The portion with my comments reads:

But Google open advocate Chris Messina warns that if Twitter doesn’t handle the new feature properly, it could become a free-for-all of competing standards and markups. “I find them very intriguing,” he said of Annotations, but added: “It could get pretty hairy with lots of non-interoperable approaches,” a concern that others have raised as well. For example, if more than one company wants to support payments through Annotations but they all use proprietary ways of doing that, “getting Twitter clients and apps to actually make sense of that data will be very slow going indeed,” said Messina. However, the Google staffer said he was encouraged by the fact that Twitter was looking at supporting existing standards such as RDFa and microformats (as well as potentially Facebook’s open graph protocol).

Unfortunately some folks found these comments more negative than I intended them to be, so I wanted to flesh out my thinking by providing the entire text of the email I sent to Mathew:

Thanks for the question Mathew. I admit that I’m no expert on Twitter Annotations, but I do find them very intriguing… I see them creating a lot of interesting momentum for the Twitter Dev Community because they allow for all kinds of emergent things to come about… but at the same time, without a sane community stewardship model, it could get pretty hairy with lots of non-interoperable approaches that re-implement the same kinds of features.

That is — say that someone wants to implement support for payments over Twitter Annotations… if a number of different service providers want to offer similar functionality but all use their own proprietary annotations, then that means getting Twitter clients and apps to actually make sense of that data will be very slow going indeed.

I do like that Ryan Sarver et al are looking at supporting existing schema where they exist — rather than supporting an adhocracy that might lead to more reinventions of the wheel than Firestone had blowouts. But it’s unclear, again, how successful that effort will be long term.

Of course, as the weirdo originator of the hashtag, it seems to me that the Twitter community has this funny way of getting the cat paths paved, so it may work out just fine — with just a slight amount of central coordination through the developer mailing lists.

I’d really like to see Twitter adopt ActivityStreams, of course, and went to their hackathon to see what kind of coordination we could do. Our conversation got hijacked so I wasn’t able to make much progress there, but Twitter does seem interested in supporting these other efforts and has reached out to help move things forward.

Not sure how much that helps, but let me know what other questions you might have.

I stand by these comments — though I can see how, spliced and taken out of context, they could be misconstrued.

Considering that we’re facing similar questions about the extensibility model for ActivityStreams, I can speak from experience that guiding chaos into order is actually how “standards” evolve over time. Managing that process determines how quickly an effort like Twitter’s annotations will succeed.

Twitter’s approach of  balancing between going completely open against being centrally managed is a smart approach, and I’m looking forward to both working with them on their efforts, as well as seeing what their developer community produces.

Specifically, I got my oil changed.

The epitome of banal, right?

Yeah, except, see, I don’t really know anything about cars (yeah, I’m man enough to admit it… what? What?!), — and so when the Oil Can Henry’s technician suggested that I use synthetic motor oil instead of the conventional stuff I’d been using, I had no idea what to tell him — though the significant price difference definitely put me off.

Pressed for an answer, I did what anyone in this situation would do (yeah right): I posted to Twitter and CC’d Aardvark (a question-answer service that follows my tweets):

Within seconds @vark sent me a direct message confirming that they’d received my query and were on the case:

Of course by now the attendant needed an answer — I was there for an oil change after all — and stalling until I got a definitive answer would have just been awkward.

“Sure,” I said, “what the hell.”

Then the responses started rolling in.

The first came from Derek S. on Aardvark 3 minutes later:

I’m far from a car expert, but my experience with my Honda Fit is that Hondas are generally engineered to run on the basics… regular unleaded gas, regular oil, etc. My guess is it’s probably not worth it.

Hmm, okay, that’s basically what I thought too, but it sounds like Derek knows as much about cars as I do.

Then came the first response on Twitter from Kasey Skala:

@chrismessina synthetic is for 75k+

Hmm, well, that’s pretty definitive. Guess I got punk’d.

But then more answers came in. A total of 17 tweets overall:

Erik Marden:

@chrismessina synthetic costs more, but lasts longer. I always go for it.

Rex Hammock:

@chrismessina For the record, Castrol is 100% owned by BP. Just saying. For the record.

Nick Cairns:

@chrismessina castrol is a bp co

Jon Bringhurst:

@chrismessina If you go synthetic, keep in mind that time between oil changes can jump up to like 10k+ miles, depending on how you drive.

@joshsprague:

@chrismessina Started doing 15Kmile synthetic on my 98 Honda. Need to read up more, but think fewer oil changes = less oil used.

Mark Boszko:

@chrismessina Synthetic oil is always a good idea, in my experience. I’ve taken cars to nearly 300K miles with its help.

Sam Herren:

@chrismessina Only if you wanna keep synthetic for the rest of the time you own the car.  Can’t go back and forth.

@earsmack:

@chrismessina I’ve heard that’s about the time to do it. Advantage = less frequent oil changes but nary any cost savings in my experience.

Frank Stallone (2, 3):

@chrismessina I put only synthetic oils in my cars — check your manual you may find you were suppose to be putting that in from the start!

@chrismessina I just looked up your car – every engine that Honda built for it should use synthetic http://bit.ly/aRvtmX

@chrismessina I love Amsoil the most but I’ll use Castrol and Mobile 1 any day — very trust worthy brands

B J Clark:

@chrismessina yes, go with synthetic and then only change it once every 5k – 10k miles.

Todd Zaki Warfel (2):

@chrismessina primary benefit of synthetic is if you drive hard or want to go longer on oil changes (e.g. 6-10k).

@chrismessina it’s the only thing I ran in my Mini Cooper S Works Edition (street legal race car)

Osman Ali:

@chrismessina Mobil 1

Christopher Loggins:

@chrismessina Prob too late, but Castrol Syntec is good oil. Good viscocity, temperature range, and zinc. Would use vs conventional.

I’ve captured all the responses here to give you a sense for the variety of answers I received from respondents who were all presumably unaware of each other’s responses.

If you ask me, this is a pretty good range — and is an excellent demonstration of both social search and distributed cognition and illustrates why “social” can’t be solved by an algorithm (this is the stuff that Brynn‘s an expert on).

The reality is that that my social network (including my 22,000+ Twitter followers and extended network through Aardvark) failed me. I probably made a premature decision to switch to synthetic oil — or at best, a decision without sufficient knowledge of the consequences (i.e. that once you switch, you really shouldn’t switch back). It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything, but this is the kind of experience that I’d expect social networks to be really good at. And it’s not like I didn’t get good answers — they just weren’t there when I needed them.

And it’s all the more funny because I actually tweeted my plans two hours before I left… why didn’t the network anticipate that I might need this kind of information and prepare it in advance? Better yet: why didn’t my car tell me its opinion (I’m half serious — it should be the authority, right?)? Surely the answer I sought was out there in the world some where — why didn’t my network tee this up for me? (And no doubt I’m not the first person to find himself in this situation!)

The network responded, but only after it was too late. So the next time I’m confronted by a question like this, what’s the likelihood that I’ll turn to my network? What if I didn’t work on this stuff for a living?

Out of curiosity, I submitted this question to Fluther, Quora, and tried to cross-post to Facebook (since Facebook is working on its own Q&A solution) but that failed for some reason.

So far, I’ve received three responses on Fluther, none on Quora, and two on Aardvark. I also posted the full text of my question to Google and Bing but amusingly enough, only my Fluther question came up as a result.

My takeaway? We’ve certainly made progress on the accessibility of social networks in aiding in question answering, but until our networks are able to provide better real-time or anticipatory responses, caveat emptor still applies.

Then again, YMMV.

There are six videos in the series; you can also watch the entire uncut screencast (parts 1-6) if you’ve got a half hour to spare. Here they are:

Introduction

Identity in the Browser

People, Apps & Pages

Share

Follow

Connect

I’d be eager to hear your feedback, here or by email. There is also a mailing list that Mozilla set up to capture feedback.

If these ideas interest you, I’d also recommend checking out the Account Manager and Contacts prototypes that Mike Hanson, Dan Mills, Ragavan Srinivasan and the Mozilla Labs team produced.

Previous entries in the concept series include: Part 1: The Social Agent, Part 2: Connect, and Part 3: Follow.

Also take a look at the rest of my mockups (view as a slideshow) or visit the project overview.

. . .

Looking back, it’s quite plain to see that web browsing, email and chat co-evolved, each being the domain of different applications, and being powered by non-interoperable protocols. Over time, people grew used to separating information consumption from information exchange. The dual use of applications like Firefox and Thunderbird demonstrate this situation, as though sharing and consuming were completely distinct modes of computing.

However, people largely treat these behaviors as one in the same — they’re nearly as eager to share what they discover on the web as they are excited to discover it. It’s just that email is one of the few (clunky) tools they have. And yet, imagine what the experience is like for the uninitiated — launching a browser for the first time (especially if they aren’t inured to the ways of email). They’re going to find it terribly frustrating to share something they find on the web, no matter how great their natural desire is to share it.

This functionality should be supported by our software — browsers included! Social computing is about combining both discovery and sharing — and the social agent can, again, manage such transactions.

Thus, it’s disheartening (is it not?) that the most advanced sharing feature that browsers offer today — in 2010 — is a hand off to your preferred local email client, adding friction and interrupting your flow. Should you really need to launch a separate app just to share a link? ?

Meanwhile, it’s become all the more common to publish content openly on the web — a public display of sharing. While historically people have been hesitant to be too open online, the success of public-by-default services like Flickr over private-by-default services like Kodak EasyShare prove the durability of this trend, which is also manifest in services like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s clear that relying on email as the primary mechanism for sharing is useful, but not sufficient for today’s web user — whose network is increasingly not found in their email address book.

Enter: the social agent.

Recall that the social agent already manages the people and topics you follow and your relationships with various parties. The next step is to add sharing to the browser. In this way, the tool that you use to discover content will be the same tool that you use to share and rebroadcast that content. Thus sharing becomes a natural part of your routine, and you become a participant-creator of the social web.

Now, of course it’s not sufficient to just add a sharing button and call it a day. That’s what so many websites already do, marring their pages with a bunch of tiny icons intended to help you share better! Well, your social agent should banish those annoying pests and make it easier for you to share the links and content with the people that you care about. Sure — for web savvy folks this isn’t necessarily a problem — but as websites become more dynamic and complex, there is a need to make sharing much more straightforward and integrated.

So suppose you visit the New York Times homepage and spot a story you think your friend would be interested in. If you used the “Send Link…” function, you’d end up sending a link to the homepage: nytimes.com. By the time your friend visits the site, the article you wanted to share might have already fallen out of site. Sharing fail!

Yet, you didn’t do anything wrong. You saw something that you wanted to share and used the only tool your browser gave you. Regardless, you still want to share the story!

There are a number of ways that the social agent could help you gracefully achieve this, whether you want to share a video, photo, blog post, article, event, or other common web document. For one, the browser can ask you to indicate specifically which item(s) you want to share. It can then attach extra information (related links, titles, descriptions) to your share to enrich your message (Facebook already does this for those of you who have figured out how to use Facebook’s sharing bookmarklet).

The browser can also tell you what methods it has available to share content with certain friends, or can make a list of your contacts or friends available through a familiar and convenient auto-suggesting textbox.

This means that the browser should help you drag and drop content to your friends, and between any compatible web sites or services.

Additionally, the browser can also maintain a history all the items you’ve shared, giving you the ability to search across them, and bring them back up quickly. You could also filter by recipient, service, time, or where you were physically located when you shared.

The browser can also follow the items you’ve shared to watch for updates or other changes like new comments. Since following is a feature we’ve already discussed, it’ll suffice to say that the items you share will be recorded and followed for new updates, which will be available in your activity dashboard.

Given how prevalent sharing information has become now that nearly everyone can be reached online, a modern browser should support this behavior in order to make the experience more universal, discoverable, easier to use, and more convenient.

Other entries in the concept series include: Part 1: The Social Agent and Part 2: Connect.

Also take a look at the rest of my mockups (view as a slideshow) or visit the project overview.

. . .

Recently I stopped by my neighborhood Whole Foods looking to pick up fixin’s for dinner — some fish, beets; y’know: the basics. After checking out, I noticed a sign on the wall that I’d not seen before, providing links to that local Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook pages. It struck me as rather strange that a company like Whole Foods would promote their profiles on networks owned by other companies until I got out of my tech bubble mindset for a moment and realized how irrelevant Whole Foods’ homepage must seem to people who are now used to following friends’ and celebrities’ activities on sites like Twitter and Facebook. What are you supposed to do with a link to a homepage these days? Bookmark it? — only to lose it among the thousands of other bookmarks you already forgot about?

As the number of people and organizations who have homepages on the web has increased the people formerly known as the audience are diverting their attention from these static outposts to activity-based social content, often consumed as-it-happens, in real-time.

This has tremendous implications for the browser, an application devised during the age of the “slow web”. More importantly, the browser’s interface hasn’t kept up with the changing and rapidly evolving nature of web content, failing to provide native interfaces that help you track content that you’re interested in, and that updates you automatically as new atomic data is available.

Though many browsers have basic feedreader support, their implementations are uninspired and irrelevant — as evidenced by the popularity of alternative web-based aggregators like Google Reader, Netvibes, Friendfeed, and even Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, the popularity of these services proves that consuming syndicated content from various sources is something that people want — it’s just that the browser does virtually nothing to satiate this desire.

Whole Foods‘ promotion of their Twitter and Facebook profiles also underscores an additional evolution that existing feed formats don’t express: that people are interested in many more kinds of content than blog posts and articles! People want photos, videos, status updates, wishlists, favorites, birthdays, and more. They want to know what changed or what happened — whether someone left a comment, made a new friend, is attending an event, or changed their profile photo. These activities take place across several domains and contexts, and pulling them all together into one convenient place is needlessly tedious and rarely portable.

Though I’m sure Whole Foods would much prefer to advertise its own website, they must promote themselves in the contexts where their customers spend their time for one simple reason: Facebook and Twitter have made it insanely easy for people to follow what their friends and favorite brands are doing. Even though feeds subscriptions have been built into browsers for several generations now, it took the social networks to actually make this feature usable — and wrote the browser right out of the picture.

But all’s not lost. As it turns out, the social agent is perfectly suited to provide “following” functionality by modernizing the browser’s existing feed infrastructure. In fact, by implementing “follow” at the browser level, we can generalize the activity of “subscribing” beyond articles and blog posts — and bring the functionality that people expect from social networks to the entire web.

Like subscribing, “following” only goes one way — and doesn’t require a reciprocal relationship in the way that “adding someone as a friend” on a social network often does.

This means that following can apply to a wider array of subjects like people, sports teams, comment threads, brands, and any other entity that might emit a stream of updates or activities (even your scale can emit an activity stream!).

Following does not define the mode by which one “follows”, nor is it restrictive in what you follow. In Twitter, for example, you can follow someone’s updates on the web, on your phone via SMS, in apps, or in other connected social networking contexts. In other words, the social agent can continually evolve the experience of following all kinds of activities and objects, rather than being restricted to the conventional list of items common today.

The social agent can integrate following in two different ways: it can either provide built-in handling of syndicated content, or it can seamlessly hand off to a service like Friendfeed, Brizzly, TuneIn, Netvibes, Seesmic, or Google Reader. What’s important, though, is that when you hit the “follow” button, updates from your sources flow to a known preferred aggregator.

The power of “following” is evident when you connect to an activity publisher. To date, getting access to protected feeds in the browser has been complicated, especially if you use technologies like Facebook Connect or OpenID which don’t use passwords to provide access. By adding the ability to connect your active account to what you follow, the social agent can provide you seamless access to private feeds.

For example, say you decide to follow your friend, and want to receive updates when he posts new photos. That’d be easy, except that his photos are private to the world, and he posts them to a network that you’re not on. No problem: since the social agent knows who you are, it can help you connect with your friend and make it easy to just ask him for permission to see his photos. Next time he signs in, he’ll get a notification that you’ve requested access, which he can approve at his leisure. And you never have to sign up for the service that he happens to use — since his updates will be delivered to you through your social agent.

In practice, much of what I’ve described is already possible using recent protocols and formats. It’s really just a matter of providing a unified experience through the browser and pushing for wider adoption of these technologies across the most popular social web services.

Over time, it is conceivable that the browser may develop sophisticated functionality that provides personal analysis and insights into the people and activities that you follow. Such analysis may be presented in an aggregated view, or give you “Best Of” summaries along various slices (daily, monthly, locally, among your college friends, etc). It certainly will be exciting to improve your ability to consume all the information you’re interested in without being overwhelmed by it, with the social agent able to differentiate between content types, activity sources, actors, and contexts and able to pick out those things which are most relevant to your tastes.

One last thing: as processors become faster and computers more connected, managing information should be a burden borne by the computer, rather than the individual. The individual should instead focus on information intake, assessment, interaction, and decision making — the things that require human attentiveness.

Interfaces for managing data should be kept to a minimum, and where they do exist, should be made simple, efficient, and clear. Where we once relied on hierarchical folders and directories, for example, we can now rely on search or other heuristic ranking tools that take social inputs to improve their performance.

Over time we can expand functionality, but to begin, it makes sense to heed the wisdom of Gall’s law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

Also take a look at the rest of my mockups (view as a slideshow) or visited the project overview.

. . .

When was the last time you created a new username and password so that you could make use of some website? Do you remember what username you picked, or which email address you used to sign up? Probably. But what about that support forum that you signed up for a couple weeks ago while you were home for the holidays? Did you write it down somewhere? Or worse: did you just use the same username and password that you use everywhere else?

Spreadsheets, text files, sticky notes, cheat-sheets, software and browser extensions — you name it, people have probably found some way to recruit every kind of notational tool there is to help them remember the countless passwords, PINs, IDs, usernames, and secrets needed to access the apps, websites, and services that they use on a regular basis. But we can do better.

Step 1: Activate

The social agent is designed to unify your online social experience. With that in mind, a social agent must become an extension of you in order to mediate your online interactions.

This is achieved by activating your browser against your preferred account provider when you first begin your online session, just as you activate your mobile phone before being able to make or receive calls. This is how the browser is turned into a social agent.

By activating your browser, you are effectively telling your browser who you are and where to store and access your data online.

Fortunately, you can activate using any account that you already have that supports a Connect API, like Twitter Connect or Facebook Connect (or soon, OpenID Connect). It is also conceivable to use the browser in an anonymous or “incognito mode”.

Step 2: Connect

Once activated, you can visit any site that supports Connect and with the click of a button, sign up and bring your profile, relationships, content, activities, and any other portable data with you. This process is identical to Facebook Connect or Twitter Connect, except that the interaction occurs between your social agent and the site you’re visiting.

What is a Connect API? Writing for the O’Reilly Radar blog in February last year, David Recordon defined the anatomy of “connect” as meeting four criteria:

• Profile: Everything having to do with identity, account management and profile information ranging from sign in to sign out on the site I’m connecting with.
• Relationships: Think social graph. Answers the questions of who do I know, who do I know who’s already here, and how I can invite others.
• Content: Stuff. All of my posts, photos, bookmarks, video, links, etc that I’ve created on the site I’ve connected with.
• Activity: Poked, bought, shared, posted, watched, loved, etc. All of the actions that things like the Activity Streams project are starting to take on.

This is what the verb “connect” means for the social agent. The “connect” button communicates that your browser is going to share some amount of your profile data with the site that you’re connecting with. You’re not just signing in. You’re connecting — and creating a relationship with the site. You can of course change the data that the website gets — even after you’ve signed in — and the benefit of this model is that you have transparency into what data you’re sharing with whom.

Far from making it impossible for you to share your data, your social agent should help you mediate such decisions, guiding you about which sites to connect with, and providing context to help inform you actions.

For this model to work, your connections are actually made between your preferred account provider and the third parties to which you’ve connected. Your account provider, then, acts as a hub for all of your online doings — collecting, maintaining, and mediating your browsing history, relationships and contacts, activities, transactions, content and media, and online profile. This provider should let you selectively configure how much, how little, or how long such your data is made available to third parties — much in the same way that you manage access on Twitter or Facebook today.

For you, this means that you get to pick an account provider of your choice — without needing to worry about remembering or managing passwords or usernames. Instead, you can have any number of accounts that are available to you wherever the web goes.

As a core feature of the social agent, connecting is the action you take whenever you want to establish an enduring an ongoing relationship with a site, service, or individual.

Thus, this is the first of a five part series that re-imagines the browser as a “social agent” — and defines how it can do more to facilitate various social behaviors by supporting three verbs that can “socialize” the browsing experience: Connect, Follow, and Share.

To put the ideas presented here into some context, I will begin with a vignette that describes a future computing scenario, motivated by three emerging conditions:

• online account and data portability
• ubiquitous networked access
• decreasing cost of advanced computing devices

This scenario is intended to provoke us to peek around the corner of today’s browser paradigm. Little that is presented here is entirely novel. Instead, this sketch presupposes that the browser has learned new capabilities that take it from the document-centric era of the web into the age of people-centric web services. This “social agent” knows who you are and facilitates common tasks like connecting to sites, interacting with following people and information, and providing intuitive tools for sharing for than just links.

. . .

We begin at a conference, somewhere far from home that required air travel, sometime in the near-future. It doesn’t really matter what the subject of the conference is, where it’s happening specifically, or why you’re going. However, a big draw of this event is getting to meet fellow professionals and exchanging tips and experiences, with the outcome of the event some kind of shared digital artifacts that capture the top highlights. There will be ample WiFi at the event and something else: everyone attending the event is given a slate computer to use for the duration of the event.

In fact, this kind of access to computing has become quite common; and with data access and portability vastly improved, the need to carry around personal electronics of any kind has all but gone away. In fact, the very thought of bringing a personal laptop — even a netbook — to the conference — now seems obtuse, as though you were bringing your own rotary phone and Yellow Pages to the conference.

It is also not possible to “install” applications on the device; instead, any application or service you need is available on-demand, available as a zero-footprint web service.

This device is the definition of a web native device; it serves dual purposes: to make computing extremely convenient, and abundant. It omits all the distractions and bells and whistles in favor of a lean, clean user experience, and is designed to augment — rather than replace — human interaction, as a whiteboard or pad of paper might.

The “browser” on this device has been modified to accommodate a new mode of online interaction. While it has retained a number of browser conventions, it introduces new capabilities that enhance personalization, sharing, and collaboration by carving out specific interfaces dedicated to interacting with people and web services.

When you turn on the device for the first time, you’re asked to activate the machine by signing in to your preferred identity service provider. You can either choose from a list of well known providers or supply an OpenID Connect-enabled account address.

Once activated, the device becomes an “extension” of your existing digital identity and any activity that you perform on the device will be attached to that identity. You may activate additional identities in order to assume discreet roles, but most people get by with as few as one or two active digital identities at any given time.

To that point, passwords are a thing of the past. With the advances in data portability and service interoperability, all modern sites and web services accept users from other networks (just as we take for granted the ability to email people from different domains today), making it possible to connect with, follow, and share with people on other networks without needing to create a new account. For most people, you only need one account for all your computing activities.

To better illustrate activation, I’ll draw an analogy to selecting your active gamer profile on an Xbox: once you’ve logged in with your gamertag, all your high scores, achievements, customizations, and social connections get attached to your profile. You don’t create a new gamertag for every game you play, nor for every social network (Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, etc) that you add to your profile. Instead, your gamertag is like a meta-identity to which you attach services, preferences, and attributes. This gamertag becomes a convenient, reusable identity.

Furthermore, if you visit a friend’s house and sign in to her Xbox with your gamertag, you’ll be able to bring all those preferences, connections, and achievements with you. You would set up and use the account system of this web-based device in the same way. In our future scenario, you would likely activate the same account that you use in your typical computing tasks while at the conference — picking up from where you left off — bringing access to all the resources and services you use, without the hassle of having to bring your own device, or remember more than one password.

During the course of the event, you would be able to make use of the built-in sharing capabilities to trade notes, photos, and videos with attendees co-located and remote. You could also follow those speakers and presenters who you find interesting, again, using the built-in features of the social agent.

On the expo floor, you could use the device to wirelessly connect your account to any of the exhibitors, taking photos, making notes, and swapping contact information or gathering information to read later — which would all be seamlessly and securely synced to your cloud provider.

Best of all, because these activities would be performed under a primary account, it would be easy for you to revisit this experience later — filtering the connections and contacts you made by time, location, or contextual activity (for example, did you meet this person because they were a speaker, or were you introduced to this person through a mutual friend?). You would also have digital receipts of the information that you shared with people, and be able to recall the products and organizations you started following while at the event. In other words, rather than having to perform these different types of common tasks across a number of separate networks after the fact, your social agent would mediate these tasks for you — ultimately freeing you up to focus on the event itself — and the interactions with your fellow attendees.

. . .

Our opportunity, then, is to define how the browser could serve us better if it were recast as a social agent. To begin with, we need to make two assumptions:

• First, there’s no reason why the browser should remain a passive bystander in our online experience. With increasing information abundance, we require smart and sophisticated tools that bring us the information that we need to know, when we need to know it, and that brings back our focus, productivity, and accelerates our understanding of the world around us.
• Second, the social agent serves as an extension of the self into the web. Just as the mouse and keyboard facilitate the interaction between man and machine, the social agent facilitates the interaction between people through the medium of the web. We trust the keyboard to “communicate” our keystrokes to the computer just as we typed them, and expect the browser to help us articulate our connections other people directly. As the trust between the browser and man grows, we are extending ourselves into the digital medium — augmenting our access and ability to manipulate information — and enhancing our ability to connect with others. And yet, the browser is cast in the image of an infovore — and not a social being. Thus the potential to retool the browser as a social agent is huge, and remains largely unexplored territory, especially as we are spending more of our computing time in this application.

As the nexus of all of our online activities the browser is uniquely positioned to provide convenient and consistent access to friends, contacts, documents, and media across networks. And as an extension of man, the social agent is a fulcrum of user-centric computing — turning the individual into the point of integration by rejecting the current rash of fragmented service-centric identities. As far as the individual is concerned, it should be a choice whether one decides to fragment his identity into a thousand partial profiles strewn across the web, rather than a mandate.

From Mozilla’s perspective, the social agent offers dignity to the individual and brings balance to a chaotic ecosystem.

Just as Firefox has brought choice and innovation to a once-monopolistic browser market, the next generation browser must bring choice to the rapidly centralizing world of social networks. To achieve this, we need more than just another social network; we need a vision of the social web that is built on upon technological interoperability that fosters agency for the citizen of the web.

As my contribution to the Mozilla Concept Series on Identity, this series will explore the following hypotheses:

• that people’s experience on the web would be enhanced if the browser offered more compelling, integrated social functionality
• that the browser can be made social, becoming a personal, social agent
• that a social agent can minimize the overhead of participating in the social web and maximize the benefits
• that the architecture of identity in the browser is critical to achieving simplicity and clarifying the experience of social networking
• that a social agent should simplify and reduce the work necessary of web developers to create secure, compelling social applications
• that social functionality must be built into the browser in order to spread the benefits of the social web as wide as possible
• that establishing trust is essential to growing the social web, and that trust can be earned by putting the individual, rather than services, at the center of the personal social web experience

This series of posts will sketch out a vision for the future of social computing, and is intended to provoke discussion, critique, and alternative proposals. In my mockups, I depict three new flows that adding three new verbs (connect, follow, and share) could bring to the browser. Subsequent posts will tackle each of these topics in turn:

• Connect: acting as your social agent, the browser becomes an extension of yourself, making it easier and more secure to participate in the social web
• Follow: as a replacement for the antiquated notion of “subscribing”, “following” becomes the general way to track the activities or feeds associated with a people, brands, celebrities, or social objects.
• Share: as the fundamental activity of the social web, sharing media, content, and information is integrated into the browser and enhanced through making available social connections and publishing services

And this disaster still unfolds, with scores pitching in — many turning to the social web and social media to facilitate or amplify their efforts.

One such effort is being lead by Project EPIC, a collection of information scientists, computer scientists and computational linguists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Irvine.

Their initiative, called Tweak the Tweet, provides a dictionary of hashtags for reporting on issues on the ground in Haiti and calling for aid. Here are templates for using their syntax:

I applaud their efforts and desire to help people communicate their status in a way that facilitates machine-processing. I worry, however, that this approach may limit its success.

Hashtags are metadata for humans first, machines second

The original need for hashtags came from the lack of any formal or public grouping mechanism in Twitter.

For example, when half of Silicon Valley went to SXSW and tweeted for days on end about this speaker or that panel, those who weren’t at the conference desperately wanted some way to filter out such noise. I proposed the hashmark (#) as a way of adding context to a tweet, so that people could choose for themselves to filter out or follow tweets tagged with certain keywords. In July last year, Twitter decided to hyperlink hashtags to their respective search results, and the format became widely adopted — more often than not used to game the trending topics on Twitter’s homepage.

Initially, most people thought hashtags were ugly and useless; even the folks at Twitter thought that they were unnecessary because they’d eventually develop natural language processing algorithms that would supersede the need manual tagging. Contrary to initial complaints about their complexity, hashtags become easier to understand and use with repeated exposure and practice because they are so transparent: if you see someone use a hashtag, you know how to use a hashtag.

And so three years later, hashtags still serve a role in helping people express themselves to each other.

Keep it simple, make it memorable

Language is inherently mutable; mathematics (the language of machines) is not. Verbal language can be adapted by a speaker, and what is heard (or read) is itself interpreted; the conversion is never digital, and invariably bears some loss of meaning.

But using hashtags to clarify meaning prioritizes the needs of the machine over the capabilities of the individual.

Such imposed order in a networked environment can succeed, but only if it achieves instant, widespread adoption, and is itself superficial (that is, it doesn’t require deep knowledge to understand or use the new order). In contrast, simpler, smaller and emergent structures tend to fare better over time, but developing them is not easy (see also: slashtags).

Successful structures should also aim for minimal cognitive burden — by being easy to remember and recall in practice. I’ve frequently seen people tweet about how they “forget to use hashtags” in posts — which is not surprising, since most people don’t think about the metadata of what they say. Hashtags and slashtags are most useful, therefore, when you want to provide additional context that is harder to express otherwise.

Learning from previous efforts

The Tweak the Tweet project introduces a “new order” for using Twitter. Though the words it calls out are mostly common, the use of the hashmark seems gratuitous, given the limited length of the medium (something that Stowe Boyd points out) and that the hashed words comprise the meat of the message, rather than the meta. To give you an example, this is Tweak-the-Tweet formatted post (77 characters):

#haiti #offering #volunteers #translators #loc Florida #contact @FranceGlobal

The same message could be reformatted to be human-readable without any loss of meaning (72 characters):

Offering volunteer translators in Florida. Contact @FranceGlobal. #haiti

While the message may not be as machine-friendly, it may reach a wider (human) audience available to respond to this offer.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss this effort, but instead provide a word of caution on focus. Tweak the Tweet is not the first hashtag pidgin language I’ve seen — and previous efforts struggled to gain adoption and awareness. Perhaps by minimizing the metadata and maximizing the meat, the effort poured into this might achieve a greater effect.

Paving the cowpaths and bulldozing fields

#sandiegofire

Hashtags may never have taken off if it weren’t for Nate Ritter tweeting about the San Diego forest fire in 2007. In fact, his use of the hashtag was the first dedicated use of a hashtag to help coordinate a response to a natural disaster:

What’s important about his use of hashtags in this case was that he was using them to communicate critical information to people in natural language. His use of the hashtag provided additional context to his followers who weren’t in San Diego, and also modeled a behavior that others could easily emulate when reporting their own news.

When I proposed using #sandiegofire as the hashtag for Nate to use, I first looked at what people were already using the tag their photos of the event on Flickr. At the time, the sandiegofire was one of the trending tags, and that’s how I chose it:

Had I tried to come up with my own new phrase for the event, Nate’s use of the tag may not have been picked up. #sandiegofire was also better than the alternatives, which were more localized and therefore more obscure to the broader audience. Using “SanDiego” in the tag itself helped bring clarity and context to Nate’s tweets.

Using hashtags effectively means considering the audience and their familiarity with the issue being tweeted about. While tagging lets you be as esoteric as you want, it may limit the reach of your effort, whereas paving the cowpaths means that you build on the familiar and connect with what people already know, reducing friction and inviting contribution.

iList with #ihave and #iwant

iList is an interesting service that originally aimed to take on eBay and Craigslist by leveraging social media. More recently they decided to narrow their efforts to focus on hashtag-based listings and Twitter search. Nonetheless, what I think is interesting about their approach is that it is, on the surface, quite simple.

To use the service, you just tag your tweet with #ihave or #iwant. If you want to get more detailed, you can add your zip code or categories like #forsale or #electronics. But the core service relies on using just two tags which seem to be have moderate usage — proving that getting adoption is always the hard part of any metadata-based communication strategy.

Twitter Vote Report#votereport

The last example is very similar to Tweak the Tweet and was launched by some friends of mine. The Twitter Vote Report project was designed to enable citizens to report on their local voting situation by using a series of hashtags:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345?
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #early if you’re voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

All tags were optional except the #votereport tag.

They also went through painstaking effort to mobilize people and provide alternative means to participate. They also did a good deal of work to report back their findings in real time (most visualizations appear to be offline) and open sourced their codebase.

They also made sure to make it possible to participate without using Twitter — the hashtags were just a mechanism for getting data into the system.

Design for adoption, stay focused

Around the time it launched, Ethan Zuckerman expressed skepticism about whether Twitter was the appropriate tool for the vote report project, in much the same way I’m wondering whether Tweak the Tweet could take a more focused approach in exchange for wider participation to achieve its goals.

My greatest concern is that there won’t be enough people who can “speak” the “tweaked” syntax, leading to a lot of effort spent building parsers that will be data-starved. While trained volunteers might be able to use this syntax effectively, I wonder if there aren’t alternative approaches that could use the existing corpus of text messages and tweets coming out of Haiti (which probably aren’t geo-coded, unfortunately) to discern the typing patterns that people use naturally in order to facilitate adoption? Perhaps by focusing on fewer tags that are self-evident in their meaning and use, it is possible that this effort could be used to model the proper usage of the tags, making a more direct difference while there’s still time? Unless the audience of this effort is expert users, I’d suggest steering towards simplicity and ease of adoption — and being mindful that typing out a complicated machine-friendly syntax might be the last thing on someone’s mind who’s trying to find or offer help in such a disaster.

First: Stowe Boyd deserves credit for Microsyntax. I just pitched in in the beginning and use the wiki to document some ideas I’ve had. I didn’t start the project, though I do think it’s a useful convening spot.

As well, Stowe and I have different ideas about microsyntax, and it’s worth taking the time to grok his perspective.

Second: when I wrote my post on what are now called slashtags, I was just documenting what I was doing… not necessarily intending to tell other people what to do. Hey, if people copied me, I figured, they might as well “get” what I was up to. Hence my blog post.

As with hashtags, I just started using them and didn’t wait for anyone to agree with me! Now, I did look at what people were doing, or what conventions already existed, which is a point that Karl made:

My suggestion to anyone looking to build tools that tease out meaning from the conversation that is happening on twitter should look carefully at the communication and social norms that are emerging and leverage that.

And that Aral also makes:

There is no centralized authority that approves Twitterformat proposals – Twitterformats are contributed and implemented by the community and they live or die based on whether Twitter client developers adopt them or not.

When I originally proposed hashtags, they imitated IRC, Jaiku, Delicious, and Flickr. In that way, they were derived and codified rather than invented — though I suppose they were somewhat novel, as no one had really been thinking about “Twitter Typography” in 2007.

As with slashtags, the whole point is to make a tweet more readable — or, as I like to say, to “separate the meta from the meat“. Each slashtag, thus, doesn’t need its own slash, and you can daisy-chain them together:

[tweet content] /cc @username1 via @username2

The slash, therefore, is a way of saying: “hey, here’s some meta data for this post — you can ignore it if you want — the good stuff is to the left!”.

So, even though it may not seem like it at first, all these formats that I’ve proposed and use are really intended for people first, and machines second (something I learned from microformats). I don’t think that people will use them if they’re not fairly easy to use, remember, and aren’t more convenient than what they’re doing already. And by “convenient”, I mean that they make it easy to communicate over a constrained channel clearer and more effectively than not using them.

Just as typographic markup (i.e. punctuation like periods, exclamation points, commas, semi-colons) makes prose more readable, slashtags and hashtags are designed to make communicating over Twitter better and more efficiently reflect the intentional message of the author. If the format succeeds at enhancing expression, then they will be adopted; if not, they will likely wither on the vine.

Perhaps it’s useful to remember that my background is in communication design and typography, rather than format or data design. If you think about from that perspective, hashtags and slashtags will probably make a lot more sense!

While you could chalk up the effect of the video to clever editing, I’ve seen similar videos that suggest that the attitudes expressed are probably a pretty accurate portrayal of how some people think (and, for the purposes of this essay, I’m less interested in what they think).

It seems to me that the people in the video largely think with their guts, and not their brains. I’m not making a judgment about their intelligence, only recognizing that they seem to evaluate the world from a different perspective than I do: with less curiosity and apparent skepticism. This approach would explain George W Bush’s appeal as someone who “lead from the gut“. It’s probably also what Al Gore was talking about in his book, Assault on Reason.

Many in my discipline (design) tend to think of the consumers of their products as being rational, thinking beings — not unlike themselves. This seems worse when it comes to engineers and developers, who spend all of their thinking time being mathematically circumspect in their heads. They exhibit a kind of pattern blindness to the notion that some people act completely from gut instinct alone, rarely invoking their higher faculties.

How, then, does this dichotomy impact the utility or usability of products and services, especially those borne of technological innovation, given that designers and engineers tend to work with “information in the mind” while many of the users of their products operate purely on the visceral plane?

In writing about the death of the URL, I wanted to expose some consequences of this division. While the intellectually adventuresome are happy to embrace or create technology to expand and challenge their minds (the popularity and vastness of the web a testament to that fact), anti-intellectuals seem to encounter technology as though it were a form of mysticism. In contrast to the technocratic class, anti-intellectuals on the whole seem less curious about how the technology works, so long as it does. Moreover, for technology to work “well” (or be perceived to work well) it needs to be responsive, quick, and for the most part, completely invisible. A common sentiment I hear is that the less technology intrudes on their lives, the better and happier they believe themselves to be.

So, back to the death of the URL. As has been argued, the URL is ugly, confusing, and opaque. It feels technical and dangerous. And people just don’t get them. This is a sharp edge of the web that seems to demand being sanded off — because the less the inner workings of a technology are exposed in one’s interactions with it, the easier and more pleasurable it will be to operate, within certain limitations, of course. Thus to naively enjoy the web, one needn’t understand servers, DNS, ports, or hypertext — one should just “connect”, pick from a list of known, popular, “destinations”, and then point, click — point, click.

And what’s so wrong with that?

What I find interesting about the social web is not the technology that enables it, but that it bypasses our “central processor” and engages the gut. The single greatest thing about the social web is how it has forced people to overcome their technophobias in order to connect with other humans. I mean, prior to the rise of AOL, being online was something that only nerds did. Few innovations in the past have spread so quickly and irreversibly, and it’s because the benefits of the social web extend beyond the rational mind, and activate our common ancestors’ legacy brain. This widens the potential number of people who can benefit from the technology because rationality is not a requirement for use.

Insomuch as humans have cultivated a sophisticated sociality over millennia, the act of socializing itself largely takes place in the “gut”. That’s not to say that there aren’t higher order cognitive faculties involved in “being social”, but when you interact with someone, especially for the first time, no matter what your brain says, you still rely a great deal on what your gut “tells you” — and that’s not a bad thing. However, when it comes to socializing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, we’re necessarily engaging more of our prefrontal cortex to interpret our experience because digital environments lack the circumstantial information that our senses use to inform our behavior. To make up for the lack of sensory information, we tend to scan pages all at once, rather than read every word from top to bottom, looking for cues or familiar handholds that will guide us forward. Facebook (by name and design) uses the familiarity of our friends’ faces to help us navigate and cope with what is otherwise typically an information-poor environment that we are ill-equipped to evaluate on our own (hence the success of social engineering schemes and phishing).

As we redesign more of our technologies to provide social functionality, we should not proceed with mistaken assumption that users of social technologies are rational, thinking, deliberative actors. Nor should we be under the illusion that those who use these features will care more about neat tricks that add social functionality than the socialization experience itself. That is, technology that shrinks the perceived distance between one person’s gut and another’s and simply gets out of the way, wins. If critical thinking or evaluation is required in order to take advantage of social functionality, the experience will feel, and thus be perceived, as being frustrating and obtuse, leading to avoidance or disuse.

Given this, no where is the recognition of the gut more important than in the design and execution of identity technologies. And this, ultimately, is why I’m writing this essay.

It might seems strange (or somewhat obsessive), but as I watched the Sarah Palin video above, I thought about how I would talk to these people about OpenID. No doubt we would use very different words to describe the same things — and I bet their mental model of the web, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google would differ greatly from mine — but we would find common goals or use cases that would unite us. For example, I’m sure that they keep in touch with their friends and family online. Or they discover or share information — again, even if they do it differently than me or my friends do. Though we may engage with the world very differently — at root we both begin with some kind of conception of our “self” that we “extend” into the network when we go online and connect with other people.

The foundation of those connections is what I’m interested in, and why I think designing for the gut is something that technocrats must consider carefully. Specifically, when I read posts like Jesse Stay’s concept of a future without a login button, or evaluate the mockups for an “active identity client” based on information cards or consider Aza and Alex’s sketches for what identity in the browser could look like, I try to involve my gut in that “thought” process.

Now, I’m not just talking about intuition (though that’s a part of it). I’m talking about why some people feel “safer” experiencing the web with companies like Google or Facebook or Yahoo! at their side, or how frightening the web must seem when everyone seems to need you to keep a secret with them in order to do business (i.e. create a password).

I think the web must seem incredibly scary if you’re also one of those people that’s had a virus destroy your files, or use a computer that’s still infected and runs really slow. For people with that kind of experience as the norm, computers must seem untrustworthy or suspicious. Rationally you could try to explain to them what happened, or how the social web can be safe, but their “gut has already been made up.” It’s not a rational perception that they have of computers, it’s an instinctual one — and one that is not soon overcome.

Thus, when it comes to designing identity technologies, it’s very important that we involve the gut as a constituent of our work. Overloading the log in or registration experience with choice is an engineer’s solution that I’ve come to accept is bound to fail. Instead, the act of selecting an identity to “perform as” must happen early in one’s online session — at a point in time equivalent to waking up in the morning and deciding whether to wear sweatpants or a suit and tie depending on whatever is planned for the rest of the day.

Such an approach is a closer approximation to how people conduct themselves today — in the real world and from the gut — and must inform the next generation of social technologies.