Is this Web 2.5?

This article on TechCrunch about the slew of new community aggregation and portability services that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google are about to launch (or have launched) is very interesting and perhaps indicative of where things are headed when (or if) we ever get away from the Web 2.0 version. (Tim O'Reilly please help us move on to a new version!). The article is well written so no need to really re-state the case, but the take-aways from these new developments are summarized by quoting from Google's press release that discusses their new FriendConnect service.

any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community...

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

Similar features/services are offered by MySpace utilizing the Data Portability project into its development. Facebook has Connect (Google and Facebook should really reach for a thesaurus regarding the word connect). These are the big dogs on the social web block so all eyes will be watching. Essentially what these services do is allow you to connect your Facebook, Google or MySpace data (and those linked to you at these sites) to other sites and services. This more tightly integrates many different kinds of sites and information across the web linked by users' information. The big question may very well be security and authentication. And one answer is oAuth which is an open source project dedicated to protecting identifies across websites.

This is a new step and some more evolution as we start to see the still very new social networks begin to grow-up a little and move beyond the cozy confines of their own domains. Take a deep breath and get ready. Web 2.0 is about to get an upgrade. Not a full version upgrade but perhaps a bump up the ladder to Web 2.5.

It will be interesting to see how these new services play out in the education world once (or if) these capabilities become broadly adopted by the myriad social sites now on the web.

Keene (University of Texas @ Austin)