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.

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.

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.

At one point in our discussion, I suggested that an HTML tag for a person might make sense — with the ability to include a person’s face or list of friends — without the need for services like Facebook or Twitter. This idea was inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s retelling of the origin story of the <img> tag and conversations I’ve had recently with Michael Hanson of Mozilla (who wrote up a concept for supporting WebFinger in the browser after discussions at IIW).

Our conversation goes on around 15 minutes but does a decent job of capturing my current thinking on the social web.

I’d also like to point out that an OpenWebCampHelsinki is happening this weekend, in case anyone happens to be passing through Finland!

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.

This post is a collaborative essay written by Jyri Engström and myself, edited by Brynn Evans and originally posted to the ArcticStartup blog on September 11, 2009. Thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick for his comments on the draft.

·   ·   ·

Around 2003, things began to change.

Technology was then the black sheep, having left overnight millionaires destitute and without change to afford their $4 lattes. Even the posers had left San Francisco and gone back to suburbia to be office managers at Walmart.

It was a sad time for everyone — that is, except the die-hards and the hackers. The web for them had never been about making money, but about reshaping culture and toppling the old order. 2003, therefore, was the perfect time for a resurgence: the people who kept pushing on in the Valley and elsewhere were a concentrated motley crew of innovators and builders. They cared about technology for technology’s sake and about developing and advancing web culture.

What they didn’t realize, however, was that the services and technologies that they were destined to build would need to be cobbled and sewn together using a system that would fight them every step of the way — not out of spite — but because of its architecture. By definition the network available was decidedly anti-human: in 2003, there was only the document-centric web.

The document-centric web

We’ll spare you the history lesson of the origin story of the internet, but suffice it to say, the web we have today is because a bunch of scientists, academics, and government folks needed a way to share static documents — not set up identities or have a dynamic conversation in public. The net was decidedly antisocial and anti-serendipity, from the beginning.

Keep that in mind when you consider what happened around 2003: masses of people started blogging, publicly. Services like Blogger and TypePad surged; LiveJournal and WordPress started to grow stubble and Drupal emerged from a college dorm. In the absence of innovation since the bubble burst, people started to realize that the web could be a place for personal expression and public conversation — and blogging became the “it” thing to do.

The problem was that tools were built around the document model of publishing. Many people maintained collections of blogs that they kept handy as bookmarks — and visited regularly, sometimes several times a day (depending on the prolificness of a given blogger). The more savvy audiences discovered desktop feed readers that fetched new content automatically. But conversation was fragmented and inconvenient: to comment, you had to visit the publisher’s blog and create a single-purpose account there; to post an original response, you had to have your own blog and know how to send a trackback to the post you were responding to.

The pace was slow and cumbersome, but most early bloggers didn’t mind. Their new medium was exciting, expansive, and controversial. And for the time, it fit the write-print/publish model many people had become familiar with thanks to Microsoft Word and other text editors — and which was in turn rewarded by Google’s link-based approach to search.

But two things were lacking in the first generation of Web 2.0 tools: personhood and aggregated conversation streams. The document-web hadn’t made room for people-friendly affordances like “faces,” and didn’t conform to our restless animal brain, which is well suited to working with a flow of short snippets of information.

Proprietary, real-time platforms

Enter: the real-time web. If 2003–2006 could be defined as the emergence of social media on infrastructure still dominated by the document-web, 2007 through the present will be defined as the transition to the “real-time” web, even if through a proprietary side-road.

We’ve had chat, SMS, and other forms of asynchronous (near) real-time data streams for some time. But, just as blogging did to email, every new generation is about pushing down the walls that cage one-to-one and one-to-few interactions, turning the same private publishing tools into many-to-many-to-many-more public publishing platforms. Emphasis on the noun: from tools to platforms.

The catch? This real-time web is not mature yet, since the platforms that sequester all of our activities today are proprietary ones like Facebook and Twitter. These are convenient, to be sure, but of limited utility to users with cross-site ambitions, who require interoperability.

While “brand-mediated” profiles and relationships may not seem completely odious on the surface, there are four major drawbacks to keep in mind:

• Tying one’s identity and communications to a single silo means relying on a single point of failure, degrading the overall reliability and stability of the system. (Remember the failwhale and efforts to keep Twitter from going offline during the Iran uprising, for example).
• Handing over management of one’s identity to a company means being dependent on their decisions and priorities. (Consider the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook; Twitter’s arbitrary suggested users list; and examples of users being ousted from various services for controversial reasons).
• A web built on top of a few proprietary platforms means less diversity and ultimately smaller scale than a web built on non-proprietary protocols and standards (consider how useful email, the web, and the internet itself became once open standards for interoperability were adopted, and the power of “small pieces loosely joined“).
• And finally, on an ethical and emotional level — it just doesn’t feel right.

Fortunately, there are a number of initiatives that are gaining in popularity and finding pockets of adoption throughout industry, leading us to a juncture, where in one direction is the status quo and in the other is what we call “the people-centric (real-time) web”.

The people-centric (real-time) web

If the document-centric web was dominated by static pages, then the people-centric web is about placing you at the center (as Time Magazine did famously in 2006). We’re seeing the rise of dynamic, portable friend lists and non-brand-mediated identities that can be used across a range of standards-compliant websites. People are beginning to move freely between silos. Individuals are increasingly able to bring their data with them and substitute one service or service provider with another, as one can switch between Outlook and Thunderbird for email, or Photoshop and Pixelmator for image editing on the desktop. Relevant information and friends’ activities are starting to come to users via distributed push publishing. (Thomas Vander Wal has called this the “come to me” web).

Let us briefly describe the key enablers of this emerging new phase:

Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

Distributed push publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

Synchronized conversation threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan).

Much work remains to make cloud services fully interoperable, but the foundations are in place to turn the web into a truly people-centric place. This call to action goes out to developers, corporations, and individuals alike. Best of all, it’s not that hard to start supporting these efforts:

Let people use existing accounts to sign in and sign up for your service. First, the signup ritual offers the least amount of value to users so get it out of the way as fast as possible! Plus, it’s an automatic barrier to entry — you’ll see an increase in successful signups by reducing the friction in logging in up front (as Plaxo did). Second, unless it’s core to what you do, this will also save you the chore of managing profiles on your service. Third, people have so many profiles these days, they can’t keep track of them and they certainly don’t want to be creating yet another. Instead, figure out a way to subscribe to someone’s existing profile — and keep a reference of it up to date on your site.

Sharing information and activities from your site is how other people will discover you. Stickiness as a business practice was a byproduct of the document era of the web; on the people-centric web, portability is critical. Data, identities, relationships, and activities need to flow between sites in order to expose insights, spread knowledge, and engender meaningful social interactivity. This sounds complicated but is relatively straightforward. To begin, your site can make available atomic units of data, exported as streams of activity that indicate who acted in which way upon what object. It’s easier than it sounds and formats are available to support this modular approach (see: Activity Streams)

As a user, consider how much control and security you really want over your online identity. How do you feel about leasing an identity from a web brand? Unsure about the benefits of owning your own? Some providers (Google, Yahoo, Flickr, MySpace, AOL) let you use their accounts as OpenIDs — a great step towards portability, and beneficial to everyone. The catch with any leased identity is that your identity will be under the provider’s brand, profile constrained by their design decisions, and personal data subjected to their terms of service. As an alternative, acquiring your own domain and setting up your own profile with an independent is becoming much easier with free services like Chi.mp and hi.im. More innovation is needed in this area to make independent identities for people and organizations first class citizens on the social web, and their setup and management simpler, accessible, and secure!

What’s yet to come

It’s 2009, going on 2010. For the past three years, the web has been morphing into a real-time and people-centric place. We’ve seen this trend among individual users — through their actions and demands for better social experiences — but also increasingly among companies and developers. We want a web that’s more “like us” than the old model was. We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents.

And with this new model come new opportunities for innovation and personalization. It is possible to build applications for participating in decentralized conversations around various ideas and trends. This presents a new opportunity for identity management apps, community sites, social dashboards, real-time search, messaging hubs… and even browser makers, hardware manufacturers, and ad networks. Mobile platforms are also growing, as people connect over non-desktop devices. These small handheld technologies further underscore the importance of portable identity, microcontent, decentralization, and (near) real-time delivery. A document-centric approach just doesn’t make sense in a mobile world, and with new ground being broken in fields like augmented reality, demand for increasingly rich social experiences powered by open standards instead of proprietary platforms will continue to grow.

But consider the future: the benefits of a people-centric model are still evolving and remain to be fully realized. It’s critical to not be complacent with the platforms we’ve grown so accustomed to. If you wear the developer’s hat, now’s the time to get on board, read the specs, and implement support for OpenID, Activity Streams, OAuth, PubSubHubbub/rssCloud, or the other mentioned open standards that are relevant to your users. If you are a user, don’t be afraid to be vocal and ask the services you love to show they love you back, by giving you the rights to your data and the tools to take it with you elsewhere. If you’re a business, realize that the distributed potential of the social web has barely been tapped, and that you have a choice between (as Robert Scoble calls it) gifting your branding power to someone else, or leveraging these standards to turn your own site from an island to a node in a network of social activity as wide as the web itself. In the end, the internet as a whole will be better off if we stay in control of our own destinies.

·   ·   ·

Jyri and I will be presenting a workshop on this material during our MindTrek pre-conference tutorial on September 30th in Helsinki. Early bird tickets are still available at a discounted rate; register today!

Also, don’t forget you can still register for MindTrek, the Nordic conference on social media (Oct. 1st–2nd) in Tampere, Finland.

Specifically, Dion Almaer’s point system seems useful:

• 0 points: Say you are open
• 10 points: Choose an OSI license
• 20 points: Define the governance of the code, or the protocols / specs. If the spec gets a license that is great, but how does it get changed? Does Adobe hold all of the cards still? Can others participate? For code, who participates? Can anyone patch? Can you, and if so how do you become a committer? At the core: HOW ARE DECISIONS MADE
• 30 points: A reference implementation under an open source license
• 40 points: Where does the IP stand? Did you donate it to Apache or some other foundation? For an example, you can see Exhibit B: Patent Non-Assertion Covenant for the OpenSocial Foundation Proposal

And summarizing the source a lot of my frustration, he writes:

All we can really ask is to have the clear communication. Just be honest with us. Be clear with your intentions. The ramifications really do effect us too. I may get more involved in a project that isn’t just run by one company, where they can change things on a whim. If the purpose for using open source is more than the insurance of “if they do something I can fork it” then this stuff matters hugely. Some are in the game for insurance, but in general I think that people like to also get behind causes. They want to put energy into something they believe in. As soon as this happens your project has a part of us in it, and you need to respect that.

Perhaps using a framework and approach such as this will help me communicate more clearly why getting open right is so important to me.

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?