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Marketspace for social networking plaforms

MM: And all this dashboard is really doing is syndicating in content streams.

I would imagine that in some cases, you’d have a window into MySpace or into these virtual reality things or metaverse things — like Second Life. Or maybe one of my massive multi-user online game things.

RT: Absolutely.

Specifically, our market space is comprised of Fortune 1,000 companies. We see it as the ability to expose these profiles that are built within MySpace, FaceBook — those are the profiles that you’re really looking for, when we’re reading in-profile information from these other networks.

We’re hoping that people adopt those as the standard. Then instead of having to type all of that in, there’s actually a company out there trying to create a unique ID for everybody that is your personality and your piece that floats around the internet.

OpenID. Yes. OpenID’s whole idea was that everybody would create these profiles in OpenID. That one profile would then be the profile that FaceBook uses — my Space uses — all these other people consume that profile and can maintain this one profile for the entire web.

MM: Are there progressive levels of disclosure?

RT: Yes. It can set privacy settings and all that good stuff. The problem is that nobody wants to share their data. Everybody wants to own their data. So that idea doesn’t work.

But what we’ve seen is that specifically in the FaceBook and MySpace world — these profiles have primarily accepted de facto standards. So we’re saying, “Okay. Let’s use those. Give us a nice rich API to read them in from. Keep your profile there and manage it all there. But let’s bring some of that data into this profile that we’re creating for you, here. We’ll tie them together so you can manage all the data in one place. But we’re going to make it visible, too.”

You’re essentially making it visible to multiple communities.

MM: You know, this sounds like the metadirectory of Napster.

RT: Yes. Very similar. The idea really comes from that type of thing. And I have to wrap it up, here.

MM: I want to thank you so much, Rudy.

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