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.

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.”

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.

Prelude

You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember — all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.

In the Matrix, Morpheus presents Neo with a choice: he can take the blue pill and continue his somnambulatory existence within the Matrix, or he can take the red pill and become free from the virtual reality that the machines created to enslave humanity.

As you can see from the clip above, Neo chooses the red pill, severing his connection to the Matrix and regaining his free will.

Everyday, when you fire up your browser and type in some arbitrary URL in the browser’s address bar, you are taking the red pill.

Increasingly though, I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL.

Call me crazy, but it seems obvious enough when you put on the right colored paranoia goggles.

Exhibit A: Web TV

There’s an article in Friday’s USA Today suggesting that we’re finally at a point where web TV has a chance. But there’s an insidious underbelly to this story. Specifically: Consumers may balk if TV sets become too computerlike and complicated.

From the article:

Manufacturers say they learned an important lesson from earlier convergence failures: Viewers want to relate to sets as televisions, not computers.

That’s why the new Web TV models don’t come with browsers that would give people the freedom to surf the full Internet, even though the TVs connect to the Web via an ethernet cable or home wireless network. The companies want to promote consumer acceptance of Web TV by making the technology simple to use: That means no keyboard or mouse.

It’s just Step 1: Engineers are talking about changes that would make it easy to navigate the Internet. One thought is to program smartphones so they can change channels, send text messages to the set and move a cursor around the screen with the motion-sensitive technology that Nintendo uses with its Wii game system.

For now, though, people just need the TV remote control to select and launch prepackaged applications.

Emphasis mine.

In a twist of McLuhanesque determinism, it would appear that the apparatus and determinism of the television experience will overrule the freedom and flexibility of the web — because, well, frankly — all that choice…! It’s so… unseemly and unmonetizable.

Instead, Web TV will be made easier to use by removing the best parts of the web and augmenting the straightjacket features of the television.

Exhibit B: Litl, ChromeOS, JoliCloud, and Apple Tablet

I somewhat serendipitously stumbled upon Litl — a little design project of famous design firm Pentagram.

The thing is cool, I admit. The netbook/webbook market needs some design thinking. And heck, I’m as eager as anyone to see what Apple is going to do in this space, so I’m watching it closely… but something tells me that the next generation “PC” devices are going to revolve around slicker, streamlined interfaces that come pre-packaged with fewer choices drawn from a set of likely suspects (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo et al.).

Taking a look at the JoliCloud homescreen… you can start to see how this will be the next Firefox search box in terms of monetization:

Though I imagine you’ll be able to set custom options here, it’s the defaults that matter.

…and these homescreens become yet another funnel to drive users to a predetermined (and paid for) set of options.

Exhibit C: Top Sites

Similar to the netbook homescreens, both Safari and Chrome provide home pages that show you thumbnails of the sites that you visit most often (coincidence? I think not!).

Seems an innocuous feature. I mean, isn’t it easier to just click a picture of where you want to go rather than typing in some awkward string that starts with HTTP into the address bar?

AH HA! So, you’d take the blue pill eh?

See the problem?

Just as browsers currently come with a set of default bookmarks today, there’s no reason why the next generation browsers won’t come with their own predefined set of “Top Sites”, that, not unlikely, will come from the same list of predetermined companies that populate the home screens of the next gen Net/Web Books.

The more that the browser address bar can be made obsolete, the more it becomes just like TV, right?

Exhibit D: Warning interstitials and short URL frames

If you use Facebook, you’ve probably seen the above warning before — usually after clicking a link that a friend sent you. Now, I recognize why they do this. It’s true: on the internet, thar be dragons!

Now, nevermind the dragons on Facebook proper — this innocuous little screen was designed, one assumes, to keep you safe from things outside the Facebook universe. However, the net effect of seeing this page every time you click an outbound link is fatigue. You get worn down by having to click through this page until finally, after a while, you just give up and stop clicking links from your friends altogether. It just could be that a momentary delay like this is enough to change your behavior completely.

Even when you do decide to leave, Facebook comes with you — inserting 45 pixels of itself into your experience as a top frame:

This make it easier to get back to Facebook, and never skip a beat. But it also removes the need to visit the address bar and think about where you want to go next (let alone type it out). Of course Facebook isn’t the only service doing this — Digg and countless other short URL generators intrude on your web experience and put yet more distance between you and the address bar.

All these little hindrances add up — and if you’ve done any usability work — you know that the smallest changes can lead to huge impacts over time if the changes are so slight as to be essentially unnoticeable.

Exhibit E: The NASCAR

Now, this one hits close to home, y’know, since this is what I’ve been working on for the past year or so… but the reality is that more and more, companies are moving to accept this logo-splattered approach to user sign in forms — “the NASCAR” — which dispatches the uncomfortable “URL-based” metaphor of OpenID altogether.

Why?

Because it’s too “complicated“. People don’t get “URLs” for sign in.

Now, we’ve made progress moving forward with “email-style identifiers” for use in OpenID transactions, but we’re not there yet, and we’re not moving fast enough either.

The specter of the Facebook Connect button is ever-present, and, from a UI perspective, it’s hard to argue with one button to rule them all (even if it destroys individual autonomy in the process — hey! freedom is messy! Let’s scrap it!).

The NASCAR, then, is just one more way to put off teaching users to recognize that URLs can represent people too, chaining us to the silos and locking us into brand-mediated identities for yet another generation.

Exhibit F: App Stores

Finally, there’s been plenty written about this already, but what is the App Store except a cleaved out and sanitized portion of the web? In fact, people accustomed to the freedom and “flow” of the web go into anaphylactic shock when they realize that they must submit to the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of Steve Jobs when they want their iPhone app to show up in the Apple app store.

And it’s only going to get worse, because now everyone wants a goddamn app store.

Thanks a lot, Steve.

The rise of the “app store mentality” is a direct attack on the web, and on the very nature of free discovery and choice built upon URL-based hyperlinks. By depriving us the ability to pick and choose which “stores” we shop from on these devices — we’re empowering a new breed of middle men and ceding to them monopoly control over our digital experience. The architecture of the web was intended to withstand such threats — but that all changes when the hardware makers get into the content business! Even though developers are beginning to see the dark side of this faustian bargain, the momentum is huge — and big business smells money.

By removing our ability to navigate, choose, and share freely — these app stores are exchanging our freedom for a promise that they’ll keep us safe, give us everything we need, and do all the choosing of what’s “good enough” for us — all starting at ninety-nine cents a hit.

No doubt this model will be emulated and copied — across all platforms — until the last vestige of the URL is patched over and removed… the last reminder of an uncomfortable and much messier era of history.

Epilogue

I don’t know about you, but a future without URLs and without the infinite organicity of the web frightens me. It’s not that I know what we’ll lose by removing this artifact of one of the most generative periods in history — and that’s exactly the point! The URL and the ability for anyone to mint a new one and then propagate it is what makes the web so resilient, so empowering, and so interesting! That I don’t need to ask anyone permission to create a new website or webpage is a kind of ideological freedom that few generations in history have known!

Now, granted, there is still much work to be done to spread the power and privilege of the web, but what I don’t want to see happen in the meantime is the next generation of kids grow up with an “easier” laptop, Web Top, Net Book, Nook, or whatever the hell they’re going to call it — that lacks an address bar. I don’t want the next generation to grow up with TV-stupid controls and a set of predefined widgets that determine the totality and richness of their experience on a mere subset of the web! That future cannot be permitted!

Maybe I’m wrong or just paranoid, and maybe the web has won, forever. But I’m not willing to rest on my laurels. No way.

We all know that the internet has won as the transport medium for all data — but the universal interface for interacting with the web? — well, that battle is just now getting underway.

As a user experience designer, it’s on my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve!

Well, friends, I’ve said my piece. Whether this threat is real or imagined, it’s one that I believe bears inspection.

Like Neo, if I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the “comfortability” of a contrived existence, I’d choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too.

Brightkite, a location-tracking service, recently launched version 2.0 of their service after merging with Limbo and taking $9M in funding this past April.

In recent months I’ve found myself using Foursquare more and more, though I still update Brightkite from time to time since it powers the location status on my personal homepage. In some ways, Foursquare is to Brightkite what Twitter was to Jaiku: a more personal, streamlined experience that builds on a core activity and dispenses will all other distractions. And, through game-like mechanisms, get you to perform the core activity more regularly (i.e. mayorships in the case of Foursquare, and, up until recently, follower counts in the case of Twitter).

I bring this up because I just stumbled upon Brightkite’s advertising section of their website, and there’s some extremely interesting stuff in there!

First of all, it’s very clear that Brightkite is one of the first (at least in my experience) to be pushing their location platform as a walk-up-and-create ad platform, much in the same way that Facebook is (you can start creating your own Facebook ads here).

Like Brightkite, Facebook gives you a considerable amount of control over the targeting of your advertisement as well, which leverages Facebook’s horde of user-contributed demographic information:

But here’s where Brightkite’s platform gets interesting: this class of mobile ads — which we’ve known have been coming for some time (so-called proximity marketing) — target the individual based on their location and real-time behavior. Thus, when a user engages in some kind of action or activity tracked by Brightkite, the system can respond with an “appropriate” ad in real-time, triangulated off of a number of aspects of the user’s situation. Brightkite has enumerated the current set of attributes that they use:

• Location and place
• Real world behavior
• Time of day
• Activity
• Demographics
• Language
• Content and interests
• Weather

The only thing missing, it seems, is friends, but they could easily fit into the “content and interests” category.

Now, as a user, if Brightkite is able to leverage all this information — presuming that I’ve provided them with accurate information — the ads in their app better be friggin’ awesome.

Indeed, Brightkite’s blog post on freebies (as in, “free beer”) suggests as much, and the example they provide shows that Brady (Brightkite co-founder), having checked into the Rackhouse Pub, has just been offered a free draft or well drink:

Hard to argue with that. But this is where things get dicey, isn’t it?

Maybe I’m reading this image wrong, but since Brady’s already in the Rackhouse Pub, why would they want to give him a free beer? Unless Brightkite is underwriting such a promo (say, to counter Foursquare’s similar promos), Rackhouse Pub wants to get OTHER people in — not just give away drinks to their current patrons.

Of course there are countless ways to spin this — for better and worse.

Word of mouth for Rackhouse Pub could skyrocket, since people would virally spread the offer to their friends through social networks — amounting to a fairly cost-effective way to “acquire” new customers, especially if Rackhouse is able to recoup the costs of its giveaway on new dine-in guests.

But it could also backfire. For the price of a free downloadable iPhone app, countless single-drink seekers could take up Rackhouse on their offer and then leave, making for a costly marketing ploy with little upside.

Who knows. It all depends on how Brightkite “pushes” this kind of information to its users.

And Brightkite et al. aren’t alone in this space. Some companies are starting to leverage location and social networks in their own apps too. For instance, the 1.1 update to the Starbucks iPhone app adds Twitter, Facebook, and location-sharing features:

Now, with all these companies offering deals and incentives, I want a piece of the action! But I don’t want to be treated like some generic, disposable target. I want to be engaged with, and respected by, companies that want my business.

We have a long way to go to make this kind of engagement simpler, but longterm, I want to be the one who manages who does and doesn’t get the right to “target” me. I don’t want to opt-out — I want companies to request the privilege of showing up on my phone, in my activity stream, or in my inbox when I ask them to, at my convenience. I want to be able to put out a list of my desires and requirements, and then have companies bid for my business. And it’s fine with me if there’s a middleman broker in the middle that takes a cut, as long as I’m getting a better deal with better service than I would have otherwise.

Is that too much to ask?

Some months back, I wrote up a vision for what I call “connected commerce“, using Comixology as a preview of where I see this going, though that service is still far too manual, anti-social, and, critically, a bottleneck between me and my preferred retailer. This is a recipe for disaster, as Apple’s App Store continues to prove.

Attention brokers, like Brightkite, therefore, need to remember their place in this ecosystem: they need to first be the friend to and advocate of the individual (their customer), and second, to the advertiser or brand. Companies that don’t get this prioritization right will fail (and is why, in some respects, Facebook continues to change its platform rules while drawing the ire of developers, because, in order to keep their users, they must ultimately continue to make their environment a safer and more trustworthy space).

Doc Searls calls this consumer-driven leverage VRM or “vendor relationship management”. I’ve been a fan of the idea, but I think it falls down on the last word: management. Big companies are willing to devote thousands and millions of dollars “managing” their customers; individuals are not. But services like Brightkite and Facebook are beginning to change that by enabling us to leverage our real-time, real-world behavior as a gating apparatus, removing the “management” requirement of VRM, and allowing us to “flow with the go”. As we invite these attention brokers into our list of recipients to whom we release increasingly contextualized and precise information about ourselves, we stand to benefit a great deal. And privacy, then, becomes a rational, economic instrument that determines whether a company gets to serve us well (based on knowing us better) or clumsily (as they make presumptions about us through circumstance rather than intentional disclosure).

Implicitly, I am already benefiting from such opt-in vendor relationships. Through Twitter, I’ve “invited” several local vendors to send me real-time updates about their offerings to me via SMS, from Luna Park around the corner to Sightglass Coffee across town. They’ve earned my trust by not spamming me, instead offering actual value and insider information, treating me as a member of their esteemed coterie.

On the surface this model doesn’t appear to scale, but that’s just a failure of imagination. Scaling up is what the web does — if you know how to embrace it. By giving individuals more control over their experience and over the kinds of data that they can share, the need to “target” (in the military sense), recedes. Instead, opportunity emerges from being available, on-demand, and ubiquitous. Attention aggregators and identity providers can then broker relationships on behalf of their customers, and both parties will, ideally, end up with a better experience, and stronger, enduring relationships.

I hope Brightkite and Foursquare and the other location-based services keep this in mind. In as much as we let them broker our attention, they work for us — and not the other way around.

Since it’s apparently all the rage to design your own features for Twitter now, I figured I’d build on my success with the hashtag and crank out a few more.

All of these are simple conventions for adding more standard metadata to a post in a specific, uniform way.

The Slasher

First, I’ve decided to migrate from encapsulating my metadata in parentheses to using a slash delimiter (“/”), which, for shits and giggles, we’ll call “the slasher”. This saves you ONE character, but hey, those singletons add up!

Now, the pointers. “Pointers” are short words with different intentions. A group of pointers should typically be prefixed by ONE slasher character. You can daisy-chain multiple pointer phrases together, padded on both sides with one whitespace character. There should be NO space following the slasher. Hashtags should be appended to the very end of a tweet, except when they are part of the content of the message itself and indicate some proper name or abbreviation. Normal words that would be part of the content of a tweet anyway SHOULD NOT be hashed.

If this doesn’t make sense yet, don’t worry, just read on.

Via

Let’s start with via, the first “pointer”.

The concept is simple and already widely used: sometimes you want to give credit to someone (as part of the pay-it-forward link economy) for something they said or linked to, without quoting them verbatim (which is what RT or “retweeting” is for, in my estimation and use). Now, a lot of people already use the “via” keyword — in fact, it’s a setting in Tweetie, and looks like this in practice:

My proposal is simple, but would look like this instead (note that there’s still no colon):

Saves you one character when used with the slasher delimiter and doesn’t look half bad.

CC

Next is cc — or “carbon copy” — not Creative Commons! Of course, if you ever used email this one should be obvious. The job of the CC is to indicate someone you want to direct a tweet at.

I follow 1600 people — and it’s highly unlikely I’m going to see everyone’s tweets — and I don’t really make an effort to do so. In the off-chance someone specifically wants to get my attention, they can just CC me, like I CC’d my friend Lauren in this tweet:

You’ll notice how, using the slash notation, you’re able to serially string together several pointer phrases: i.e. “/via @cshirky cc @laurendarby“.

By

The last one I’ll mention is by. As you can imagine, the “by” syntax is similar to “via” and “RT”, but not quite the same. It’s more like the cite or blockquote HTML tags in that they provide a simple way to attribute authorship for a longer-form piece — i.e. not from a status update or spoken utterance (that’s what RT and OH are for respectively).

Here, I’m quoting a passage by Dominiek ter Heide (@dominiek) that I took from a blog post that he wrote:

So, why bother writing these up? Well, I never expect that anyone will follow my lead, but if they do, I’d like to spell out what I’m doing so they can more or less get it right. It seemed to work with hashtags, and these ideas proposed here are even simpler. Now, you might not expect that, one, two, or three characters in tweets would make that much difference, but when you’re taking about a payload that maxes out at 140, each scintilla must carry its own significance. As such, there is value in coordinating our language, and providing some basic guidelines that emerge based on behavior — so that we can encode more meaning into these little blips of communication.

I’ve started tweeting using these patterns and invite you to do so as well when it makes sense. If you have your own ideas for microsyntax, Stowe Boyd started a wiki a while back to document them, so feel free to contribute your own or improve or use the ones already proposed!

These are the slides from my talk at the Mindtrek conference in Tampere, Finland today.

I admit that there are some controversial things in this talk, but if I don’t say it, I don’t know who will. So, for the purpose of understanding this talk, it’s worth keeping in mind that I mean “OpenID” in a much more expansive way — not limited to the purview of the features of the protocol today, but as an effective, comprehensive competitor to Facebook Connect.

As well, I’m working out what I really mean by “Identity as the Platform”, but my five touchpoints are currently:

1. Me at the center
2. Smarter user agents
3. Dynamic personal expression
4. Universal user experience
5. Data is money

I’ll be posting a video of my talk later, which should I expand on what these elements actually mean, but I’m happy for feedback in the meanwhile!

Also, I’m embedding this slideshow using Scribd as Slideshare wasn’t able to convert my slides. Let me know what you think.

In case you didn’t hear, OneWebDay is coming up next week on Tuesday, September 22.

The event is modeled after Earth Day and was started three years ago by Susan Crawford, a technology policy advisor to President Obama.

Mozilla is doing their part with their own poster/photo contestand a specific call to action:

1. Print and share an ‘I love the web poster’. Create a global wave that shows the web is a precious public resource.
2. Conduct an Internet Health Check. Find computers with Internet Explorer 6, and upgrade them to a more secure browser.
3. Donate to OneWebDay. Every time you donate, Mozilla will too.

I like the connection to Earth Day and the idea of highlighting the web as a “precious public resource“; it is true that if we don’t nurture and protect it, it could, for all we know, “go away” (whatever that might mean). And yes, in case you were wondering, that would be terrible.

Clearly many of us take the web for granted — and many more of us can barely remember a time before what is rapidly becoming a more people-centric web. Thus, I hope you’ll join me next Tuesday on OneWebDay to take a moment out to reflect on and celebrate this vast human-created wellspring of innovation, creativity, knowledge, and opportunity.

Earlier today, Rob Dolin announced the launch of additional sources of activities for Windows Live users — including MySpace, Hulu, Skyrock, and SlideShare.

Writing on the Windows Live Services blog, he outlines the premise behind the Activity Streams effort (emphasis original):

With today’s latest partner integrations on Windows Live, we’ll have over fifty web activities that Windows Live customers can add into their Windows Live experience. (To learn more about all the Windows Live partners, check out our Windows Live Team blog). Nearly all of the web activities employ a polling model where a customer enters some basic information about their presence on a website and then Windows Live periodically polls an XML feed of the customer’s activity on that site. In the past, this feed has been in RSS 2.0 or Atom and then for each partner, we have a custom XSLT that maps the elements from the customer’s feed to the data attributes in Windows Live’s system.

Challenges with Web Activities

There are two big challenges with this basic polling model of RSS 2.0 or Atom:

1. We need to develop a custom mapping for each partner
2. Each partner needs to have only one activity type or they need a way to communicate what type of activity each RSS 2.0 <item> or Atom <entry> is.

The emerging Activity Streams open standard comes in to help solve both of these problems.

How Activity Streams Help

Activity Streams help to address both of the above issues. First, instead of having to do a custom mapping for practically every Web Activities partner, with an open standard like Activity Streams, we can build a single mapping that can be used by multiple partners.

Second, Activity Streams includes <activity:verb> and <activity:object-type> elements so we can identify that one is a status update and another is a blog entry. Thus, services that have multiple activity types (like MySpace) can have a single feed that includes photos, status, blogs, music, and more.

This maps directly to my motivation in starting this effort, back in June of 2008:

The basic premise is this: lifestreams, alternatively known as “activity streams”, are great for discovering and exploring social media, as well as keeping up to date with friends (witness the main feature of Facebook and the rise of FriendFeed). I suggest that, with a little effort on the publishing side, activity streams could become much more valuable by being easier for web services to consume, interpret and to provide better filtering and weighting of shared activities to make it easier for people to get access to relevant information from people that they care about, as it happens.

By marking up social activities and social objects, delivered in standard feeds [...], we enable anyone to run a FriendFeed-like service that innovates and offers value based on how well it understands what’s going on and what’s relevant, rather than on its compatibility with any and every service.

We’ve come a long way since then — and the acquisition of FriendFeed only helps to reinforce the timeliness of this work.

It’s also been incredibly gratifying to see people like Rob and Monica Keller devote so much energy (see MySpace’s activity streams docs) to helping this effort get off the ground. Maintaining the momentum of this project has been challenging at times — considering that Mart Atkins (author of the Activity Streams specs) has a full time job at Six Apart and David Recordon (my other cohort) just left there to go work at Facebook (where Jerry Cain has been key in getting Facebook to adopt activity streams).

Seeing large players adopt the activity streams format is good for the open web ecosystem. It’s good for individual choice and for enabling market-based mechanisms that encourage competition and good behavior. It enables the decentralization of reading and publishing, and provides individuals with a record of both what their friends are doing as well as what they themselves have done. And these things are all good for the development of the people-centric social web.

Ok, so I see it now. It’s not like I didn’t have some notion of it before, but now it’s really obvious.

It would seem as though I’ve become one of those mean and despised open source nut-case curmudgeons with nothing nice to say.

How soon we forget the lessons our mothers taught us.

While constructive criticism is essential for keeping in context the various actions and decisions of industry players, consistently taking on the role of the negative creep just doesn’t jive with the more powerful approach of positive reinforcement. Just because I’m personally disappointed or disagree with someone’s decision doesn’t mean that my way is right, nor does it mean I’ve got all the facts that I need in order to deliver a credible critique. Worse, all this negativity just gets people’s backs up — reinforcing the very walls that I’ve been trying to tear down!

Case in point?

Writing for CNET, Open Road columnist Matt Asay cites my post on Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework to demonstrate how open source advocates (acolytes?) are potentially doing more harm than good with their vitriolic complaints:

Sigh. In open source, no good deed goes unpunished. There is no greater enemy to open source than itself.

[...]

…why would anyone expect Microsoft and its ilk to continue to court a community that ridicules and second-guesses its every attempt at perestroika? I know from conversations with several companies that they’re actually scared to engage the open-source community because the responses have been so intemperate and ideological.

I’m convinced that this element of the open-source community, vocal and sometimes vicious, is a minority. I’m equally convinced that we’d better off if this enemy within would spend more time analyzing its own behavior rather than shouting down the supposed “mudbloods” of open source.

But it’s not just Matt that made this point. In personal conversations and on Twitter… it’s clear that my rhetoric, though well-intentioned (in my mind), is perhaps missing the mark and needs an attitudinal adjustment. Furthermore — to Matt’s point — other people in open source that I respect have called me out on it — people like Alex Russell:

Reading your post makes me grumpy as someone who’s spent nearly all of his career building Open Source products. It makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that everyone else who choses a set of licensing terms *does so for the same reasons that you do*. It’s human nature to assume that others can and do share your perspective, but it’s as often wrong in software as it tends to be in other aspects of life.

“open washing”? “anti-community”? WTF?

The good arguments for OSS are economic…and your critique doesn’t begin to address Adobe (or anyone else’s) moves in that context. The code is MPL. The community process is likely not 100%, and together those things will define who *else* invests in this code. MPL is a fine license. That investment will determine if (and for whom) this announcement is good. Trying to tar Adobe for not being sufficiently slavish in their devotion to a cause that they can’t *ever* get on board with (economically speaking) seems…strange. Why bother?

And he’s right. Why bother ranting on for 1100+ words when the intended target is going to end up feeling bruised and angry, if they don’t just walk away altogether?

A much more civil tone could perchance reach the intended audience as well as a wider audience — and be replayed across many contexts beyond this blog’s readership: a wider, and therefore more valuable, contribution.

Though it’s no consolation, I am at least an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. I’ve poked Mozilla in the eye just as I have Microsoft. Adobe and Opera were only the most recent in a long line of targets that I’ve besmirched. When I write these tirades, in my head my intention is to inform and elucidate — trying to achieve contrast, if not through provocation. But without counterbalancing my complaints with some positivity from time to time, it just ends up sounding grating and unhelpful. And that’s something that I clearly need to work on.

So Matt, Alex, Ryan — others — message received. Perhaps this little personal intervention will lead to a more constructive approach to the challenge of evangelizing open source, while promoting and highlighting the aspects of it that I think are being forgotten as it becomes a more mainstream concept.

Of course there has been great progress made recently by the most unlikely of industry players — and for that, they should be praised and acknowledged. Never one to be satisfied (especially in my own endeavors), maybe I’ve just assumed that I need to stay up on the offensive, even as things have shifted. I mean, perhaps we have made so much progress that this new narrative that I keep talking about is necessary — and that continuing to fight when the battle’s been won risks alienation and undoing much of the progress that’s been made!

If I really believe that “this can all be made better”, perhaps I should recognize when it finally has?