Open source – Page 14

Picoformats: microformats for mobile

Andrew Turner pinged me about a project I started up as an offshoot to my work with Mozes called Picoformats. He wrote that a picoformat is a standard-means for defining markup in small, probably mobile, devices.

That’s not exactly the original idea, but it actually makes a lot of sense and, the more that Tara and I use our Blackberries, the more we see a need for standard micro-interfaces. Sure it’s great that you can download my hcard into your address book from your regular web browser, but the same seems not to hold true on mobile devices.

Anyway, that’s an issue that needs to be addressed in mobile browsers, and Opera‘s well on their way working on such problems.

Andrew’s post did highlight both the need for me to get the word out about this project and also explain it a little more clearly since Microformats could actually address the formating of data for mobile devices (especially when we start pairing up microformatted content with relevant media-specific CSS).

The goal of the Picoformats project is to use an open process that reflects existing behavior and come up with standards for an SMS-based dialect for interacting with mobile services.

Dodgeball already has a pretty good SMS/email dialect. In fact, I use it all the time. What I want is service interoperability, so that when I send a message to (okay, I’ll reveal my bias) Mozes, I can use the same syntax to compose the command or message. For example, if I send a message formed like this: “! heading to the movies at 10pm”, it shouldn’t matter if I’m on Dodgeball, Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, or FactoryCity Mobile — each service that supports Picoformats should send out the blast message to my friends, just as I’d expect it to. But already there’s divergence — with Mozes using “@” for blast messages and Dodgeball using “!”. This is the kind of thing that will make it extremely hard for people to move between services or, worse yet, use a multitude of services.

You can probably begin to see how this is similar to life before Adium or Trillian. Personally, I like not having to run 5 different instant messenger apps. I like having them all in one and being able to IM my friends regardless of the service they’re on from one interface. I’d like to be able to do the same with the mobile services I use. And that’s why this Picoformats idea is important — it’s syntactic interoperability.

OpenOffice initiative to follow SFX’s footsteps

Apparently someone named Ben Horst has taken up the failed SpreadOpenOffice initiative in order to buy out the back page in New York free daily Metro, following in the footsteps of Spread Firefox’s campaign which lead to a two-page ad in the New York Times last year (which I designed).

Ben’s goal of raising $5,000 is a bit more modest than the $100,000 we set out to collect in 10 days (raising nearly $250,000 by the end) — and the audience of the Metro is noteably smaller and less geographically diverse than the TImes, but the effort is nonetheless to be commended.

I have my own issues with OpenOffice as a product, but I do wholeheartedly support Ben’s efforts to galvanize the community around a specific action. He’s currently 75% of the way through raising funds and there’s already been a good deal of pick-up on Digg and Slashdot so I imagine he’ll meet his goal before his self-imposed deadline.

It’s interesting to see this effort emerge organically — especially after the initial thrust to create a SpreadOpenOffice project fashioned after Spread Firefox died on the vine owing to internal struggles over branding control. A similar project SpreadKDE made it out of the gate, but it’s unclear whether it ever took off.

So why did it work for Mozilla? And will it work for others? Not sure, but it’ll interesting to see whether Ben’s micro-donation effort pays off.

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If I were smaht and I worked at Microsoft, I might consider the freebie that Apple’s put out in Bootcamp as an opportunity to really stake my claim on the future. Think about it — the most proprietary hardware in the world can now run Windows. Boy I’d take that software — the Windows OS that is — and give it away for free.

Think about it — the browser market’s price was set at zero many years ago, leading to Microsoft’s monopoly. If you give your product away (as Google does) can it be considered a monopoly? Furthermore, the value of an OS, ignoring the cost of development, is rapidly diminshing as more apps migrate to the web.

So why not do something totally whack and just give it away, interupting the whole OSX onslaught? I mean, I’m not much good with math or economics, but could it really hurt at this point?

What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

I can’t help but notice that not much has happened with Spread Firefox since I left, even though my good friend Jamey continues to feed me mockups and possible redesigns of the site (note: the photo at right isn’t Jamey’s work but an early redesign attempt between me and Josh Jarmin).

And though the Firefox Flicks Campaign was a considerable success, it didn’t seem to arouse the same kind of passionate support that the New York Times ad campaign did in its time (though it did drive a considerable amount of traffic). It seemed isolated and somewhat self-congratulatory… preaching to an audience that was already aware of and promoting the open source browser, rather than those who wouldn’t be able to separate the “Internet” from “MySpace” from “the blue E”.

And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism so much as something I’ve been stewing on for some time, trying to figure out, y’know, what comes next?

When I was at Flock (and I continue to champion this idea mind you) I wanted Flock and Firefox to team up — to work together to show their collective usefulness across a wider and more diverse community — one that a single browser simply wouldn’t be able to appeal to as effectively as two designed with different intents. In fact, with Internet Explorer 7 on the horizon, incorporating many of the features that have set Firefox apart, I wonder whether either Flock or Firefox will have much of a chance at widespread adoption without a concerted effort to spell out more clearly the benefits of both platforms — and how developers can leverage their work across both simulataneously.

This is the challenge as it stands and as I see it. As the features that formerly set Firefox apart become standard fare in modern browsers, one way to form the question is to consider whether Firefox has served its purpose — causing Redmond to wake up and to change its flagship browser. If so, then ok, keep building it out and improving it, but tell the fans that they can go home until next season.

If the fight or the battle or the … non-violent conflict … is only beginning, then I guess I’d like to see a clear declaration of intentions. I’d like to see Mozilla stand up and declare the principles, ideas, dreams and ambitions that set it apart and keep its proponents up at night, dreaming of ways to get the story out there to an ever-widening audience. Anything less, and the juggernaut will bowl us over, diminishing the effects of the incredible achievements that have been made in the past two years. I’m looking at this as a ten-year struggle — as a hugely powerful Hydra that must be faced on each branch, what I’m talking about is the future of the web and the tools that we will use to navigate, explore, publish and own it with. In order to stay in the game and continue to participate in the conversation (or ever set the tone), we need a strategy, we need a plan, we need people and we ought get started now.

I’m open for ideas, have a few of my own, but mostly just want to know: What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

Identity Twenny is the new cross-platform

I’ve been spending a lot of time working over the idea of identity representation and validation over the past couple weeks… a topic that is both deep and wide and includes many players.

For the moment, I’m partial to OpenID, as it seems lightweight, decentralized and championed by my buddy Scott Kveton at JanRain (who is now also a Citizen Agency advisor). In fact, now that ClaimID has implemented OpenID, I have a good working example to show off.

But OpenID isn’t the only game in town. And many people are aware of this — in fact, wanting to become the next Passport standard that actually gets widespread adoption. Because once you become that standard, you have a lot of power, both over individual meta-data as well as the social networks that someone is connected to.

In our beginning conversations with Marc on his PeopleAggregator, this is apparent (we’re taking Marc on as a client to act as the community advocate, shortening the product feedback loop). As is increasingly clear, identity lock-in is where the next big battles will be fought, especially as more and more Web Twenny sites open up ports on their data but require authentication in exchange for access (the PeopleAggregator, for example, offers distributed login choices including SXIP, OpenID via LiveJournal, Flickr auth).

Over on the Identity 2.0 blog, there’s an interesting post by Dick on Google Account Authentication — looking at the desktop-based side of authentication (that you’d find in Picasa or Google Earth or even GTalk, for example) and web-based applications, like Joga). He makes the point, as ZDNet latches on to, that Google is “deepening of the identity silo”. And, of course, with Google Checkout, you can see the tenacles of the beast spreading out further without any likelihood of opening up.

So what’s interesting in seeing all these implementations emerge is the opportunity, as Marc has caught on to, of providing a man-in-the-middle “Debabelizer” between auth standards and social networks — what’s been called a “meta social network”. My buddy Scott, though, has also seen this opportunity. And both, fortunately are taking the open source approach (even if not all parties call it that).

So anyway, with all this going on and big players making moves in the space, the one thing that is clear to me about where we’re going is this: in the not-too-distant future, when someone asks if you’re “cross-platform” they’ll no longer be referring to the operating system that you’re running, but whether their identity or authentication standard is supported on your site. And furthermore, whether you’ve made it possible to bring in their existing social network/buddy list from other networks — because, let’s face it: it’s irrelevant whether you build for the Mac, PC and Linux; you’ve got the web, you can make your app universal. The big concern will be whether the social environment that I’ve spent years cultivating can travel with me and cross the chasm from the place where I first built it to populate the host that you’re building.

Then there was BarCamp San Francisco

I really shouldn’t post anymore before at least mentioning that BarCamp San Francisco has come and gone, offering something between a roar and a whimper. The truth is, it was such a big, multi-tiered kind of experience that I think it’ll take me awhile to unravel it.

Fortunately there’s lots of photos and even some interesting video available in the meanwhile.

Thanks again to the folks who really made it possible: especially the lead organizer and my favorite co-camper, Tara, and Tantek, Nima and the host of awesome volunteers who pitched in throughout the event. And don’t forget our extremely supportive sponsors who fed us and gave us nice things to drink all weekend. The event simply wouldn’t have been possible — or nearly as satisfyingly exhausting — if it weren’t for all the additive efforts of these folks.

Event In a Suitcase and Running Remote S5 Presentations

Continuing the tradition of the “Event in a…” meme, we came up with the notion of “Event in a Suitcase” at the most recent Mash Pit.

The idea is pretty simple: make it easy to walk into a room and make a presentation.

Well, among the five of us, we came to the conclusion that there’s nothing really that makes it easy. There are tools, both hardware and software, that make it possible, and writing them down was a good place to start from. But there really isn’t an open source or free workflow that gets us where we want to be… where everything is affordable and fits in a literal suitcase.

So anyway, we documented our work and could use more help. If you’ve got ideas, tools, solutions, workflows or whatever, add them!

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So, one of the cool hacks that we brainstormed and that Kevin Marks was actually able to implement before the day was out involved Eric Meyer’s public domain slideshow format S5. Essentially he made it possible for people watching an S5 presentation, like Tantek’s excellent Building Blocks for Independent, to see the slides change as the presenter changes them.

Of course bringing this awesome hack together with a Gizmo call-in means that people can at least watch and listen remotely as presentation happens — and participate in IRC. So voila, it’s like NetMeeting, but open source! Anyway, Kevin’s code is in Twisted and now that I’ve blogged this, hopefully he’ll be incented to clean it up and publish it!

ClaimID makes the OpenID connection

I have to say that it’s things like this that really make me shiver with excitement…

I mean, it’s pretty simple, but it’s also pretty important.

What’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, it’s yet another site adopting OpenID, a decentralized identity system. And, as more and more sites adopt this system (which should remain transparent to end-users if they don’t want an OpenID), we near ever-closer to a lightweight, single sign-on solution.

To be sure, OpenID isn’t a panacea. It’s not intended to be one. The primary attractiveness of OpenID is its simplicity: it’s decoupled the issue of trust from identity and simply offers a way of staking your identity to a given URL. In a sense, if you can trust the credentials of Website X, then you (as a web service provider) can trust accounts created on that domain as well. The benefit for the account holder is that they don’t have to re-register on Website Y.

Note that this is a web-centric solution and doesn’t carry well into the real world where people don’t identify themselves by URLs (hmm, what if instead of a social security number, we were assigned a URL at birth? whoa.).

The other thing that’s great about this announcement is that it’s the work of Scott Kveton’s new startup, JanRain. I brought Scott and Terrell Russell together some time ago, so it’s awesome to see the fruits of this connection already — and that Scott’s going off to do this kind of work full-time.

What I want to see? Well, the proliferation of OpenID across all the various sites that I use. The cost is minimal since the libraries are being developed on all kinds of platforms — and it should integrate fairly well with existing login schemes. Then I want to see either Ma.gnolia or ClaimID add support for XFN (they already support hCards and ClaimID allows for custom rel values). Then, of course, we need to be able to string together (loosely coupled, mind you) my contact list and my group membership list so that I can import and export them wherever I go (obviously this should be done with microformats). Once we’ve got that situation fleshed out, and I’ve claimed my sites with either MicroID or (preferrably) rel=me, I’ll have a pretty portable social network to carry around the web!

Yahoo! Local goes Cuckoo for CoCo Puffs!

The title means nothing, but today at Supernova, Andy Baio announced that Yahoo! Local has added support across the board for hCard, hCalendar and hReview, following Flickr, Upcoming and Yahoo! Tech (blurry video 1, video 2 — turn it up!).

I can’t exactly say what adding 10s of millions of microformatted bits of data will do for the web, but it certainly makes the rush to develop UI around this new opportunity all the greater…

Oh, and bonus: when I was at Flock, I wanted to see ground-level integration of microformats in the browser. Imagine having Lucene indexing all the microformatted content that you come across on the web (whether you know it or not) and then having that data separated out for use in extensions, in filling out forms, in generating new cross-sections and views of your ‘history’. And Rohit gave me another side of that idea: being able to autofill forms anywhere by creating an index of microformat classes-to-input value pairs for specific websites… Yeah, the client/browser part is going to be key to making all this work have obvious value for folks on the web. Can’t wait to see how this moves forward.

MashPit by day, Microformats by night

Today I’ll be hosting the third Mash Pit in San Francisco at the Wharton West, downtown at 101 Howard Street, Suite 500. Things kick off at 10am and go until 5pm (not 6pm, necessitated by the facilities and the fact that we’ll be hungry!).

What can you expect? Well, it’s pretty simple. The goal of the day is work on mashups — particularly ones that work on solving “human problems” — like making it easier to find wifi cafes in the city or autotag your photos based on your Upcoming or EVDB account (which, by the way, is really about making it easier to help folks find your photos later).

Tara and I came up with the agenda this morning. We’ve got a bit of experience now, so we’ll see how it goes!

And of course, after this is all over, tonight is the Microformats 1-year Anniversary Party at 111 Minna. We’re pretty excited about how far this little fledgling community project has come in the last year and want to celebrate! It gets going around 8pm — and, if you can’t be there, you can always order a shirt!

Ah! And before I forget, a big thanks to Tara, Tantek, the Supernova folks (especially Kevin and Jeanne!), and Mozes for helping make Mash Pit possible!