Citizen-centric Web – Page 6

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.

OAuth 1.0, OpenID 2.0 and up next: DiSo

IIW 2007b is now over and with its conclusion, we have two significant accomplishments, both the sum of months of hard work by some very dedicated individuals, in the release of the OpenID 2.0 and OAuth Core 1.0 specifications.

These are two important protocols that serve as a foundational unit for enabling what’s being called “user-centric identity”, or that I call “citizen-centric identity”. With OpenID for identity and authentication and OAuth for authorizing access to portions of your private data, we move ever closer to inverting the silos and providing greater mobility and freedom of choice, restoring the balance in the marketplace and elevating the level of competition by enabling the production of more compelling social applications without requiring the huge investment it takes to recreate even a portion of the available social graph.

It means that we now have protocols that can begin to put an end to the habit of treating user’s credentials like confetti and instead can offer people the ability to get very specific about they want to share with third parties. And what’s most significant here is that these protocols are open and available for anyone to implement. You don’t have to ask permission; if you want to get involved and do your customers a huge favor, all you have to do is support this work.

To put my … time? … where my mouth is (I haven’t got a whole lot of money to put there) … Steve Ivy and I have embarked on a prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out. We’re calling it DiSo, or “Distributed Social Networking applications”. The emphasis here is on “distributed”.

In his talk today on Friends List Portability, Joseph Smarr laid out an import set of roles that help to clarify how pieces of applications should be architected:

first of all, people have contact details like email addresses, webpage addresses (URLs), instant messaging handles, phone numbers… and any number of these identifiers can be used to discover someone (you do it now when you import your address book to a social networking site). In the citizen-centric model of the world, it’s up to individuals to maintain these identifiers, and to be very intentional about who they share their identifiers with
Second, the various sites and social networks you use need to publish your friends and contacts lists in a way that is publicly accessible and is machine readable (fortunately XFN does well there). This doesn’t mean that your friends list will be exposed for all the world to see; using OAuth, you can limit access to pieces of your personal social graph, but the point is that it’s necessary for social sites to expose, for your reuse, the identifiers of the people that you know.

With that in mind, Steve and I have started working on a strawman version of this idea by extending my wp-microformatted-blogroll plugin, renaming it to wp-contactlist and focusing on how, at a blog level, we can expose our own contact list beyond the realm of any large social network.

Besides, this, we’re doing some interesting magic that would be useful for whitelisting and cross-functional purposes, like those proposed by Tim Berners-Lee. Except our goal is to implement these ideas in more humane HTML using WordPress as our delivery vehicle (note that this project is intended to be an example whose concepts should be able to be implemented on any platform).

So anyway, we’re using Will Norris’ wp-openid plugin, and when someone leaves a comment on one of our blogs using OpenID, and whose OpenID happens to be in blogroll already, they’ll be listed in our respective blogroll with an OpenID icon and a class on the link indicating that, not only are they an XFN contact, but that they logged into our blog and claimed their OpenID URL as an identifier. With this functionality in place, we can begin to build add in permissioning functionality where other people might subscribe to my blogroll as a source of trusted commenters or even to find identifiers for people who could be trusted to make typographic edits to blog posts.

With the combination of XFN and OpenID, we begin to be able to establish distributed trust meshes, though the exposure of personal social graphs. As more people sign in to my blog with OpenID and leave approved comments, I can migrate them to my public blogroll, allowing others to benefit from the work I’ve done evaluating whether a given identifier might be a spam emitter. Over time, my reliability in selecting and promoting trustworthy identifiers becomes a source of social capital accrual and you’ll want to get on my list, demonstrating the value of playing the role of identity provider more widely.

This will lead us towards the development of other DiSo applications, which I’ve begun mapping out as sketches on my wiki but that I think we can begin to discuss on the DiSo mailing list.

Blogger Beta offers OpenID; or, I am mine.

Dave Recordon (and many, many, many others)points out that the Blogger Beta has added support for accepting OpenID for comments.

This is a watershed moment in terms of OpenID’s brief history as it seems to represent a change in the perception and utility of the protocol by a very significant potential proponent.

For once I can say to someone like Google, “No, you don’t know me, you’ve never let me use my own credentials — my own domain — where I’ve built up my reputation — to login to your system before. To date you’ve only let me use your siloed credentials to sign in against your servers… you never trusted me before. Today you’re starting to say, ‘Well, maybe it’s okay for you to tell me who you are using your own credentials.’”

Now, don’t think me getting wistful here.

OpenID is far from perfect (as Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out). But, with Internet Identity Workshop coming next week, we have a great opportunity to discuss the necessary improvements that need to happen around user experience, around security, around finalization of the protocol and around thinking through what possibilities a more “citizen centric web” might bring.

(Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I like to use Pearl Jam song titles in my blog posts.)

Data banks, data brokers and citizen bargaining power

I wrote this this morning in a notebook as a follow up to my post yesterday… and since I don’t have time to clean it up now, I thought I’d present in raw, non-sensible form. Maybe there’s some value in a rough draft:

It’s like giving our money to a bank and having them turn around and sell our data to try to upsell us on loans and all kind of … oh wait, but the key difference is if we do get fed up, we can take our money out and go elsewhere, depriving the bank the ability to both target us with their partners’ ads and the ability to compound interest on our savings.

We need data brokers introduced into the system — organizations who are like safety deposit receptacles for our data — and who speak all APIs and actually advocate on our behalves for better service based on how “valuable” we are — this is necessary to top the scales in our favor — to reintroduce a balancing force into the marketplace because right now the choice to leave means dissing our friends — but if I’m not satisfied but still want to t talk to my friends, why can’t I be on the outside, but sending messages in? hell I’m willing to pay — in momentary access to my brokered personal profile — for access to my friends inside the silo. This is what Facebook is doing by shutting down so many accounts — it’s not personal — it’s protecting its business. They don’t want to become a myspace cesspool, succumb to empty profiles and Gresham’s Law — overrun with spam profiles and leeches and worthless profile data — a barren wasteland for advertisers who want to connect with that 8% of their customers who make up 32% of their revenue.

No it’s in data fidelity, richness, ironically FB took it upon themselves to weed out the bad from the good in their system-wide sweeps. Unfortunately they got it wrong a bunch of times. If Facebook allowed the export of data and became a data broker for its users — provided some citizen agency to its customers — there would be economic — as well as social — benefits to maintaining a clean and rich profile — beyond just expressiveness to one’s friends. For better or worse, FB users have a lot of benefit through the siloed apps of that F8 platform — but the grand vision should be closer to what Google’s marketing department christened “OpenSocial”… still though , the roles of banker and broker have yet to be made explicit and so we’ve leapt to “data portability” for nerds, forgetting that most people 1) don’t care about this stuff 2) are happy to exchange their data for services as long as their friends are doing it too 3) don’t want to be burdened with becoming their own libertarian banker! Dave Winer might want to keep everything in an XML file on his desktop, but I know few others who, IRL, feel the same way.

Thus concludes my rough notes.

So, if Facebook were perceived as a big Data Bank in the sky, how would that change things? Would people demand the ability to “withdraw” their data? Does the metaphor confuse or clarify? In any case, what is the role of data banks and data brokers? Is there a difference if the data container leverages the data for their own benefit? If they sell advertising and don’t provide a clear or universal means to opt-out? And what’s in the way of making more “benevolent” data vaults a reality — or how do we at least bring the concept into the discussion?

I have no personal interest the concept, only that’s a viable alternative to the siloed approach is missing from the discussion. And going back to the business models of OpenID and other identity providers… well, if any, that’s it. It’s like having a credit card with access to no credit — what’s the point? And OpenID becomes more valuable the more data capital it has access to. Or something like that.

Oh, and I’d like to quote something poignant that Anders Conbere said to me today in chat:

I was talking with my friend the other day and I tried to explain to him, that what I fear about facebook that I don’t fear about pretty much any other vendor is it’s continued developement as a competing platform to the web. a locked in, proprietary version and what I see, is just like Microsoft leveraged Windows as a “platform for application developement” facebook is doing that for web developement. what it offers developers is the simplicity and security of a stable developement environment at the cost of inovation because as we’ve seen, as market share grows, the ability to inovate decreases (since your success is tied to the backwards compatibility of your platform) and I see the possibility of facebook becoming a dominant platform for web application developement which will in turn lead to two decades of stagnation

So yeah, put that in your bonnet and smoke it. Or whatever.