This is an overview of what was said during the panel conversation at Le Web on Platforms, which was moderated by our own Mike Arrington. (right)

Lots of panelists for this particular discussion – the conference organizers managed to get all of these people on one stage: Ethan Beard (Director, Facebook Developer Network), Cristian Cussen (Director of Business Development at Ning), Brandon Duncan (Director of Platform Engineering at LinkedIn), John Ham (Co-founder & CEO of Ustream), David Jacobs, (VP , Six Apart), Mike Jones (COO, MySpace) and Ryan Sarver (Director of Platform, Twitter).

Michael Arrington: As we’ve learned today, Facebook Connect has really exploded. MySpaceID has had less impressive growth. Any comment on that?

Mike Jones (MySpace): MySpaceID is generally available, we’ve seen it been used on thousands of publisher networks, it’s growing. We think of it as a healthy platform, but we’re obviously going to be pushing more weight behind it – it’s still definitely a vital part of our strategy.

So how many people are actually signing in to websites using MySpaceID?

MJ: I don’t have exact numbers, but we’re talking millions.

You don’t feel like the online identity race is pretty much over, and Facebook and Twitter won?

MJ: I think it’s healthy to have multiple digital identity providers, as long as it makes things easier for both publishers and users.

What about LinkedIn are you guys playing along?

Brandon Duncan (LinkedIn): We recognize the value of the systems, and consider us active in this field. We’re evidently more in the professional sphere than the personal one, and there’s loads of interesting things we can do.

It’s not just about signing in, of course, but also taking your social graph with you wherever you go on the Web. Thoughts?

John Ham (Ustream): the interactive piece of the platform pie, the social aspect of it, is evidently great for live events and thus live broadcasting. We’re showing that off here at Le Web with the livestreaming of the event online and via the iPhone app.

Christian Cussen (Ning): At Ning, we look at it this way: Facebook is great for people who already know each other, Twitter is great for realtime, MySpace for entertainment … at Ning we’d like to allow people who don’t know each other, connect. We’re trending away from the whole friending thing, letting people communicate without actually being connected on the network. We’ll accomodate both of course, we want to both amplify using existing platforms and at the same time make it as lazy as possible for our members to use Ning.

Okay, but Yahoo made great promises about its Inbox 2.0 too and now we see them teaming up with Facebook for the social aspect after all. Do you really think a combination is viable?

CC: Definitely. At Ning, you can have multiple profiles and run more than one network with a single sign-on – adding Facebook Connect as a layer is not going to be a conflict.

BD: Agreed, just take a look at our integration of Twitter and LinkedIn.

There have been rumors about Facebook Connect soon getting deployed all over MySpace. Any comment on that?

MJ: We’re not making any announcements today. Let’s just say we look at all platforms and all possible implementations based on their merit.

Let’s talk about the way developers should be treated by the entity running the platform. Apple hasn’t been treating developers the way they should have, but users don’t seem to be minding all that much. Even though there are capable open platforms out there. Thoughts?

Ryan Sarver (Twitter): we feel we have no choice but to treat developers within our ecosystem extremely well, we need that alignment.

David Jacobs (Six Apart): It’s important to have an open platform, and the iPhone is a unique case for a multitude of reasons. But anyone else would be playing with fire doing it the way Apple does today.

Ethan Beard (Facebook): We have more than 350 million members now, so that’s our key asset, it’s what can make our platform unique. What’s important to us is that user experience has to come first. I actually feel for the guys at Apple for having to manage their platform the way they are supposed to. But then again, our developers demand changes too, and we listen to them.

Is Facebook treating its developers too well, though? Are you being too nice (e.g. Scamville kerfuffle etc.)?

EB: We obviously try to balance things, but we realize full well that we’re unable to solve all problems upfront. We try to be a healthy ecosystem first and foremost, and we address problems quickly in my opinion. The balance between treating developers right and maintaining a high standard in user experience is really the key here.

MJ: Same at MySpace. You want to commit to everything you release to third-party developers, push out things incrementally.

JH: Being a developer on many platforms, I’d say most are treating us right. It’s important for us, evidently, we want them to pay attention to our needs.

Has Apple treated you well?

JH: We just announced the live broadcasting app. Continuing our efforts for the iPhone platform has paid off for us.

And why did you stick with them? Despite the policy, and just because it’s too important to ignore?

JH: It’s very much a strategic platform for us.

BD: You don’t want to prescribe too many things to developers. We want to leverage the developer community so we can have stuff built that we couldn’t or wouldn’t build ourselves. Finding that balance is crucial.

CC: We put the user experience first for Ning Apps. Our most valued users are our network creators, so we wonder how to enable people with limited means make money off our platform, easily and quickly.

Whatever happened to OpenSocial? We don’t hear about it often.

CC: All Ning Apps are based on OpenSocial, so it’s a very crucial element for our strategy.

DJ: we look and consider every platform, because you just never know when and on which one the next killer app is going to surface.

Is OpenSocial still: “build once, deplay anywhere”?

BD: We’re continuing to support opensocial, and we take it seriously.

MJ: OpenSocial is a big part of MySpace too, and it works great. We keep on trying to improve the standards around it. I don’t see any controversy here.

Twitter is still young, and I admit when I first wrote about it I didn’t see the potential. But you’ve also never had the ability to grow along with your users, as it has surged so quickly. Do you feel you’re finally getting ahead of the curve now?

RS: We’ve had to grow up a lot this year, and the partnerships with Google and Microsoft are helping us a great deal. If you look at the numbers, you’ll notice we’ve grown to become much more stable now compared to the early days.

Do you think you have what it takes to scale to a billion users, one of the self-declared targets for Twitter? Will you be able to maintain control over the basic plumbing and keep things centralized?

RS: We think about the future, but a lot needs to be determined still. We don’t have any solid answers to your question at this point.

We need more controversy in this panel. You’re all getting along too much for my taste. But maybe that’s also a sign of the times. What is a platform anymore, anyway?

MJ: well in my opinion what Apple has is not a platform, it’s just a store, like Walmart. MySpace is more of a platform in my opinion: we help developers enhance their applications, not just run and distribute them.

EB: I consider Walmart to be a platform, actually. After all, the store sells stuff that other companies make. We shifted from the App Platform, which was more tech-oriented at first, to Facebook Connect. Now that it’s as broad as it is, we evolved into thinking of FB Connect as a data access layer much more than a platform. After all, you can use it on the Web, for desktop clients, mobile apps, etc.

MJ: What we’re seeing right now is definitely a new type of animal. Twitter is a platform, but it’s also more than that. It’s a different beast, it’s new, and frankly I don’t know how to call it anymore.

TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs.

TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from.

And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.

With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app.

But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes.

The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.

So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told.

One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go.

This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards.

TypePad Platform and Developer Program

The TypePad Platform will essentially enable developers to use structured social objects (think blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups and tags) to more easily build social applications on top of a cloud network. While this is obviously mostly a developer-oriented product, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden in a blog post wrote that this will also benefit bloggers, whether they’re part of a business or organization that uses TypePad for online publications or individual bloggers who share their life with a close circle of friends and family.

For larger publishers and online businesses, Alden writes, the TypePad Platform could be another alternative for them to incorporate blogs and social networking into their websites, thus offering an alternative to local software solutions or hosted SaaS solutions. Personal bloggers will ultimately benefit from more applications that enhance TypePad’s core functionality, he expects.

Starting today, interested programmers can head to the fresh TypePad Developer Program website to obtain an alpha version of the TypePad API for free, with commercial versions of the TypePad Platform set to debut later on. Time will tell if the initiative will end up creating an ecosystem of third-party developers much like rival Automattic has managed to assemble for WordPress over the years.

TypePad Motion

Six Apart recently added some Posterous-style microblogging flavor and real-time blogging capabilities to TypePad, but is now switching to full throttle with the launch of TypePad Motion. The new service is the inaugural open source app built by Six Apart developers for the new TypePad platform and incorporates many of the features of the late Pownce. It’s also reminiscent of Jaiku, Tumblr and the recently introduced Yahoo Meme service.

The service is already live here, so I played around with it a little and found that it was far from anything remotely spectacular in terms of functionality or wealth of features. You log on with your Typepad account and add text (no character limit, links, photos, online videos and audio) to your Motion profile. Other community members can subscribe to your new blog and comment much like any other microblogging / lifestreaming service. That’s about it, although the open-source aspect is interesting for the future.

Six Apart says the TypePad Motion app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community. It’s written in Python using the Django framework (GitHub). An example of a customized Motion blog is this showcase for the Future of Web Apps conference where the above announcements were made today.

A leader playing a good hand by broadening and diversifying its product line, or too little, too late? What’s your take?

If you’re a TypePad user, you can now post by e-mailing in an article or using your iPhone to publish whatever short posts, links, videos and pictures you want to put up on the web easily and rapidly. And you can just as easily push the content back out to other services such as Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed while you’re at it, which is entirely in line with what Posterous has been all about since its inception. To complement the new feature, Six Apart is also adding some new custom themes to TypePad, starting with the Pico template the company introduced yesterday.

The only difference with Posterous that I can see is the support and training Six Apart provides with its TypePad service and the fact that you can add advertising units to your new mini-blog, although I can’t imagine this will convince many individuals to actually pay for a microblogging service when there are so many free alternatives.

Or will it?

The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board.

From what we can gather reading about the project on the website, its founders are passionate about Movable Type but see more value in forking it, community-style, “to see it flourish as a platform”. According to the FAQ section, the team is working together with Six Apart to some degree – which isn’t surprising considering Dash’ presence on the board – and strives for as much compatibility with Movable Type’s core APIs as possible. However, you can also read that the team is inspired by successful open source initiatives such as WordPress (a Six Apart rival), Apache, Linux and Firefox.

“While at its onset Melody will have a great deal in common with Movable Type from a feature perspective, we believe that by listening to and empowering our community we will unlock the true potential of open source and begin to advance the platform at a more rapid pace. To that end we intend on decoupling features that add complexity to the product, yet only a minority of users use, e.g. TrackBack and Postgres support, and increasing the level of investment in those areas that will help people become more efficient and successful in designing and building web sites using Melody, like theme building and distribution.”

As for the product, it’s not ready yet, even for beta testing. The first release (Melody 1.0) is scheduled for ‘Fall 2009′, but if you’re a developer and you can’t hold your horses than you should check out the latest development snapshot from Melody’s source code repository on Github.

Behind Melody: Tim Appnel, Jesse Gardner, Dan Wolfgang, Mark Stosberg, Jay Allen, Su, Arvind Satyanarayn and Byrne Reese.

Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by WordPress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, WordPress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host WordPress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to WordPress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for WordPress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will WordPress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

The micro-sharing application was launched the same year in private beta and became somewhat of a competitor to Twitter (which was nowhere near as popular as it is nowadays) and Pownce (which never really took off and was ultimately put out of its misery by Six Apart). Jaiku was famously acquired by Google at the end of 2007 before it hit mainstream success and has since often been cited as one of the search engine company’s infamous zombie acquisitions, with little or no further development happening on the service since the takeover and the original founders moving on to doing other things on the company’s payroll.

Then Google discontinued a number of services in the beginning of this year, and Jaiku was widely reported to be one of the axed products, but Engeström swiftly responded to those reports with a blog post saying that Jaiku wasn’t dying but instead morphing (into an open-source platform for building micro-publishing services on Google App Engine).

Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are.

(sorry about the occasional sound glitches)

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4512841&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. WordPress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. WordPress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

Six Apart, the company behind blogging platform Movable Type, has just announced a new social application called Motion that integrates social network-like activity streams, microblogging support, and dead simple login functionality for visitors that allows them to quickly leave comments and even tie in their own activity feeds to your site. The new application will be free for all users of Moveable Type Pro, the site’s premium service, once it leaves beta in 2009. For now, you can sign up for a free demo of the Beta version here.

Motion is build around open standards, allowing users to create their own microblogs that pull in events (in a manner similar to FriendFeed) from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart’s Action Streams, which launched earlier this year. The service also offers full support for OpenID, allowing users to login with their Google accounts, Facebook Connect, AOL screen names, and Yahoo IDs.

Six Apart says that Motion isn’t just a set of social features – rather, it’s a flexible suite that you can customize to suit your needs. Among the possible applications:

* Create a private, custom action aggregator to track sentiment and glean intelligence from conversations around the web through action streams.
* Provide a private microblog community for simple internal employee or team collaboration.
* Publish a public microblog to nurture and grow your community while increasing your page views.
* Create a public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of competing against other social networks.

At this point there aren’t any sites that have actually implemented Motion so its hard to get a feel for how well it works, but Six Apart says that they’ll have a demo live some time this evening (we’ll update the post once they do). You can read more about Motion on the application’s product page here.

FriendFeed is the reason Twitter has won. It’s the toolkit for providing innovation around Twitter. It has always been the reason why micromessaging could be taken to the next level, to absorb and extend email. FriendFeed is the most important third party app to emerge in the platform space Twitter created to garner its dominant market share. There is no competition for FriendFeed, not even close.

Facebook is not competition for FriendFeed because the only way to kill FriendFeed is to kill Twitter, and there is no competition for Twitter. Where Twitter gets dangerous for Facebook is if its Follow cloud and restored Track discovery engine prove more efficient at modeling social graph data in realtime. This is why FriendFeed’s realtime expansion is so dangerous to Facebook, because it extends Twitter at no cost to Twitter by harvesting the most active portion of Twitter’s economy.

If FriendFeed builds a high value cloud of realtime users while leveraging Twitter’s Track cloud for scale, the combined entity captures more and more of the high value customers in the information space. If the percentage of high value realtime messages reaches parity with email, the increased efficiency of providing strategic information based on the social cloud and its personalized filtering will encourage email vendors to aggregate and rank email alongside micromessages. In effect, the combination of Track and dynamic follow mechanisms already does this.

Direct messages subsume point to point email. Collaboration threads have always been handled poorly in email systems; CCs and BCCs distort and disrupt top down hierarchies, and flatter organizations are overwhelmed with aggressive copying and information hoarding that begins to look like the rest of what’s left: spam. Micromessaging via the supple architecture of Follow/Track affinity transports sidesteps those problems and produces much greater signal to noise by harnessing the social filter.

Pownce was DOA because it didn’t enter the market at the only point where it could compete: against a FriendFeed that hadn’t yet begun to morph. Once FriendFeed flipped the realtime switch, the battle was over. It’s still possible to attempt to compete with FriendFeed, but a better version of FriendFeed inevitably extends Twitter and therefore consolidates FriendFeed’s value as an after effect. Why invest in incremental improvements when it’s easier to just wait until FriendFeed adds those features?

If FriendFeed is a parasite service of Twitter, then the only conceivable entry point now is as a parasite service of FriendFeed. What would that entail? It would have to be a service that thrived on being absorbed as it seeded new functionality into the expanding messaging subsystem. Luckily, there is a lot of room for growth, since micromessaging will move into the richer data types of the media transformation once it’s eaten email. That should make Amazon and Ebay more than a little nervous. If Twitter and FriendFeed capture microtransactions at the very moment digital media wins, they effectively control the set top box. There is not competition for that, not even close.

This is not a comprehensive blog directory like Technorati or even a meme tracker like Techmeme.  It will launch covering only 1,200 blogs. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tells me that his goal is not to compete with other blog directories so much as to offer a service that will help blogs in general (because that helps Six Apart as a provider of blogging software).

How good is it?  We don’t know because we haven’t played with it yet. But judging from some screenshots that we did obtain, it looks like a fairly standard media hub.  It breaks up the blogosphere into business, entertainment, news & politics, life, technology (shouldn’t that be first?), student life (yawn), and top 10 lists.  On its homepage, it will highlights posts from each of the categories, as well as one big write-up focussed on the hot discussion topic of the day..  

Given that blogs.com generates a ton of natural traffic based on its URL alone, it should provide yet one more way to get a traffic boost for the blogs that are featured.  (Just don’t expect a massive Yahoo Buzz-type boost any time soon).

Here are the screenshots.  The home page:

The Entertainment Section:

And a top ten blog list: