I care about… – Page 4

Relationships are complicated

I’ve noticed a few interesting responses to my post on simplifying XFN. While my intended audiences were primarily fellow microformat enthusiasts and “lower case semantic web” types, there seems to be a larger conversation underway that I’d missed — one that both Adam “Everyware” Greenfield and Tim Berners-Lee have commented on.

In a treatise against XFN (and similarly reductive expressions of human relationships) from December of last year, Greenfield said a number of profound things:

…one of my primary concerns has always been that we not accede to the heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate and clumsy models derived from technical systems – and yet, that’s a precise definition of social networking as currently instantiated.
All social-networking systems constrain, by design and intention, any expression of the full band of human relationship types to a very few crude options — and those static!
…it’s impossible to use XFN to model anything that even remotely resembles an organic human community. I passionately believe that this reductive stance is not merely wrong, but profoundly wrong, in that it deliberately aims to bleed away all the nuance, complication and complexity that makes any real relationship what it is.
I believe that technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

Whew! Strong stuff, but useful, challenging and insightful.

Meanwhile, TBL defended a semi-autistic perspective in describing the future of the Semantic Web (yes, the uppercase version):

At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web.

While my sympathies actually lie with Greenfield (especially after a weekend getting my mom setup on Facebook so she could send me photos without clogging my inbox with 80MB emails… a deficiency in the design of the technology, not my mother mind you!), I also see the promise of a more self-aware, self-descriptive web. But, realistically, that web is a long way off, and more likely, that web is still going to need human intervention to make it work — at least for humans to benefit from it (oh sure, just get rid of the humans and the network will be just perfect — like planes without passengers, right?).

But in the meantime, there is a social web that needs to be improved, and that can be improved, in fairly simple and straight-forward ways, that will make it easier for regular folks who don’t (and shouldn’t have to) care about “data portability” and “password anti-patterns” and “portable contact lists” to benefit from the fact that the family and friends they care about are increasingly accessible online, and actually want to hear from them!

Even though Justin Smith takes another reductive look at the features Facebook is implementing, claiming that it wants to “own communications with your friends“, the reality is, people actually want to communicate with each other online! Therefore it follows that, if you’re a place where people connect and re-connect with one another, it’s not all that surprising that a site like Facebook would invest in and make improvements to facilitate interaction and communication between their members!

But let’s back up a minute.

If we take for granted that people do want to connect and to communicate on social networks (they seem to do it a lot, so much to that one might could even argue that people enjoy doing it!), what role should so-called “portable contact lists” play in this situation? I buy Greenfield’s assertion that attempts by technologists to reduce human relationships to a predefined schema (based on prior behavior or not) is a failing proposition, but that seems to ignore the opportunity presented by the fact that people are having to maintain many several lists of their friends in many different places, for no other reason than an omission from the design of the social internetwork.

Put another way, it’s not good enough to simply dismiss the trend of social networking because our primitive technological expressions don’t reflect the complexity of real human relationships, or because humans are just one of kind of “object” to be “semantified” in TBL’s “Giant Global Graph“… instead, people are connecting today, and they’re wanting to connect to people outside of their chosen “home” network and frankly the experience sucks and it’s confusing. It’s not good enough to get all prissy about it; the reality is that there are solutions out there today, and there are people working on these things, and we need smart people like Greenfield and Berners-Lee to see that solutions that enable the humanist web (however semantic it needs to be) are being prioritized and built… and that we [need] not accede to the heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate and clumsy models derived from technical systems.

I can say that, from what I’ve observed so far, these are things that computers can do for us, to make the social computing experience more humane, should we establish simple and straightforward means to express a basic list of contacts between contexts:

help us find and connect to people that we’ve already indicated that we know
introduce us to people who we might know, or based on social proximity, should know (with no obligation to make friends, of course!)
help us from accidently bumping into people we’d rather not interact with (see block-list portability)
helping us to segment our friendships in ways that make sense to us (rather than the semi-arbitrary ways that social networks define)
helping us to confidently share things with just the people with whom we intend to share

There may be others here, but off the top of my head, I think satisfying these basic tasks is a good start for any social network that thinks allowing you to connect and interact with people who you might know, but who may not have already signed up for the service, is useful.

I should make one last point: when thinking about importing contacts from one context to another, I do not think that it should be an unthinking act. That is, just because it’s merely data being copied between servers, the reality is that those bits represent things much more sacred and complicated than any computer might ever be programmed to imagine. Therefore, just because we can facilitate and lower the friction of “bringing your friends with you” from one place to another doesn’t mean that it should be an automatic process and that all your friends in one place should be made to be your friends in the new place.

And regardless of how often good ol’ Mark Zuckerberg claims that the end game is to make communications more efficient, when it comes to relationships, every connection transposed from one context to another should have to be reconsidered (hmm, a great argument for tagging of contacts…)! We can and should not make assumptions about the nature of people’s relationships, no matter what kind of semantics they’ve used to describe them in a given context. Human relationships are simply far too complicated to be left up to assumptions and inferences made by technologists whose affinity oftentimes lies closer to the data than to the makers of the data.

Picking the open source candidate

I Voted! My buddy whurley is at it again, but this time considering which candidate(s) is the most compatible or supportive of open source — in other words, among the many options, which could be considered the “open source candidate”?

Just as I voted for Obama yesterday, I voted for Obama today. I’m not sure why, except that 1) he’s on Twitter and 2) Hillary is more of a “dynasty” type of candidate as opposed to a “meritocratic” candidate (in my limited view) and given that Obama’s success seems predicated on his previous good works (rather than inheriting a presidential legacy, let’s say), he seems more in line with the nature of open source development. Then again, cognitive science suggests that I can essentially rationalize any irrational decision to explain my actions, so I could just as well chalk it up to gut instinct.

Whatever, here’s the poll if you’ve got an opinion:

http://s3.polldaddy.com/p/290674.js
A couple related thoughts and questions::

How might a candidate demonstrate that they understand or value open source? Just by running Linux? Or something deeper?
What kind of “open source platform” would the ideal candidate support? (using platform in the political sense) That is, getting beyond the software or hardware, how would their policies be affected by ideals and practices derived from the open source ecosystem?
Is it just about transparency, or would the candidate need to understand how open source itself is becoming increasingly important to the economy and to the future of work?
As whurley said in his post, where would an “open source” candidate come down on patent and IP reform?

If you’ve got any inside knowledge about where the candidates sit in terms of open source, I’d love to see some references or stories about their leanings. In the meantime, don’t forgot to vote — on whurley’s poll!

After Social Graph FOO Camp — and a challenge for the Data Portability Group

This past weekend I attended a topic-specific FOO Camp called Social Graph FOO Camp (otherwise known as SGFOO) organized by Scott Kveton and David Recordon (or ray-chor-dohn according to Larry).

Scott’s write up is pretty complete, but I wanted to call out one specific outcome that I think is worth noting.

On Sunday, we had a significant discussion on data portability and about the activities, responsibilities and opportunities of and for the eponymous group which has recently generated much hype and buzz but little, (as far as I’ve see) clarity and/or cogent strategy for advancing its expansive charter:

The purpose of this project is to put all existing data portability technologies and initiatives in context and to promote viable reference implementations (blueprints) to the developer, vendor, and end-user communities.

The frustration over the minimal barrier to “becoming a member” of the group (you simply have to sign up for a mailing list) and the focus on large vendors without advancing an agenda with teeth and clearly defined metrics for success was palpable. But so was the desire to make some progress, and if not come to complete agreement, to at least identify concerns shared by the majority of us and perhaps develop a strategy to deflate the hype to date and get the group moving in a productive direction.

My suggestion was to emulate the work that Tara and I have been doing on the Open Media Web project, which developed out of our work with Songbird where we could sense that there was a real opportunity to explore, but didn’t yet have a clear picture of either the space as it was understood by lead users and experts nor of the outcomes that needed to be advocated. So rather than diving in and promoting technologies or tactics before we had identified the opportunities, challenges and boundaries of the problem domain, we decided to pursue an investigatory strategy, starting with a series of meetups, blog posts and interviews (vlogged on Viddler) that might help us flesh out the actors, ideas and conversations that were already ongoing in the space.

The result of my proposal is captured in this post by Chris Saad to the Data Portability mailing list. I think this is a positive step, and one that I hope will give Data Portability some direction and good work to do over the next several weeks and months. I’d like to go a step further and flesh out my thinking however, before this project gets underway.

These interviews should really be conducted assassin-style (as I like to say) where someone (probably Chris Saad) goes to each major vendor represented (and pimped) by the group (i.e. Google and Facebook, Plaxo, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Flickr, Six Apart, MyStrands, et al) and solicits written (or video) answers to the same five or six questions. Each of these interviews should subsequently be posted to the data portability blog over a series of months.
The goal of these ongoing interviews should be to discover primarily: 1) why these companies joined the group and what their goals are; 2) what they think of when they say “data portability” 3) what challenges are they facing when it comes to offering their vision of data portability at their company? 4) what are the greatest benefits of data portability? 5) what are they doing (if anything) to promote and advance data portability within their organization? 6) what technologies have they implemented (or plan to implement in the next six months) in support of data portability? From these answers, I think we can start to recognize trends in both the headspace of large social networking sites as well as begin to call out certain technologies that might be worth picking up and evangelizing, especially in the interest of interop between multiple parties’ sites.
As such, the advocacy of any particular technological solution by the data portability group today should be immediately abandoned until further research and exploration has occurred. While I was happy to see my favorite stable of technologies listed on the group’s homepage in the early days, I now realize that technology is not the hard part; it’s actually the politics, the policies, the usability and impact on and perception of the individual data owners that are really the first order priorities. Without beginning to address issues in those areas first, the technology conversation will never occur.
In terms of timing, I think that the data portability group has come along more or less at the right time, but that it’s actually walking into the problem ass-backwards. What we don’t need right now is a lot of hype and glorification of an abstruse notion of data portability. In fact, data portability by itself is currently meaningless and intangible; without good examples of how it can be applied to make things better for companies’ customers, there will never be an economic imperative to move in this direction (I should point out that data portability is interesting to me because increased customer choice is interesting to me, and thereby competition in the space is beneficial to the customers of such services). For a timely example of a positive case where data portability is making a difference, consider the ability to move your bookmarks from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia in lieu of Microsoft’s looming acquisition bid of Yahoo!. Surely there are other equally beneficial applications of data portability, and building out these use cases in terms of end-user benefit is critical to continuing to make the case for data portability with credibility.

So anyway, I do believe that there is an opportunity here and Chris Saad is correct that getting a number of the prominent players in this arena to come to the table on this topic is a feat; however, simply bringing them together without engaging with the gnarly problems and policies that have kept data portability from becoming a reality could bring more confusion and angst than benefit. Deflating the hype and going back to humble beginnings and simple questions is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the appropriate and most effective way forward. Data portability is still not obvious for most people or most companies — heck the technologies that enable it are barely out of their 1.0 and 2.0 phases yet — and still this topic is one that captures people’s imaginations and lets them imagine countless “what if” scenarios that seem, somehow, just around the corner. Data portability is a critical topic, and with the advances in the state of the conversation we had over the weekend, I’m eager to see the members of the data portability group pick up the ball and keep moving it forward.

So, if this topic is something that interests you, I recommend you blog about it, talk about it, interpret it and really take some time to consider what data portability means to you, and why it matters (or doesn’t) to you. Me, Larry and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr rapped about this stuff some more on our Citizen Garden podcast today, so if you’re looking for more information, ideas or fodder, you might go ahead and give it a listen.

The OpenID mobile experience

Two days ago, Ma.gnolia launched their mobile version, and it’s pretty awesome (disclosure: Ma.gnolia is a former client and current friend/partner of Citizen Agency).

In the course of development, Larry asked me what he thought he should do about adding OpenID sign-in to the mobile version. He was reluctant to do so because, he reasoned, the experience of logging in sucks, not just because of the OpenID round-trip dance, but because most identity providers don’t actually support a mobile-friendly interface.

Indeed, if you take a look at the flow from the Ma.gnolia mobile UI to my OpenID provider (using the iPhone simulator app), you can see that it does suck.

I strongly encourage Larry to go ahead and add OpenID even if the flow isn’t ideal. As it is, you can sign up to Ma.gnolia with only an OpenID (without a need for creating yet another username and password) and so without offering this login option, the mobile site would be off-limits to folks in this situation.

So there’s clearly an opportunity here, and I’m hoping that out of OpenIDDevCamp today, we can start to develop some best practices and interface guidelines for OpenID providers for the mobile flow (not to mention more generally).

If you’ve seen a good example of an OpenID (or roundtrip authentication flow) for mobile, leave a comment here and let me know. It’s hard to get screenshots of this stuff, so any pointers would be appreciated!

The problem with open source design

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Call me elitist in this one aspect, but with all due respect to code artistes, it’s quite clear whether a function computes or not; the same quantifiable measures simply do not exist for design and that critical lack of objective review means that design is a form of Art, and its execution should be treated as such.
Continue reading “The problem with open source design”

Fluid, Prism, Mozpad and site-specific browsers

Matt Gertner of AllPeers wrote a post the other day titled, “Wither Mozpad?” In it he poses a question about the enduring viability of Mozpad, an initiative begat in May to bring together independent Mozilla Platform Application Developers, to fill the vacuum left by Mozilla’s Firefox-centric developer programs.

Now, many months after its founding, the group is still without a compelling raison d’être, and has failed to mobilize or catalyze widespread interest or momentum. Should the fledgling effort be disbanded? Is there not enough sustaining interest in independent, non-Firefox XUL development to warrant a dedicated group?

Perhaps.

There are many things that I’d like to say both about Mozilla and about Mozpad, but what I’m most interesting in discussing presently is the opportunity that sits squarely at the feet of Mozilla and Mozpad and fortuitously extends beyond the world-unto-itself-land of XUL: namely, the opportunity that I believe lies in the development of site-specific browsers, or, to throw out a marketing term: rich internet applications (no doubt I’ll catch flak for suggesting the combination of these terms, but frankly it’s only a matter of time before any distinctions dissolve).

If you’re just tuning in, you may or may not be aware of the creeping rise of SSBs. I’ve personally been working on these glorified rendering engines for some time, primarily inspired first by Mike McCracken’s Webmail.app and then later Ben Willmore’s Gmail Browser, most recently seeing the fruition of this idea culminated in Ruben Bakker’s pay-for Gmail wrapper Mailplane.app. More recently we’ve seen developments like Todd Ditchendorf’s Fluid.app which generates increasingly functional SSBs and prior to that, the stupidly-simple Direct URL.

But that’s just progress on the WebKit side of things.

If you’ve been following the work of Mark Finkle, you’ll be able to both trace the threads of Web Runner’s transformation into the full-fledged Prism project, as well as the germination of Mozpad.

Clearly something is going on here, and when measured against Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s AIR frameworks, we’re starting to see the emergence of an opportunity that I think will turn out to be rather significant in 2008, especially as an alternative, non-proprietary path for folks wishing to develop richer experiences without the cost, or the heaviness, of actually native apps. Yes, the rise of these hybrid apps that look like desktop-apps, but benefit from the connectedness and always-up-to-date-ness of web apps is what I see as the unrecognized fait accompli of the current class of stand-alone, standards compliant rendering engines. This trend is powerful enough, in my thinking, to render the whole discussion about the future of the W3C uninteresting, if not downright frivolous.

A side effect of the rise of SSBs is the gradual obsolescence of XUL (which already currently only holds value in the meta-UI layer of Mozilla apps). Let’s face it: the delivery mechanism of today’s Firefox extensions is broken (restarting an app to install an extension is so Windows! yuck!), and needs to be replaced by built-in appendages that offer better and more robust integration with external web services (a design that I had intended for Flock) that also provides a web-native approach to extensibility. As far as I’m concerned, XUL development is all but dead and will eventually be relegated to the same hobby-sport nichefication of VRML scripting. (And if you happen to disagree with me here, I’m surprised that you haven’t gotten more involved in the doings of Mozpad).

But all this is frankly good for Mozilla, for WebKit (and Apple), for Google, for web standards, for open source, for microformats, for OpenID and OAuth and all my favorite open and non-proprietary technologies.

The more the future is built on — and benefits from — the open architecture of the web, the greater the likelihood that we will continue to shut down and defeat the efforts that attempt to close it up, to create property out of it, to segregate and discriminate against its users, and to otherwise attack the very natural and inclusive design of internet.

Site specific browsers (or rich internet applications or whatever they might end up being called — hell, probably just “Applications” for most people) are important because, for a change, they simply side-step the standards issues and let web developers and designers focus on functionality and design directly, without necessarily worrying about the idiosyncrasies (or non-compliance) of different browsers (Jon Crosby offers an example of this approach). With real competition and exciting additions being made regularly to each rendering engine, there’s also benefit in picking a side, while things are still fairly fluid, and joining up where you feel better supported, with the means to do cooler things and where generally less effort will enable you to kick more ass.

But all this is a way of saying that Mozpad is still a valid idea, even if the form or the original focus (XUL development) was off. In fact, what I think would be more useful is a cross-platform inquiry into what the future of Site Specific Browsers might (or should) look like… regardless of rendering engine. With that in mind, sometime this spring (sooner than later I hope), I’ll put together a meetup with folks like Todd, Jon, Phil “Journler” Dow and anyone else interested in this realm, just to bat around some ideas and get the conversation started. Hell, it’s going on already, but it seems time that we got together face to face to start looking at, seriously, what kind of opportunity we’re sitting on here.

Making the most of hashtags

A couple of days ago a new site called Hashtags.org was launched by Cody Marx Bailey and Aaron Farnham, two ambitious ~~college students~~ folks from Bryan & College Station, Texas.

I wanted to take a moment to comment on its arrival and also suggest a slight modification to the purpose and use of hashtags, now that we have a service for making visible this kind of metadata.

First of all, if you’re unfamiliar with hashtags or why people might be prepending words in their tweets with hash symbols (#), read Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels to get caught up on where this idea came from.

You should note two things: first, when I made my initial proposal, Twitter didn’t have the track feature; second, I was looking to solve some pretty specific problems, largely related to groupings and to filtering and to amplifying intent (i.e. when making generic statements, appending an additional tag or two might help others better understand your intent). For consistency, my initial proposal required that all important terms be prefixed with the hash, despite how ugly this makes individual updates look. The idea was that, I’d try it out, see how it worked, and if someone built something off of it, or other people adopted the convention, I could decide if the hassle and ugliness were ultimately worth it. A short time after I published my proposal, the track feature launched and obviated parts of my proposal.

Though the track feature provided a means for following explicit information, there was still no official means to add additional information, whether for later recall purposes or to help provide more context for a specific update. And since Twitter currently reformats long links as meaningless TinyURLs, it’s nice to be able to provide folks with a hint about the content at the end of the link. On top of those benefits, hashtags provide a mechanism for leveraging Twitter’s tracking functionality even if your update doesn’t include a specific keyword by itself.

Now, I’ll grant you that a lot of this is esoteric. Especially given that Twitter is predicated on answering the base question “what are you doing?” I mean, a lot of this hashtag stuff is gravy, but for those who use it, it could provide a great deal of value, just like the community-driven @reply convention.

Moreover, we’ve already seen some really compelling and unanticipated uses of hashtags on Twitter — in particular the use of the #sandiegofire hashtag as a common means for identifying information related to the San Diego fires.

And that’s really just the beginning. With a service like Tweeterboard providing even more interesting and contextual social statistics, it won’t be long before you’ll be able to discover people who talk about similar topics or ideas that you might enjoy following. And now, with Hashtags.org, trends in the frequency of certain topics will become all the more visible and quantifiable.

BUT, there is a limit here, and just because we can add all this fancy value on top of the blogosphere’s central intelligence system doesn’t mean that our first attempt at doing so is the best way to do it, or that we should definitely do it at all, especially if it comes at a high cost (perceived or real) to other users of the system.

Already it’s been made clear to me that the use of hashtags can be annoying, adding more noise than value. Some people just don’t like how they look. Still others feel that they encumber a simple communication system that should do one thing and one thing well, secondary uses be damned if they don’t blend with the how the system is generally used. This isn’t del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia after all.

And these points are all valid and well taken, but I think there’s some middle ground here. Used sparingly, respectfully and in appropriate measure, I think that the value generated from the use of hashtags is substantial enough to warrant their continued use, and it isn’t just hashtags.org that suggests this to me. In fact, I think hashtags.org, in the short term, might do more damage than good, if only because it means people will have to compose messages in unnatural ways to take advantage of the service, and this is never the way to design good software (sorry guys, but I think there’s room to improve the basic track feature yet).

In fact, with the release of the track feature, it became clear that every word used in a post is important and holds value (something that both Jack and Blaine noted in our early discussions). But it’s also true that without certain keywords present in a post, the track feature is useless. In this case in particular, where they provide additional context, I think hashtags serve a purpose. Consider this:

“Tara really rocked that presentation!”

versus:

“Tara really rocked that presentation! #barcampblock”

In the latter example, the presence of the hashtag provides two explicit benefits: first, anyone tracking “barcampblock” will get the update, and second, those who don’t know where Tara is presenting will be clued into the context of the post.

In another example:

“300,000 people evacuated in San Diego county now.”

versus

“#sandiegofire: 300,000 people evacuated in San Diego county now.”

Again, the two benefits are present here, demonstrating the value of concatenated hashtags where using the space-separated phrase “San Diego” would not have been caught by the track feature.

What I don’t think is as useful as when I first made my proposal (pre-tracking) is calling out specific words in a post for emphasis (unless you’re referring to a place or airport, but that’s mostly personal preference). For example, revising my previous proposal, I think that this approach is now gratuitous:

“Eating #popcorn at #Batman in #IMAX.”

Removing the hashes doesn’t actually reduce the meaning of this post, nor does it affect the tracking feature. And, leaving them out makes the whole update look much better:

“Eating popcorn at Batman in IMAX.”

If you wanted to give your friends some idea of where you are, it might be okay to use:

“Eating popcorn at Batman in IMAX at #Leows.”

…but even still, the hash is not wholly necessary, if only to help denote some specialness to the term “Leows”.

So, with that, I’m thrilled to see hashtags.org get off the ground, but it’s use should not interfere with the conventional use of Twitter. As well, they provide additional value when used conservatively, at least until there is a better way to insert metadata into a post.

As with most technology development, it’s best to iterate quickly, try a bunch of things (rather than just talk about them) and see what actually sticks. In the case of hashtags, I think we’re gradually getting to a pretty clear and useful application of the idea, if not the perfect implementation so far. Anyway, this kind of “conversational development” that allows the best approach to emerge over time while smoothing out the rough edges of an original idea seems to be a pretty effective way to go about making change, and it’s promising to see efforts like hashtags.org take a simple — if not controversial — proposal, and push it forward yet another step.

Public nuisance #1: Importing your contacts

I’ve talked about this before (as one of the secondary motivators behind OAuth) but I felt it deserved a special call out.

Recently, Simon Willison presented on OpenID and called the practice that Dopplr (and many many others) uses to import your contacts from Gmail absolute horrifying. I would concur, but point out that Dopplr is probably the least offender as they also provide safe and effective hcard importing from Twitter or any URL, just as Get Satisfaction does.

Unfortunately this latter approach is both less widely implemented and also unfamiliar to many regular folks who really just want to find their friends or invite them to try out a new service.

The tragedy here is that these same folks are being trained to hand out their email address and passwords (which also unlock payment services like Google Checkout) regularly just to use a feature that has become more or less commonplace across all social network sites. In fact, it’s so common that Plaxo even has a free widget that sites can use to automate this process, as does Gigya. Unfortunately, the code for these projects is not really open source, whereas Dopplr’s is, providing little assurance or oversight into how the import is done.

What’s most frustrating about this is that we have the technology to solve this problem once and for all (a mix of OpenID, microformats, OAuth, maybe some Jabber), and actually make this situation better and more secure for folks. Why this hasn’t happened yet, well, I’m sure it has something to do with politics and resources and who knows what else. Anyway, I’m eager to see a open and free solution to this problem and I think it’s the first thing we need to solve after January 1.

Ruminating on DiSo and the public domain

There’s been some great pickup of the DiSo Project since Anne blogged about it on GigaOM.

I’m not really a fan of early over-hype, but fortunately the reaction so far has been polarized, which is a good thing. It tells me that people care about this idea enough to sign up, and it also means that people are threatened enough by it to defensively write it off without giving it a shot. That’s pretty much exactly where I’d hope to be.

There are also a number of folks pointing out that this idea has been done before, or is already being worked on, which, if you’re familiar with the microformats process, understand the wisdom in paving well-worn cow paths. In fact, in most cases, as Tom Conrad from Pandora has said, it’s not about giving his listeners 100% of what they want (that’s ridiculous), it’s about moving from the number of good songs from six to seven out of a set of eight. In other words, most people really don’t need a revolution, they just want a little more of what they already have, but with slight, yet appreciable, improvements.

Anyway, that’s all neither here nor there. I have a bunch of thoughts and not much time to put them down.

. . .

I’ve been thinking about mortality a lot lately, stemming from Marc Orchant’s recent tragic death and Dave Winer’s follow up post, capped off with thinking about open data formats, permanence and general digital longevity (when I die, what happens to my digital legacy? my OpenID?, etc).

Meanwhile, and on a happier note, I had the fortunate occasion to partake in the arrival of new life, something that, as an uncle of ~17 various nieces and nephews, I have some experience with.

In any case, these two dichotomies have been pinging around my brain like marbles in a jar for the past couple days, perhaps bringing some things into perspective.

. . .

Meanwhile, back in the Bubble, I’ve been watching “open” become the new bastard child of industry, its meaning stripped, its bite muzzled. The old corporate allergy to all things open has found a vaccine. And it’s frustrating.

Muddled up in between these thoughts on openness, permanence, and on putting my life to some good use, I started thinking about the work that I do, and the work that we, as technologists do. And I think that term shallow now, especially in indicating my humanist tendencies. I don’t want to just be someone who is technologically literate and whose job it is to advise people about how to be more successful in applying its appropriate use. I want to create culture; I want to build civilization!

And so, to that end, I’ve been mulling over imposing a mandate on the DiSo Project that forces all contributions to be released into the public domain.

Now, there are two possible routes to this end. The first is to use a license compatible with Andrius Kulikauskas‘ Ethical Public Domain project. The second is to follow the microformats approach, and use the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

While I need to do more research into this topic, I’ve so far been told (by one source) that the public domain exists in murky legal territory and that perhaps using the Apache license might make more sense. But I’m not sure.

In pursuing clarity on this matter, my goals are fairly simple, and somewhat defiant.

For one thing, and speaking from experience, I think that the IPR process for both OpenID and for OAuth were wasteful efforts and demeaning to those involved. Admittedly, the IPR process is a practical reality that can’t be avoided, given the litigious way business is conducted today. Nor do I disparage those who were involved in the process, who were on the whole reasonable and quite rational; I only lament that we had to take valuable time to work out these agreements at all (I’m still waiting on Yahoo to sign the IPR agreement for OAuth, by the way). As such, by denying the creation of any potential IP that could be attached to the DiSo Project, I am effectively avoiding the need to later make promises that assert that no one will sue anyone else for actually using the technology that we co-create.

So that’s one.

Second, Facebook’s “open” platform and Google’s “open” OpenSocial systems diminish the usefulness of calling something “open”.

As far as I’m concerned, this calls for the nuclear option: from this point forward, I can’t see how anyone can call something truly open without resorting to placing the work firmly in the public domain. Otherwise, you can’t be sure and you can’t trust it to be without subsequent encumbrances.

I’m hopeful about projects like Shindig that call themselves “open source” and are able to be sponsored by stringent organizations like the Apache foundation. But these projects are few and far between, and, should they grow to any size or achieve material success, inevitably they end up having to centralize, and the “System” (yes, the one with the big es) ends up channeling them down a path of crystallization, typically leading to the establishment of archaic legal institutions or foundations, predicated on being “host” for the project’s auto-created intellectual property, like trademarks or copyrights.

In my naive view of the public domain, it seems to me that this situation can be avoided.

We did it (and continue to prove out the model) with BarCamp — even if the Community Mark designation still seems onerous to me.

And beyond the legal context of this project, I simply don’t want to have to answer to anyone questioning why I or anyone else might be involved in this project.

Certainly there’s money to be had here and there, and it’s unavoidable and not altogether a bad thing; there’s also more than enough of it to go around in the world (it’s the lack of re-circulation that should be the concern, not what people are working on or why). In terms of my interests, I never start a project with aspirations for control or domination; instead I want to work with intelligent and passionate people — and, insomuch as I am able, enable other people to pursue their passions, demonstrating, perhaps, what Craig Newmark calls nerd values. So if no one (and everyone) can own the work that we’re creating, then the only reason to be involved in this particular instance of the project is because of the experience, and because of the people involved, and because there’s something rewarding or interesting about the problems being tackled, and that their resolution holds some meaning or secondary value for the participants involved.

I can’t say that this work (or anything else that I do) will have any widespread consequences or effects. That’s hardly the point. Instead, I want to devote myself to working with good people, who care about what they do, who hold out some hope and see validity in the existence of their peers, who crave challenge, and who feel accomplished when others share in the glory of achievement.

I guess when you get older and join the “adult world” you have to justify a lot more to yourself and to others. It’s a lot harder to peel off the posture of defensiveness and disbelief that come with age than to allow yourself to respond with excitement, with hope, with incredulity and wonder. But I guess I’m not so much interested in that kind of “adult world” and I guess, too, that I’d rather give all my work away than risk getting caught up in the pettiness that pervades so much of the good that is being done, and that still needs to be done, in all the many myriad opportunities that surround us.

Slow, steady and iterative wins the race

Consider this a cry for anti-agile, anti-hyped solutions for delivering the open social web.

I read posts like Erick Schonfeld’s “OpenSocial Still “Not Open for Business”” and I have two reactions: first, TechCrunch loves to predict the demise or tardiness of stuff but isn’t very good at playing soothsayer generally and second: there’s really no way Google could have gotten the launch of OpenSocial right. And not like my encouragement will make much difference in this case, but I’m with Google this time: just keep trucking, we’ll get there eventually.

On the first point, I’d like to jog your memory back to when TechCrunch declared Ning RIP and that Mozilla’s Coop was bad news for Flock. Let’s just say that both companies are both alive and kicking and looking better than ever. I don’t really care to pick on TechCrunch, only point out that it often doesn’t really serve much purpose to try to predict the demise of anyone before they’re really gone or to lament the latency of some brand new technology that holds great promise but has been released early.

On my second reaction, well, I have some sympathies for Google for releasing OpenSocial prematurely, before it was fully baked or before they had parity with the Facebook platform. We suffered a similar coal-raking when Flock 0.2 launched. It was literally a bunch of extensions and a theme baked on to the husk of Firefox and when people asked “hey, where’s the beef?!”, well, we had to tell them it was in the future. You can imagine how well that went over.

The point is, we kept at it. And after I left, Flock kept at it. And so just over two years after we’d released 0.2, Flock 1.0 came out, and the reviews, well, were pretty good.

Had we not released Flock 0.2 when we did and gone underground, there’s a chance we would have had more time to prove out the concepts internally before taking them to a wider and less-forgiving audience and would have avoided the excessive media buzz we unnecessarily spun up and that blew up in our face. I learned from that experience that enthusiasm isn’t enough to convince other people to be patient and to believe that you’re going to deliver. I also learned the hard way how long good technology development actually takes and that typically whatever you come out with first is going to have to be radically changed throughout the testing and iterations of any design process.

To look at what Google’s attempting to do, I can see the same kind of awe shucks, we’re changing the world kind of technical development going on. But unlike Flock’s early days, there wasn’t the same political and economic exposure that I’m amazed to see Google taking on. It’s one thing for Facebook, with its youth and bravado, to force its partners to toe whatever line it sets, and to have them build to their specifications. After all, if they don’t, their apps won’t work.

Google’s doing something slightly different and more dangerous, in that, not only are they basically building a cross-platform operating system that runs on the web itself, but they’re also having to balance the needs and passing fancies of multiple business partners involved in actually implementing the specifications to greater or lesser degrees, with varying amounts of attention and wherewithal.

Worst of all, between Facebook and Google’s platforms, we’re quickly heading down a path that leads us to a kind of stratefied Internet Explorification of the web that we haven’t seen since Firefox 1.0 came on the scene. Already we’re seeing inconsistencies between the existing OpenSocial containers and it’s only going to get worse the more adopters try to work to the unfinished specs. As for Facebook apps, well, for every Facebook app built to run inside of Facebook, that’s one less app that, today, can’t run on the Open Web and then God kills another kitten.

So the moral here is that slow and steady isn’t as sexy for the media or VCs but it typically wins races in terms of technology adoption and deployment. So I guess I can’t fault Google for releasing a little too early, but it’ll be interesting to see if it actually helps them get to a stable OpenSocial sooner. Whether it matters when they get there is a matter of debate of course, but in the meantime, hell, there’s plenty for us to do to improve the web as it is today and to solve some tricky problems that neither OpenSocial or Facebook have begun to consider. So, I’m with Doc. And I’m in it for the long haul. I’ll keep my eyes open on OpenSocial and frankly hope that it succeeds, but in the end, I’m interested developing on the best citizen-centric technology that’s going to shape the next evolution of the web.

So long as it’s open, it’s free, non-proprietary, and inclusive, well, even if it’s slow going getting it done, at least we’re not treading back in time.