I care about… – Page 3

OAuth for the iPhone: Pownce.app

If you’re one of the lucky folks that’s been able to upgrade your iPhone (and activate it) to the 2.0 firmware, I encourage you to give the Pownce application a try, if only to see a real world example of OAuth in action (that link will open in iTunes).

Here’s how it goes in pictures:

And the actual flow:

Launch the Pownce app. You’ll be prompted to login in at Pownce.com
Pownce.app launches Pownce.com via an initial OAuth request; here you signin to your Pownce account using your username or password (if Pownce supported OpenID, you could signin with OpenID as well).
Once successfully signed in to your account, you can grant the Pownce iPhone app permission to access your account.
Once you click Okay, which is basically a pownce:// protocol link that will fire up Pownce.app to complete the transaction.

There are three important aspects of this:

First, you’re not entering your username and password into the Pownce application — you’re only entering it into the website. This might not seem like a great distinction, but if a non-Pownce developed iPhone application wanted to access or post to your Pownce account, this flow could be reused, and you’d never need to expose your credentials to that third party app;
Second, it creates room for the adoption of OpenID — or something other single sign-on solution — to be implemented at Pownce later on, since OAuth doesn’t specify how you do authentication.
Third, if the iPhone is lost or stolen, the owner of the phone could visit Pownce.com and disable access to their account via the Pownce iPhone app — and not need to change their password and disrupt all the other services or applications that might already have been granted access.

Personally, as I’ve fired up an increasing number of native apps on the iPhone 2.0 software, I’ve been increasingly frustrated and annoyed at how many of them want my username and password, and how few of them support this kind of delegated authorization flow.

If you consider that there are already a few Twitter-based applications available, and none of them support OAuth (Twitter still has yet to implement OAuth), in order to even test these apps out, you have to give away your credentials over and over again. Worse, you can guarantee that a third-party will destroy your credentials once you’ve handed them over, even if you uninstall the application.

These are a few reasons to consider OAuth for iPhone application development and authorization. Better yet, Jon Crosby’s Objective-C library can even give you a head start!

Hat tip to Colin Devroe for the suggestion. Cross-posted to the OAuth blog.

Feature request: OAuth in WordPress

In the past couple days, there’s been a bit of a dust-up about some changes coming to WordPress in 2.6 — namely disabling ATOM and XML-RPC APIs by default.

The argument is that this will make WordPress more secure out of the box — but the question is at what cost? And, is there a better solution to this problem rather than disabling features and functionality (even if only a small subset of users currently make use of these APIs) if the changes end up being short-sighted?

This topic hit the wp-xmlrpc mailing list where the conversation quickly devolved into spattering about SSL and other security related topics.

Allan Odgaard (creator TextMate, as far as I can tell!) even proposed inventing another authorization protocol.

Sigh.

There are a number of reasons why WordPress should adopt OAuth — and not just because we’re going to require it for DiSo.

Heck, Stephen Paul Weber already got OAuth + AtomPub working for WordPress, and has completed a basic OAuth plugin for WordPress. The pieces are nearly in place, not to mention the fact that OAuth will pretty much be essential if WordPress is going to adopt OpenID at some point down the road. It’s also going to be quite useful if folks want to post from, say, a Google Gadget or OpenSocial application (or similar) to a WordPress blog if the XML-RPC APIs are going to be off by default (given Google’s wholesale embrace of OAuth).

Now, fortunately, folks within Automattic are supportive of OAuth, including Matt and Lloyd.

There are plenty of benefits to going down this path, not to mention the ability to scope third party applications to certain permissions — like letting Facebook see your private posts but not edit or create new ones — or authorizing desktop applications to post new entries or upload photos or videos without having to remember your username and password (instead you’d type in your blog address — and it would discover the authorization endpoints using XRDS-Simple — Eran has more on discovery: Magic, People vs. Machines).

Anyway, WordPress and OAuth are natural complements, and with popular support and momentum behind the protocol, it’s tragic to see needless reinvention when so many modern applications have the same problem of delegated authorization.

I see this is a tremendous opportunity for both WordPress and OAuth and am looking forward to discussing this opportunity — at least consideration for WordPress 2.7 — and tonight’s meetup — for which I’m now late! Doh!

Announcing Emailtoid: mapping email addresses to OpenIDs

The other night at Beer and Blog in Portland, fellow Vidooper Michael T Richardson announced and launched a new service that I’m both excited and a little apprehensive about.

The service is called Emailtoid, and while I prefer to pronounce is “email-toyed”, others might pronounce it “email two eye-dee”. And depending on your pronunciation, you might realize that this service is about using an email address as an ID — specifically an OpenID.

This is not a new idea, and it’s one that been debated and discussed in the OpenID community an awful lot, which culminated in a rough outline of how it might work by Brad Fitzpatrick following the Social Graph FOO Camp this past spring, and that David Fuelling turned into an early draft spec.

Well, we looked at this work and this discussion and felt that sooner or later, in spite of all the benefits of using actual URLs for identity, that someone needed to take a lead and actually build out this concept so we have something real to banter about.

The pragmatic reality is that many people are comfortable using email addresses as their identity online for signing up to new services; furthermore, many, many more people have email addresses who don’t also have URLs or homepages that they call their own (or can readily identify). And forcing people to learn yet another form of identifier for the web to satisfy the design of a protocol for arguably marginal value with a lesser user experience also doesn’t make sense. Put another way: the limitations of the technology should not be forced on end users, especially when it doesn’t need to be. And that’s why Emailtoid is a necessary experiment towards advancing identity on the web.

How it works

Emailtoid is a very simple service, and in fact is designed for obsolescence. It’s meant as a fallback for now, enabling relying parties to accept email addresses as identifiers without requiring the generation of a new local password and without requiring the address owner to give up or reveal their existing email credentials (otherwise known as the “password anti-pattern“).

The flow works like this:

Users enter either an OpenID or email address into a typical OpenID input field. For the purpose of this flow, we’ll presume an email address is used.
The relying party splits email addresses at the ‘@’ symbol into the username and the domain, generating a directed identity request to the email domain. If an XRDS, YADIS or XRDS-Simple document is discovered at the domain, the typical OpenID flow is invoked.
If no discovery document is found, the service falls back to Emailtoid (sending a request like http://emailtoid.net/mapper?email=jane@example.com), where users verify that they own the supplied email addresses by providing their one-time access token that Emailtoid mailed to them.
At this point, users may optionally associate an existing OpenID with their email address, or use the OpenID auto-generated by Emailtoid. Emailtoid is not intended to serve as a full-featured OpenID provider, and we encourage using an OpenID from a third-party OpenID provider.
In the case where users supply and verify their own OpenID, Emailtoid will create a 302 HTTP redirect removing Emailtoid from future interactions completely.

Should an email provider supply a discovery document after an Emailtoid mapping has been made, the new mapping will take precedence.

Opportunities and issues

The drive behind Emailtoid, again, is to reduce the friction of OpenID by reusing familiar identifiers (i.e. email addresses). Clearly the challenges of achieving OpenID adoption are not simply technological, and to a great degree rely on how the user experience needs to become more streamlined and deliver on the promise of greater security and convenience.

Therefore, if a service advertises that they support signing in with an email address, they must keep that promise.

Unfortunately, until all email providers do some kind of local resolution and OpenID authentication, we will need a centralized mapper such as Emailtoid to provide the fallback mapping. And therein lies the rub, defeating some of the distributed design of OpenID.

If anything, Emailtoid is intended to drive forward a conversation about the experience of OpenID, and about how we can make the protocol compatible with, or complementary to, existing and well-known means of identifying oneself on the web. Is it a final solution? Probably not — but it’s up, it’s running, it works and it forces us now to look critically at the question of emails as OpenIDs, now that we can actually experience the flow, and the feeling, of entering an email address into an OpenID box without ever having to enter, or create, another unnecessary password.

A conversation about social network interop and activity stream relevance

Brian Oberkirch captured some video today of a conversation between him, David Recordon and myself at GSP East about social network interop, among other things.

Hot on the heals on my last post, this conversation is rather timely!

Thoughts on dynamic privacy

A highly touted aspect of Facebook Connect is the notion of “dynamic privacy“:

As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

Over the course of the Graphing Social Patterns East conference here in DC, Dave Morin and others from Facebook’s Developer Platform have made many a reference to this scheme but have provided frustratingly scant detail on how it will actually work.

In a conversation with Brian Oberkirch and David Recordon, it dawned on me that the pieces for Dynamic Privacy are already in place and that, to some degree, it seems that it’s really just a matter of figuring out how to effectively enforce policy across distributed systems in order to meet user expectations.

MySpace actually has made similar announcements in their Data Availability approach, and if you read carefully, you can spot the fundamental rift between the OpenSocial and Facebook platforms:

Additionally, rather than updating information across the Web (e.g. default photo, favorite movies or music) for each site where a user spends time, now a user can update their profile in one place and dynamically share that information with the other sites they care about. MySpace will be rolling out a centralized location within the site that allows users to manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to engage with.

Indeed, Recordon wrote about this on O’Reilly Radar last month (emphasis original):

He explained that MySpace said that due to their terms of service the participating sites (e.g. Twitter) would not be allowed to cache or store any of the profile information. In my mind this led to the Data Availability API being structured in one of two ways: 1) on each page load Twitter makes a request to MySpace fetching the protected profile information via OAuth to then display on their site or 2) Twitter includes JavaScript which the browser then uses to fill in the corresponding profile information when it renders the page. Either case is not an example of data portability no matter how you define the term!

Embedding vs sharing

So the major difference here is in the mechanism of data delivery and how the information is “leased” or “tethered” to the original source, such that, as Morin said, “when a user deletes an item on Facebook, it gets deleted everywhere else.”

The approach taken by Google Gadgets, and hence OpenSocial, for the most part, has been to tether data back to the source via embedded iframes. This means that if someone deletes or changes a social object, it will be deleted or changed across OpenSocial containers, though they won’t even notice the difference since they never had access to the data to begin with.

The approach that seems likely from Facebook can be intuited by scouring their developer’s terms of service (emphasis added):

You can only cache user information for up to 24 hours to assist with performance.

…

2.A.4) Except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any Facebook Properties not explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation within 24 hours after the time at which you obtained the data, or such other time as Facebook may specify to you from time to time;

2.A.5) You may store and use indefinitely any Facebook Properties that are explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; provided, however, that except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any such Facebook Properties: (a) if Facebook ceases to explicitly identify the same as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; (b) upon notice from Facebook (including if we notify you that a particular Facebook User has requested that their information be made inaccessible to that Facebook Platform Application); or (c) upon any termination of this Agreement or of your use of or participation in Facebook Platform;

2.A.6) You may retain copies of Exportable Facebook Properties for such period of time (if any) as the Applicable Facebook User for such Exportable Facebook Properties may approve, if (and only if) such Applicable Facebook User expressly approves your doing so pursuant to an affirmative “opt-in” after receiving a prominent disclosure of (a) the uses you intend to make of such Exportable Facebook Properties, (b) the duration for which you will retain copies of such Exportable Facebook Properties and (c) any terms and conditions governing your use of such Exportable Facebook Properties (a “Full Disclosure Opt-In”);

2.B.8) Notwithstanding the provisions of Sections 2.B.1, 2.B.2 and 2.B.5 above, if (and only if) the Applicable Facebook User for any Exportable Facebook Properties expressly approves your doing so pursuant to a Full Disclosure Opt-In, you may additionally display, provide, edit, modify, sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer such Exportable Facebook Properties in such manner as, and only to the extent that, such Applicable Facebook User may approve.

This is further expanded in the platform documentation on Storable Information:

Per the Developer Terms of Service, you may not cache any user data for more than 24 hours, with the exception of information that is explicitly “storable indefinitely.” Only the following parameters are storable indefinitely; all other information must be requested from Facebook each time.

…

The storable IDs enable you to keep unique identifiers for Facebook elements that correspond to data gathered by your application. For instance, if you collected information about a user’s musical tastes, you could associate that data with a user’s Facebook uid.

However, note that you cannot store any relations between these IDs, such as whether a user is attending an event. The only exception is the user-to-network relation.

I imagine that Facebook Connect will work by “leasing” or “sharing” information to remote sites and require, through agreement and compliance with their terms, to check in periodically (or to receive directives through a push mechanism) for changes to data, and then to flush caches of stored data every 24 hours or less.

In either model there is still a central provider and store of the data, but the question for implementation really comes down to whether a remote site ever has direct access to the data, and if so, how long it is allowed to store it.

Of note is the OpenSocial RESTful API, which provides a web-friendly mechanism for addressing and defining resources. Recordon pointed out to me that this API affords all the mechanisms necessary to implement the “leased” model of data access (rather than the embedded model), but leaves it up to the OpenSocial applications and containers to set and enforce their own data access policies.

…Which is a world of a difference from Facebook’s approach to date, for which there is neither code nor a spec nor an open discussion about how they’re thinking through the tenuous issues imbued in making decisions around data access, data control, “tethering” and “portability“. While folks like Plaxo and Yahoo are actually shipping code, Facebook is still posturing, assuring us to “wait and see”. With something so central and so important, it’s disheartening that Facebook’s “Open” strategy is anything but open, and everything less than transparent.

Parsing the “open” in Facebook’s “fbOpen” platform

Yesterday, as expected, Facebook revealed the code behind their F8 platform, a little over a year after its launch, offering it under the Common Public Attribution License.

I can’t help but notice the glaring addition of Section 15: Network Use and Exhibits A and B to the CPAL license. But I’ll dive into those issues in a moment.

For now it is worth reviewing Facebook’s release in the context of the OSI’s definition of open source; of particular interest are the first three sections: Free Redistribution, Source Code, and Derived Works. Arguably Facebook’s use of the CPAL so far fits the OSI’s definition. It’s when we get to the ninth attribute (License Must Not Restrict Other Software) where it becomes less clear whether Facebook is actually offering “open source” code, or is simply diluting the term for its own gain, given the attribution requirement imposed in Exhibit B:

Each time an Executable, Source Code or Larger Work is launched or initially run (including over a network), a display of the Attribution Information must occur on the graphic user interface employed by the end user to access such Covered Code (which may include a splash screen).

In other words, any derivative work cleft from the rib of Facebook must visibly bear the mark of the “Initial Developer”, namely, Facebook, Inc., and include the following:

Attribution Copyright Notice: Copyright © 2006-2008 Facebook, Inc.
Attribution Phrase (not exceeding 10 words): Based on Facebook Open Platform
Attribution URL: http://developers.facebook.com/fbopen
Graphic Image as provided in the Covered Code: http://developers.facebook.com/fbopen/image/logo.png

Most curious of all is how Facebook addressed a long-held concern of Tim O’Reilly that open source licenses are obsolete in the era of network computing and Web 2.0 (emphasis original):

…it’s clear to me at least that the open source activist community needs to come to grips with the change in the way a great deal of software is deployed today.

And that, after all, was my message: not that open source licenses are unnecessary, but that because their conditions are all triggered by the act of software distribution, they fail to apply to many of the most important types of software today, namely Web 2.0 applications and other forms of software as a service.

And in the Facebook announcement, Ami Vora states:

The CPAL is community-friendly and reflects how software works today by recognizing web services as a major way of distributing software.

Thus Facebook neatly skirts this previous limitation in most open source licenses by amending Section 15 to the CPAL, explicitly covering “Network Use”:

The term ‘External Deployment’ means the use, distribution, or communication of the Original Code or Modifications in any way such that the Original Code or Modifications may be used by anyone other than You, whether those works are distributed or communicated to those persons or made available as an application intended for use over a network. As an express condition for the grants of license hereunder, You must treat any External Deployment by You of the Original Code or Modifications as a distribution under section 3.1 and make Source Code available under Section 3.2.

I read this as referring to network deployments of the Facebook platform on other servers (or available as a web service) and forces both the release of code modifications that hit the public wire as well as imposing the display of the “Attribution Information” (as noted above).

. . .

So okay, first of all, we’re not really dealing with the true historic definition of open source here, but we can mince words later. The code is available, is free to be tinkered with, reviewed, built on top of, redistributed (with that attribution restriction) and there’s even a mechanism for providing feedback and logging bugs. Best of all, if you submit a patch that is accepted, they’ll send you a Facebook T-shirt! (Wha-how! Where do I sign up?!)

Not ironically, Facebook’s approach with fbOpen smells an awful lot like Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative (some background). Consider the purpose of one of Microsoft’s three Shared Source licenses, the so-called “Reference License”:

The Microsoft Reference License is a reference-only license that allows licensees to view source code in order to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a given technology. It does not allow for modification or redistribution. Microsoft uses this license primarily for technologies such as its development libraries.

Now compare that with the language of Facebook’s announcement:

The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods.

While it’s certainly conceivable that there may be intrepid entrepreneurs that decide to extend the platform and release their own implementations (which, arguably would require a considerable amount of effort and infrastructure to duplicate the still-proprietary innards of Facebook proper — remember that the fbOpen platform IS NOT Facebook), they’d still need to attach the Facebook brand to their derivative work and open source their modifications, under a CPAL-compatible license (read: not GPL).

In spite of all this — and whether Facebook is really offering a “true” open source product or not — is really not the important thing. I’m raising issues simply to put this move into a broader context, highlighting some important decision points where Facebook zagged where others might have otherwise zigged, based on their own priorities and aspirations with the move. Put simply: Facebook’s approach to open source is nothing like Google’s, and it’s critical that people considering building on either the fbOpen platform or OpenSocial do themselves a favor and familiarize themselves with the many essential differences.

Furthermore, in light of my recent posts, it occurs to me that the nature of open source is changing (or being changed) by the accelerating move to cloud computing architectures (where the source code is no longer necessarily a strategic asset, but where durable and ongoing access to data is the primary concern (harkening to Tim O’Reilly’s frequent “Data is the Intel Inside” quip) and how Facebook is the first of a new class of enterprises that’s growing up after open source.

I hope to expand on this line of thinking, but I’m starting to wonder — with regards to open source becoming essentially passé nowadays — did we win? Are we on top? Hurray? Or, did we bet on the wrong horse? Or, did the goalposts just move on us (again)? Or, is this just the next stage in an ongoing, ever-volatile struggle to balance the needs of business models that tend towards centralization against those more free-form and freedom seeking and expanding models where information and knowledge must diffuse, and must seek out growth and new hosts in order to continue to become more valuable. Again, pointing to Tim’s contention that Web 2.0 is also at least partly about harnessing collective intelligence, and that data sources that grow richer as more people use them is a facet of the landscape, what does openness mean now? What barriers do we need to dissemble next? If it’s no longer the propriety of software code, then is it time that we began, in earnest, to scale the walls of the proprietary data horders and collectors and take back (or re-federate) what might be rightfully ours? Or that we should at least be given permanent access to? Hmm?

Related coverage:

Facebook opens up, but misses opening by Jay Lyman, 451 Group
Facebook: Open Source Was Always the Plan by Clint Boulton, eWeek
Facebook adopts the CPAL poison pill by Matt Asay, CNET

Facebook, the USSR, communism, and train tracks

Low hills closed in on either side as the train eventually crawled on to high, tabletop grasslands creased with snow. Birds flew at window level. I could see lakes of an unreal cobalt blue to the north. The train pulled into a sprawling rail yard: the Kazakh side of the Kazakhstan-China border.

Workers unhitched the cars, lifted them, one by one, ten feet high with giant jacks, and replaced the wide-gauge Russian undercarriages with narrower ones for the Chinese tracks. Russian gauges, still in use throughout the former Soviet Union, are wider than the world standard. The idea was to the prevent invaders from entering Russia by train. The changeover took hours.

— Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth

I read this passage today while sunning myself at Hope Springs Resort near Palm Springs. Tough life, I know.

The passage above immediately made me think of Facebook, and I had visions of the old Facebook logo with a washed out Stalin face next to the wordmark (I’m a visual person). But the thought came from some specific recent developments, and fit into a broader framework that I talked about loosely to Steve Gillmor about on his podcast. I also wrote about it last week, essentially calling for Facebook and Google to come together to co-develop standards for the social web, but, having been reading up on Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Central Asian history, and being a benefactor of the American enterprise system, I’m coming over to Eran and others‘ point that 1) it’s too early to standardize and 2) it probably isn’t necessary anyway. Go ahead, let a thousand flowers bloom.

If I’ve learned anything from Spread Firefox, BarCamp, coworking and the like, it’s that propaganda needs to be free to be effective. In other words, you’re not going to convince people of your way of thinking if you lock down what you have, especially if what you have is culture, a mindset or some other philosophical approach that helps people narrow down what constitutes right and wrong.

Look, if Martin Luther had nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door but had ensconced them in DRM, he would not have been as effective at bringing about the Reformation.

Likewise, the future of the social web will not be built on proprietary, closed-source protocols and standards. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Google wants OpenSocial to be an “open standard” and Facebook wants to be the openemest of them all!

The problem is not about being open here. Everyone gets that there’s little marginal competitive advantage to keeping your code closed anymore. Keeping your IP cards close to your chest makes you a worse card player, not better. The problem is with adoption, gaining and maintaining [developer] interest and in stoking distribution. And, that brings me to the fall of the Communism and the USSR, back where I started.

I wasn’t alive back when the Cold War was in its heyday. Maybe I missed something, but let’s just go on the assumption that things are better off now. From what I’m reading in Kaplan’s book, I’d say that the Soviets left not just social, but environmental disaster in their wake. The whole region of Central Asia, at least in the late 90s, was fucked. And while there are many causes, more complex than I can probably comprehend, a lot of it seems to have to do with a lack of cultural identity and a lack of individual agency in the areas affected by, or left behind by, Communist rule.

Now, when we talk about social networks, I mean, c’mon, I realize that these things aren’t exactly nations, nation-states or even tribal groups warring for control of natural resources, food, potable water, and so forth. BUT, the members of social networks number in the millions in some cases, and it would be foolish not to appreciate that the borders — the meticulously crafted hardline boundaries between digital nation-states — are going to be redrawn when the battle for cultural dominance between Google (et al) and Facebook is done. It’s not the same caliber of détente that we saw during the Cold War but it’s certainly a situation where two sides with very different ideological bents are competing to determine the nature of the future of the [world]. On the one hand, we have a nanny state who thinks that it knows best and needs to protect its users from themselves, and on the other, a lassé-faire-trusting band of bros who are looking to the free market to inform the design of the Social Web writ large. On the one hand, there’s uncertainty about how to build a “national identity”-slash-business on top of lots of user data (that, oh yeah, I thought was supposed to be “owned” by the creators), and on the other, a model of the web, that embraces all its failings, nuances and spaghetti code, but that, more than likely, will stand the test of time as a durable provider of the kind of liberty and agency and free choice that wins out time and again throughout history.

That Facebook is attempting to open source its platform, to me, sounds like offering the world a different rail gauge specification for building train tracks. It may be better, it may be slicker, but the flip side is that the Russians used the same tactic to try to keep people from having any kind of competitive advantage over their people or influence over how they did business. You can do the math, but look where it got’em.

S’all I’m sayin’.

The battle for the future of the social web

When I was younger, I used to bring over my Super Nintendo games to my friends’ houses and we’d play for hours… that is, if they had an SNES console. If, for some reason, my friend had a Sega system, my games were useless and we had to play something like Sewer Shark. Inevitably less fun was had.

What us kids didn’t know at the time was that we were suffering from a platform war, that manifested, more or less, in the form of a standards war for the domination of the post-Atari video game market. We certainly didn’t get why Nintendo games didn’t work on Sega systems, they just didn’t, and so we coped, mostly by not going over to the kid’s house who had Sega. No doubt, friendships were made — and destroyed — on the basis of which console you had, and on how many games you had for the preferred platform. Indeed, the kids with the richest parents got a pass, since they simply had every known system and could play anyone’s games, making them by default, super popular (in other words, it was good to be able to afford to ignore the standards war altogether).

Fast-forward 10 years and we’re on the cusp of a new standards war, where the players and stakes have changed considerably but the nature of warfare has remained much the same as Hal R. Varian and Carl Shapiro described in Information Rules in 1999. But the casualties, as before, will likely be the consumers, customers and patrons of the technologies in question. So, while we can learn much from history about how to fight the war, I think that, for the sake of the web and for web citizens generally, this coming war can be avoided, and that, perhaps, it should be.

Continue reading “The battle for the future of the social web”

I’m joining Vidoop to work on DiSo full time

Well, Twitter, along with Marshall and his post on ReadWriteWeb, beat me to it, but I’m pretty excited to announce that, yes, I am joining Vidoop, along with Will Norris, to work full time on the DiSo (distributed social) Project.

For quite some time I’ve wanted to get the chance to get back to focusing on the work that I started with Flock — and that I’ve continued, more or less, with my involvement and advocacy of projects like microformats, OpenID and OAuth. These projects don’t accidentally relate to people using technology to behave socially: they exist to make it easier, and better, for people to use the web (and related technologies) to connect with one another safely, confidently, and without the need to to sign up with any particular network just to talk to their friends and people that they care about.

The reality is that people have long been able to connect to one another using technology — what was the first telegraph transmission if not the earliest poke heard round the world? The problem that we have today is that, with the proliferation of fairly large, non-interoperable social networks, it’s not as easy as email or telephones have been to connect to people, and so, the next generation of social networks are invariably going to need to make the process of connecting over the divides easier, safer and with less friction if people really are going to, as expected, continue to increase their use of the web for communication and social interaction.

So what is the DiSo Project?

The DiSo Project has humble roots. Basically Steve Ivy and I started hacking on a plugin that I’d written that added hcards to your contact list or blogroll. It was really stupidly simple, but when we combined it with Will Norris’ OpenID plugin, we realized that we were on to something — since contact lists were already represented as URLs, we now had a way to verify whether the person who ostensibly owned one of those URLs was leaving a comment, or signing in, and we could thereby add new features, expose private content or any number of other interesting social networking-like thing!

This lead me to start “sketching” ideas for WordPress plugins that would be useful in a distributed social network, and eventually Steve came up with the name, registered the domain, and we were off!

Since then, Stephen Paul Weber has jumped in and released additional plugins for OAuth, XRDS-Simple, actionstreams and profile import, and this was when the project was just a side project.

What’s this mean?

Working full time on this means that Will and I should be able to make much more progress, much more quickly, and to work with other projects and representatives from efforts like Drupal, BuddyPress and MovableType to get interop happening (eventually) between each project’s implementation.

Will and I will eventually be setting up an office in San Francisco, likely a shared office space (hybrid coworking), so if you’re a small company looking for a space in the city, let’s talk.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about DiSo in particular, you should probably just check out the interview I did with myself about DiSo to get caught up to speed.

. . .

I’ll probably post more details later on, but for now I’m stoked to have the opportunity to work with a really talented and energized group of folks to work on the social layer of the open web.

XRDS-Simple Draft 1 released

The little guys keep building the future of the web in little steps.

Well, okay, I shouldn’t use such hubris, but I’m pretty proud of our little squad of do-gooders, developing quality technology that I think IS advancing the state of the web, and doing so without any budget whatsoever, and without any kind of centralized resources (can you tell I’ve been hanging out in Redmond at Microsoft’s campus the last couple days?).

Anyway, yesterday Eran Hammer-Lahav, the primary author of the OAuth spec, released the first draft of XRDS-Simple format for public review.

Acronyms aside, what we’re defining here is a data format that allows web authors to link to — in a consistent, ordered way — the various services that they use across the web. What’s important about this format is that 1) we’re not inventing anything new and that 2) it’s already widely implemented, thanks in large part to OpenID 2.0’s discovery mechanism (discovery, in this case, can be loosely defined as the means by which a computer determines where a service exists — for example, where someone stores their photos or blog posts — very useful, of course, in the case of URL-based identities).

Microformats folks will ask why we don’t just use rel-me, and that’s a very valid question. Sure, you could use rel-me to link to an XRDS-Simple document, but that doesn’t answer the question. Specifically, there are three main technical features that, taken together, are superior to rel-me from a service discovery perspective:

Media types: essentially the MIME type that the service provides, as defined by RFC-2046 (in layman terms: photos, videos, text, etc).
Local IDs: the identifier (i.e. a username or email address) associated with the requested resource; think of your Facebook email address (and clearly not something you’d necessarily want to publish publicly on your blog!)
Service priority: useful for determining the selection order should there be more than one of a given type of service (for example, use my Vimeo account videos before my Viddler collection, etc)

Promoted by similar questions from Danny Ayers, Eran elaborated on this and similar topics (I’d encourage you to read this response for a good technical and philosophical backgrounder).

I’ll finish briefly by putting XRDS-Simple into a broader context of the work we’re doing, and point out how this fits into DiSo. First, we now have OpenID for URL-based identity on the web so we can identify people between web sites; second, we have OAuth for specifically controlling who has access to your data; and third, we now have a mechanism for discovering the services and data brokers that you use in a consistent, fairly widely supported format. These three building blocks are critical to advancing the smooth and secure flow of people and their data between web sites, web services and changing contexts.

For DiSo, we will enable someone to sign in to a web service for the first time and, at their discretion, have their contacts looked up (eventually this should be more like a buddy list reference), have feeds of her photos or videos or whatever other media she publishes automatically discovered and imported (would be really useful for Adobe Photoshop Express, for example!), to then provide her the option to allow the web service to send information back to her identity provider or data broker (for example, inserting events into her activity stream) which would then be able to be subscribed to or followed by any of her friends running their own sites, or who delegate to some third party aggregator service (a la FriendFeed).

This is actually a pretty simple flow, but the difference is that we can now assemble this entire stack with open tools, open protocols and open formats. Discovery is one of the few remaining components that we need to nail down to get into the next stage of building out this model. So, to that end, I encourage and invite your comments (the list is moderated and requires you to state your interest to sign up). We’ll be ending the Draft 1 review period April 10, so get your comments in sooner than later!