web 2.0‘ at this year’s (excellent) Eduserv Foundation Symposium, made the related point that Web 2.0 services which rely on a global scale in terms of numbers of users and/or on social networks will become decreasingly useful if the number of users starts to drop. Essentially, the network effect works both ways….

Incidentally, Chris also pointed us to some Guidelines for Using External Web 2.0 Services supplied by Edinburgh University. and spoke authoritatively about the institution’s use of remote Web 2.0 services and the risks involved in this, especially in terms of compliance with the Data Protection Act. Interestingly, the ‘back-channel’ at the symposium, populated primarily perhaps by people likely to be passionate about new technology, tended to dismiss some of Chris’s points. I felt that some participants either didn’t realise, or didn’t care that Chris was describing risks to the institution.

Once we got past the recession at the end of the dot-com bubble in the first years of this century, the notion of an open-source operating system had reached a level of sufficient maturity for it to enter the mainstream. Web 2.0 services and SaaS as a viable, mainstream approach will likely reach similar levels of maturity in time. But perhaps now, more than ever, institutions need to make sober appraisals of their options for service delivery or procurement.

After all, no one wants to be made to look like an idiot!

Both MySpace and Facebook have recently launched initiatives to open up a little….but not too much.

MySpace has announced its Data Availability project with some major partner applications. Essentially, this will encourage the user to manage ‘profile’ information on MySpace, with a view to surfacing this information in other, partner applications (initially Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter. It will also allow users to share some data such as photos which they have added to the MySpace site. Facebook has a similar initiative called Facebook Connect, initially in partnership with Digg. In both cases, a set of usage policies will be imposed such that the user retains control over what is shared, with the power to revoke the sharing agreement. I’m really encouraged to note that in the case of MySpace’s Data Availability, the mechanism adopted to solve the inter-authentication/authorisation issues between these systems is an implementation of OAuth.

Amit Kapur (MySpace’s Chief Operating Officer) says that Data Availability is:

“…founded first and foremost on allowing users to have comprehensive control over their content and data.”

Dave Morin of Facebook believes that:

“…the next evolution of data portability is [...] about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.”

The extent to which users ‘have control’ over their content and data even while it has been completely locked up within the MySpace and Facebook applications has been argued about extensively. The relationships between these sites, their users, and their users’ data have evolved over the last year or two, as users have become a little more savvy. Pressure from groups such as DataPortability appears to have had an effect, with MySpace also signing up to this recently.

So, it seems as though the walled gardens are opening up, getting ready to participate in the wider web. Or are they?

In a web of distributed social networks, the most likely way in which users might manage their participation would seem (right now) to be through a single entry point. Essentially, if the web of social networks is going to allow ‘single-sign-on for the user, and allow a re-use of profile information, and even content across multiple applications, then one model is to give the user a ‘gateway’ service, where they sign-on and manage their ‘account’. Both Facebook and MySpace are going to battle hard to be that gateway service for the masses. Both have accepted that they can no longer remain as a completely walled garden – they must open up, just a little, to avoid being eventually marginalised. But now that they are not totally closed, they may find it difficult to retain control. They may find others are waiting to seize the initiative. Enter Google, and its Friend Connect service.

Friend Connect is different to the previous initiatives from Facebook and MySpace. Google’s new offering is designed to provide a ‘middleware’ services, sitting between the big social networks, and sundry web applications which might want to exploit the new openings in these services. It also utilises components which have been developed with the OpenSocial API. Friend Connect is, I think, a very significant development, because it shows how more distributed social networks might work. It is significant also in a particular detail – notice how Friend Connect can become a social network of sorts simply by integrating existing social networks. Suddenly, the huge headstart enjoyed by Facebook and MySpace doesn’t look so unassailable. This is, presumably, the real reason why Facebook have taken steps to block Friend Connect.

I suggest that because they have been walled gardens for so long, neither Facebook nor MySpace really know how to succeed as middleware. They have always been the destination – never really a component in someone’s workflow. By contrast, Google has always offered services which the user employs en route to a different destination. Google understands this kind of arrangement fundamentally. Expect to see increasingly desperate measures from MySpace and Facebook to retain control while Google quietly grows its Friend Connect service.

A while ago, I noticed that there was no longer any reference to this particular support in any of the documentation and began to suspect that this was being deprecated. Today, Google announced via their official blog that:

…we’ve found that the information we gain from our support of OAI-PMH is disproportional to the amount of resources required to support it. Fewer than 200 sites are using OAI-PMH for Google Sitemaps at the moment.

In order to move forward with even better coverage of your websites, we have decided to support only the standard XML Sitemap format by May 2008. We are in the process of notifying sites using OAI-PMH to alert them of the change.

Fewer than 200 sites…..

There are a few ways of looking at this. Perhaps ‘open access’ repositories are less concerned with Google rankings than the typical website owner. Perhaps the penetration of OAI-PMH in the world is still below any level that Google could find particularly interesting – certainly they never went to great lengths to advertise this support while it lasted. Clearly, Google have come to the end of a ‘trial period’ for their support for this protocol in their main indexing service.

Can we conclude anything from this? Probably not – surely OAI-PMH can thrive without Google Sitemap support? It certainly plays a fairly significant part in my professional life at present! Or should we view this as a symptom of decline….?

The official Google announcement is here.

Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information, a professor of media studies will claim this week.

Meanwhile, Andy Powell over at eFoundations counters with:

Blaming the Internet for “a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information” is a bit like blaming paper for the Daily Star.

Indeed.

What I find interesting is the implicit notion of a ‘Google generation’. When I hear this term used pejoratively, I tend to substitute the phrase ‘the trouble with the youth of today….’.

In a wonderful coincidence of timing, I note, via the JISC news feed, that the ‘Google Generation is a myth‘. Apparently, there is some evidence to suggest that age/generation is not an indicator for particular research behaviour:

The report ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future’ also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

Hmmmm.

Caveat: I like white bread – it makes the best toast. Also, I found all of the material I’ve read so far about this via Google (apart from the stuff delivered to my RSS reader).