Monica Lam: Open Social Mobile Framework

So here is the architecture that we have come up with. The funny thing is that it took us, this is our fourth try, we threw away three different systems to come up with this architecture. It's very, very simple. And only simple things work, by the way. So what does this say? It says, look, today the way we connect the to our friends is through these huge social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and what have you. And each one of these networks has its own set of rules. These are the social rules of engagement. We know what it means to be friends of friends on Facebook for you to friend me. You know that you're going to give me access to a lot of things than just to do some play a game together using Facebook Connect. So there are lots of rules associated with Facebook or LinkedIn and so forth. However, if I look at the phone, it's like the phones are so powerful, why are we treating them like they are little, little thin client attached to the cloud? Why is it that I can go and talk to you directly? You have your phone, I have a phone. Why do I need a third party storing or keeping track of our relationships and following us? So why is it. And one of the biggest problem with these phones is that they route using TCP IP address. What is your TCP IP address? I don't even know my TCP IP address, let alone your TCP IP address. So what we have created is a very simple messaging core infrastructure. And what it does is that it allows people to exchange messages based on their existing identities. What are they? Email phone numbers, Facebook numbers. And as long as I know you via some kind of a name identity, I should be able to connect with you via this messaging service. So we are now going back to more like a contact book model. And when I do something with you, all you get is what I'm doing with you. You don't get all the friends of friends and pictures that I'm sharing in other networks. It is just that straight up, that is the connection. We do something together and that's the end of that. So that's the basic idea now that if I can connect with you personally, then I can do all kinds of things with you. One thing we do is to make that messaging function available to the apps. By the way, I should mention that when I say that there is a messaging system, sometimes my phone is offline. So. So it is necessary for the messaging core to hold onto the data until it is retrieved. But once it hands you over the data, it can go ahead and delete it because it is only a messenger. So what we have done is then make this messaging layer available to the apps. So, for example, if you are playing a little Scrabble game between three people, the. The Scrabble game can just run straight on those phones. I play the word hello on row two, column three. It's just a little bit of a message. It just goes onto the network and delivered to those two phones. The three of us are in a little Scrabble social network together for a short little while and there is nothing more to it than that. So now we can enable all kinds of multiparty interactions built on top of this simple messaging core. And then you'd say to me, it's like, what? I mean, what happened to the data? What happen if I lose my phone? Well, you have a lot of valuable stuff on your phone already. It's called the gallery. What do you do with a gallery? You back it up. Maybe you use Dropbox, maybe you back it up to your PC and so forth. So what we are asking to do then is that you have your phone back up. All the communicated data can also be back up and you can choose the backup of your choice. You can put it in G drive, I can put it on Scribe drive, you can put it into different accounts of the Dropbox. And now we are sharing across these resources together, these servers in the cloud. There are a lot of free services in the cloud, or you can pay for some of these services and it is all up to you. But now we can interact with each other.