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.

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

Yesterday’s launch of Google Buzz and the fledgling Google Buzz API is like a downpayment on what I see as Google’s broader social web ambitions, that have been bubbling beneath the surface for some time. Understand that Buzz is not entirely an end unto itself, but a way for Google to get some skin in the game to promote the use and adoption of different open technologies for the social web.

In fact, I’d argue that Buzz is as much about Google creating a new channel for conversation in a familiar place as it is about how we’re going about building its public developer surfaces. Although today’s Buzz API only offers a real-time read-only activity stream, the goal is to move quickly towards implementing a host of other technologies — most of which should be familiar to readers of this blog.

As Kevin Marks observes, in order to address the mess of the social web that Mike Arrington described, we need widespread use [of common standards] so that we can generalize across sites — and thus enable people to interact and engage across the web , rather than being restricted to any particular silo of activity — which may or may not reflect their true social configuration.

In other words, standards — and in particular social web standards — are the lingua franca that make it possible for uninitiated web services to interact in a consistent manner. When web services use standards to commoditize essential and basic features, it forces them to compete not with user lock-in, but by providing better service, better user experience, or with new functionality and utility. I am an advocate of the open web because I believe the open web leads to increased competition, which in turn affords people better options, and more leverage in the world.

Buzz is both a terrific product, and a great example of how the social web is evolving and becoming truly ubiquitous. Buzz is simply one more stitch in the fabric of the social web.

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.

I’ve been thinking about how we make OpenID both easier and sexier for quite a while now. As frustrating as the answer may be to technologists, the problem is not necessarily one that can be solved with more technology. Instead, at some point, you have to move beyond the original constituents of a solution and start to package up the thing in a way that is less alienating, and less “insider baseball”.

“OpenID Connect”, therefore, is what I’m starting to use in casual conversation as my answer to Twitter and Facebook Connect.

It’s really creative, I know. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Seriously though, from a marketing perspective — it’s what I want the OpenID Foundation (and our new board) to offer the world in 2010. Essentially I think it’s time we ditched the “Open Stack” concept and put something out there that can stand up in conversation alongside the likes of Facebook Connect, in all its rich and specific expressiveness.

At some point, I want OpenID Connect to be what Facebook and Google and others implement that becomes the interoperable identity interchange protocol for the social web. But we’re not quite there yet, though all the technology is on the verge of being… ready.

Speaking of, from a technical perspective — I’m really just talking about repackaging OpenID as a profile of OAuth WRAP (credit: Recordon). It would provide relying parties with profile data, relationships, access to content, and activity streams — based on Recordon’s anatomy of connect.

Unlike the current incarnation, it would work in real-time, distributed systems, on the desktop as well as in mobile devices. Huzzah!

We’re not even that far away from such a solution. Since OpenID really just bootstraps identity — we need a way to provide relying parties with all the other stuff they’ve come to expect from the Twitter and Facebook Connect APIs… and that’s where the “connect” in “OpenID Connect” comes in.

So, to summarize:

• for the non-tech, uninitiated audiences: OpenID Connect is a technology that lets you use an account that you already have to sign up, sign in, and bring your profile, contacts, data, and activities with you to any compatible site on the web.
• for techies: OpenID Connect is OpenID rewritten on top of OAuth WRAP using service discovery to advertise Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and any other well known API endpoints, and a means to automatically bootstrap consumer registration and token issuance.

I suppose that realization was just as potent as the high school realization that I’d be entering college one year before 2000, and that a decade after that (i.e. this year), we’d supposedly have made contact with aliens by now.

In any case, it got me thinking that, in all likelihood, I’m going to make it to 2050. I’ll be 69 years old, and imagine by then, will have much more perspective, knowledge, and wisdom than I have now.

Still though, life never ceases to amaze (as the expression goes) and so I’m curious what you think: picture yourself waking up 40 years from now and saying to yourself, “Y’know, in 2050, I never would have imagined…” and then complete the sentence.

You can either leave your response here, or tweet it with the tag #in2050.

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 &emdash; 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.

But one must ask himself: was it really so different then?

Superficially of course it certainly seems to like things are quite different from back then: faster, bigger, and more connected for starters.

The hallmark of this change, it would seem, is the simple status update. As more people have taken to publishing online, we the group formerly known as the audience has invariably gravitated to consuming smaller and smaller bits of content, leading to a culture of snack-sized sociality. For many of us, the status update seems distinctly modern — a sign of the times, cut from the networked medium of the age:

But hold on. Take a closer look there.

That tweet above? It’s a fake. It’s photoshopped. I took that content from one of those postcards I found in Pauline’s shop. It was post stamped in 1940:

Just goes to show that the more things appear to change, the more we prove what habitual creatures we are.

…Though I don’t doubt Miss Phyllis Epstein’s reply was terse, I reckon she was ever able to reply quite so immediately:

So maybe the drive to communicate, coordinate, and group hasn’t changed much, but perhaps our ability to do so quickly, cheaply, and at an unprecedented scale has? It’s surely no surprise, but only time will tell.

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.