Digital Identity – Page 5

Blogger adopts OpenID site-wide

Clarification: The title of this post is a little misleading, as Oxa pointed out. Blogger has only enabled OpenID commenting site-wide. The author regrets any impression otherwise.

In what has to be a positive sign of things to come, Blogger has taken the OpenID commenting feature from beta to live in a matter of two weeks.

This is huge.

With great progress coming on OAuth Discovery, we’re rapidly approaching the plumbing needed to really start to innovate on citizen-centric web services… and social network portability.

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.

The inside-out social network

Anne Zelenka of Web Worker Daily and GigaOM fame wrote me to ask what I meant by “building a social network with its skin inside out” when I was describing DiSo, the project that Steve Ivy and I (and now Will Norris) are working on.

Since understanding this change that I envision is crucial to the potential wider success of DiSo, I thought I’d take a moment and quote my reply about what I see are the benefits of social network built inside-out:

The analogy might sound a little gruesome I suppose, but I’m basically making the case for more open systems in an ecosystem, rather than investing or producing more closed off or siloed systems.

There are a number of reasons for this, many of which I’ve been blogging about lately.

For starters, “citizen centric web services” will arguably be better for people over the long term. We’re in the toddler days of that situation now, but think about passports and credit cards:

your passport provides proof of provenance and allows you to leave home without permanently give up your port of origin (equivalent: logging in to Facebook with your MySpace account to “poke” a friend — why do you need a full Facebook account for that if you’re only “visiting”?);

your credit/ATM cards are stored value instruments, making it possible for you to make transactions without cash, and with great convenience. In addition, while you should choose your bank wisely, you’re always able to withdraw your funds and move to a new bank if you want. This portability creates choice and competition in the marketplace and benefits consumers.

It’s my contention that, over a long enough time horizon, a similar situation in social networks will be better for the users of those networks, and that as reputation becomes portable and discoverable, who you choose to be your identity provider will matter. This is a significant change from the kind of temporariness ascribed by some social network users to their accounts today (see danah boyd).

Anyway, I’m starting with WordPress because it already has some of the building blocks in place. I also recognize that, as a white male with privilege, I can be less concerned about my privacy in the short term to prove out this model, and then, if it works, build in strong cross-silo privacy controls later on. (Why do I make this point? Well, because the network that might work for me isn’t one that will necessarily work for everyone, and so identifying this fact right now will hopefully help to reveal and prevent embedding any assumptions being built into the privacy and relationships model early on.)

Again, we’re in the beginning of all this now and there’ll be plenty of ill-informed people crying wolf about not wanting to join their accounts, or have unified reputation and so on, but that’s normal during the course of an inversion of norms. For some time to come, it’ll be optional whether you want to play along of course, but once people witness and come to realize the benefits and power of portable social capital, their tune might change.

But, as Tara pointed out to me today, the arguments for data portability thus far seem predicated on the wrong value statement. Data portability in and of itself is simply not interesting; keeping track of stuff in one place is hard enough as it is, let alone trying to pass it between services or manage it all ourselves, on our own meager hard drives. We need instead to frame the discussion in terms of real-world benefits for regular people over the situation that we have today and in terms of economics that people in companies who might invest in these technologies can understand, and can translate into benefits for both their customers and for their bottom lines.

I hate to put it in such bleak terms, but I’ve learned a bit since I embarked on a larger personal campaign to build technology that is firmly in the service of people (it’s a long process, believe me). What developers and technologists seem to want at this point in time is the ability to own and extract their data from web services to the end of achieving ultimate libertarian nirvana. While I am sympathetic to these goals and see them as the way to arriving at a better future, I also think that we must account for those folks for whom Facebook represents a clean and orderly experience worth the exchange of their personal data for an experience that isn’t confounding or alienating and gives them (at least the perception) of strong privacy controls. And so whatever solutions we develop, I think the objective should not be to obviate Facebook or MySpace, but to build systems and to craft technologies that will benefit and make such sites more sustainable and profitable, but only if they adopt the best practices and ideals of openness, individual choice and freedom of mobility.

As we architect this technology — keeping in mind that we are writing in code what believe should be the rights of autonomous citizens of the web — we must also keep in mind the wide diversity of the constituents of the web, that much of this has been debated and discussed by generations before us, and that our opportunity and ability to impose our desires and aspirations on the future only grows with our successes in freeing from the restraints that bind them, the current generation of wayward web citizens who have yet to be convinced that the vision we share will actually be an improvement over the way they experience “social networking” today.

My OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist for 2008

Update: I’ve posted an update to these lists, giving props to Yahoo, Google, PBWiki and Drupal for embracing OpenID.

I believe in the power of community to drive change, and I believe that peer pressure can be a great motivator. I also believe that shaming can be an equally powerful motivator, if used lovingly and when an “out” is provided.

In this case, that “out” is adding support for consuming OpenIDs, not just being an identity provider.

With that in mind, I thought I’d throw out my OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist with the hope that a little sunlight might cause the previously planted seeds to finally sprout. Since OpenID 2.0 is now out, these folks really have very little excuse not to get on board and make this happen (limited developer resources notwithstanding).

So, without further ado:

My Shitlist

Last February, at the Future of Web Apps in London, there was an orgy of OpenID announcements.

The point of my Shitlist is to publicly shame folks who have previously promised (or strongly indicated an intent) to adopt and add support for OpenID but who have failed, thus far, to do so. I invite them to redeem themselves by making good on their promises. I won’t hold it against them, but hey, it’s their word on the line.

Digg.com. I’d consider myself personal friends with the Digg folks. I like Daniel, Kevin and Owen. I think they do great work and that Digg is one of the most influential synaptic centers of the net. But Digg tops my shitlist because of a very important 10 seconds of speech that Kevin offered on stage, and which was covered by Om and TechCrunch. He said, and I quote: And then we also want to announce today, uh, support for OpenID. So we will be, uh, rolling out OpenID here in the next few months. That’s gunna be cool. Listen to it yourself. Did this ever happen? Nu uh. Still waiting. Hmmph!
NetVibes. NetVibes remains one of the more innovative, more “open source like” rich internet desktops out there. Tariq‘s a friend. But, like Digg, when you make promises (scroll down to Tariq Krim) to do something and months and months later you haven’t made good on your word, well, you end up in my shitlist.
Last.fm. Now, I’m going out on a limb here. I have a strong recollection that Last.fm was the third company to promise OpenID support at FOWA, but for the life of me, I can hardly find a reference (besides this: “So what was the buzz at this years FOWA London? Two things resonated to me more than anything in the conference. OpenID and attention data. All of the key players from digg to Netvibes, Last.FM to Arrington touched on, commented or made announcements in these arenas.” — hat tip to JP), and in the recording of their session, they make nary a mention. Now, I’m pretty sure they said something about it, but I don’t have proof. Last.fm needs OpenID regardless, so if someone can backup or discredit my memory, I’m happy to move them to a more appropriate list.
PBWiki. I’m a fan of PBWiki, the hosted wiki service. They’re a good friend to the BarCamp and Twitter communities and are my first choice when I need a wiki and don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining my own. The oldest email I could find when I first approached David, Nathan and Ramit with a request to support OpenID was July 30, 2006. I’ve badgered them consistently since then, receiving various assurances that they’d work on it. And without directly calling bullshit, I do wonder why their own Auth API hasn’t been made to be OpenID compliant when there have been so many other significant improvements made. I know that nerds aren’t their top priority (nor their biggest money-makers by a long shot) but maybe we can hack it in at the next SHDH?
MyBlogLog. I suppose things change when you get absorbed by a massive corporation that requires a consistent terms of service. Or else it seems plausible that the early indications of support for OpenID might have blossomed into full fledged support. Alas, it was not to be.
Technorati. In October of 2006, Technorati announced support for blog claiming with OpenID. They also became an OpenID provider. So technically, they don’t deserve a full shaming. However, it’s lame that they allow you to claim your blog if it’s an OpenID, but for reasons that confound me, don’t let you actually sign in to Technorati using the same OpenID. This seems ludicrous to me and frankly, I expect more from Technorati. (And can I point out that it’s a bad sign that when I search your blog for OpenID using your search engine, nothing comes up? Huzzah!)
Wikipedia. Well, everyone loves Wikipedia right (that’s an uncorroborated generalization)? Well, they still belong on my shitlist. Wikipedia said they’d support it in a Google Video as early as June of 2006. They might be able to define the protocol, but they certainly don’t support it. (Reprieve: open source to the rescue! Evan Prodromou wrote the OpenID extension for Mediawiki. Now Wikipedia simply needs to adopt it!)

Hitlist

With the shitlist out of the way, I can get on to those folks who haven’t necessary made promises before, but are ripe candidates to be lobbied to add support for OpenID.

Satisfaction. Satisfaction has long since planned on offering OpenID (and more recently OAuth) and they tell me that it’s coming soon. With co-founders (and my friends!) Thor and Amy recently getting into a new startup they’ve named Tesla Jane, I think I can be patient for a while longer. 😉
Twitter. If you’re aware of the backstory of OAuth, you’ll know that it was my advocacy of OpenID for Twitter that revealed the need for a delegated authentication protocol that was compatible with OpenID. And, now that OAuth has gone 1.0 (and while we’re waiting for Twitter to roll out support for the final spec) it’d be great to also see movement on the OpenID front. I know you’ll get right on that. Heh.
Drupal. Bonus points go to Drupal and James Walker for rolling in support for OpenID into core for Drupal 6.0, and maybe we have to wait for the upgrade, but it’s too bad that there isn’t support on the drupal.org website. Should be an easy fix, and with the brilliant way the community devoured my recent feedback, I hope that this request is met with equal enthusiasm!
Plazes. Well, I’m with Tara and am pretty disappointed with where Plazes is today. Felix and Stefan are great, but the new Plazer sucks. It’s like they took a bunch of VC and lost focus. Then again, maybe I’m projecting. Anyway, it’d mean something to me if they went ahead and added support for OpenID. Better late than never.
Pownce. Pownce has been rocking the portable social network stuff, along with sister-site Digg (yes, the same Digg on my shitlist). The logical next step is for them to provide OpenID consumption to make the circle of portability complete!
Ning. Well, they already have NingID, but I really question the wisdom of proprietary authentication schemes at this point. I mean, if they’re all about niche-social-networks, wouldn’t consuming OpenIDs make so much sense to further reduce barriers to outsides coming in to play?
LinkedIN. These guys have been doing some great work widely adopting microformats and becoming more social-network-like. People seem to use LinkedIN as an identity aggregation point; shouldn’t they also be able to prove that they own a certain LinkedIN profile elsewhere and then verify their accounts elsewhere by logging in to LinkedIN with their other OpenIDs?
Slideshare. Given that Slideshare probably has the greatest collection of OpenID related presentations on the net, it’s kind of a shame that you can’t login to the site using the protocol. I know Rashmi and Jon have their hands full, but it’d be sweet to see them add support.
TripIt. TripIt’s awesome. Tara and I did a day of consulting with them and have been constant users ever since. What’d be great is if you could use your OpenID to login between Dopplr and TripIt — it might sound insane to them — but they really are complementary services. Tying my identity between them would save me such a hassle of having to go back and forth between them — and they’d both win!
Blip, Viddler, YouTube et al. This might be a pipe dream, but I do think that we could win over Blip and Viddler. YouTube, not so much. But if we lobbied each independent and got one to go, the others might follow…
WordPress.com. So WordPress is a funny one. They serve as an OpenID provider but don’t currently consume. If you want to enable OpenID consumption, you have to run your own blog (as I do) and use Will Norris‘ excellent plugin. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but with Drupal 6.0 getting support and Blogger offering limited consumption of OpenIDs, I would have hoped that WordPress would have made the move first.
Pandora. Finally, and this one might just be a vanity request, but I think it’d be cool if Pandora supported OpenID, if only because it would make OpenID seem cooler.

Wishlist

So, with the more likely candidates out of the way, I’d like to turn my attention to what would be big wins for OpenID, but that are an order of magnitude harder to win over, not so much because of technology issues but because of the complexities of terms of service and other business-level issues. In any case, if we see support from these folks for OpenID in 2008, we know we’re making serious ground.

Facebook. I asked the question on Twitter whether people would use Facebook as their OpenID provider if they could. The overwhelming response was no. Still, of anyone, Facebook could, if they actually rebuilt people’s trust and extended the reach of their strong privacy controls with best practice OpenID support, I think it’d be a net positive thing to see Facebook official adopt OpenID. There are already two Facebook apps that enable it, so clearly someone’s interested!
Yahoo and its various properties: Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming. I know they’re interested, but it will take more than interest and developer intentions to make this one happen. If Yahoo gets on board, game over man, cat’s in the bag.
Google. With their enthusiasm for OAuth and the recognition of the problem of widespread password scraping, I think Google is realizing that their avoidance of OpenID is not paying off. With Blogger toying with support for OpenID, I think (hope!) that’s it’s only a matter of time.
Microsoft. Well, Bill already promised. And they’ve even shipped code, even if it’s kind of a weird approach. Like most brushes with the embrace of openness, Microsoft is probably at war with itself once again, on the one hand having elements within that want to do the right thing and on the other, for some reason, being heavily influence by holdouts from the evil empire. We’ll see what comes of this, but I’m not holding my breath, even if InfoCard is the right interface metaphor for OpenID.
Mozilla. I don’t know if you noticed, but Mozilla has quite a few properties strewn about. Practically every week there’s a new property launched to promote some new campaign, not to mention all the myriad community sites that crop up (i.e. UserStyles.org, thankfully an OpenID consumer!). In leiu of a top-down single sign-on solution, why not just support OpenID and get it over with and enable portable reputation within the Mozilla universe? And — once you do that — maybe start looking at integrating support into Firefox, as I asked earlier this year?
Trac/SVN. With OAuth, support for OpenID on the command line becomes much more feasible, even if there’s little support today. Imagine being able to use your OpenID credentials to login to any SVN repository. Being able to federate whitelists of identifiers would make cross-collaboration much more facile and I think would be a boon to independent open source development.
MySpace, Hi-5, Bebo, Orkut et al. I mean, we now know that OpenSocial is basically an overhyped widget distribution platform, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t turn into something more. Eventually the limits of siloed identities are going to run up against the cross-pollinating design of OpenSocial and logging in to Bebo with your MySpace account is not only going to make sense, but will be expected, just like I can send email from my Gmail account to Hotmail and Yahoo email users. OpenID 2.0, with directed identity, is perfectly suited to handle this particular use case and I’d love to see the early OpenSocial partners get on board sooner than later.
Adobe. Not even sure why this one’s in the list, but so long as I’m thinking big, it’d be sweet to see support not only on Adobe’s site for OpenID, but also in Flash apps (which I think would possibly require OAuth). Adobe has Adobe IDs already, and, as I suggested before, proprietary protocols for identity on the web make less and less sense.
TechCrunch. This one’s for fun. I know Mike’s a fan of big ideas and making things better, so it seems strange that, given his use of WordPress, he hasn’t demanded support for OpenID commenting yet. Perhaps we can dream.

Now that I’ve got those lists out of the way, I wanted to give summary props to folks who have already gone ahead and implemented OpenID (this is not an exhaustive list; check out the OpenID Directory for more):

Ma.gnolia (1)
ClaimID (1)
iusethis (1)
Basecamp (1, 2)
Dopplr (1)
AOL (1)
Six Apart (1)
JanRain/Pibb
Iconbuffet (1)
Shopify (1)
Plaxo (1)
Blinksale (1)
SmugMug (1, 2)
Wikitravel (1)

Make sure to stop by these folks’ sites and try out their support for OpenID. Heck, they’ve pioneered the way forward, might as well both give them some patronage and see what user experience lessons can be had from their implementations.

And, this is by no means a finished list. It’s just a start. If you’ve got your own Shitlist, Hotlist and Wishlists, please do share them. Not only have I probably missed some folks (Amazon anyone?), but there are probably services and sites more dear to your hearts that should be embracing citizen-centric web protocols that I don’t even know about yet.

So, let me know what you think and if you want to start doing some lobbying, the best place to start is with the OpenID site itself.

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.

Data portability and thinking ahead to 2008

So-called data portability and data ownership is a hot topic of late, and with good reason: with all the talk of the opening of social networking sites and the loss of presumed privacy, there’s been a commensurate acknowledgment that the value is not in the portability of widgets (via OpenSocial et al) but instead, (as Tim O’Reilly eloquently put it) it’s the data, stupid!

Now, Doc’s call for action is well timed, as we near the close of 2007 and set our sights on 2008.

Earlier this year, ZDNet predicted that 2007 would be the year of OpenID, and for all intents and purposes, it has been, if only in that it put the concept of non-siloed user accounts on the map. We have a long way to go, to be sure, but with OpenID 2.0 around the corner, it’s only a matter of time before building user prisons goes out of fashion and building OpenID-based citizen-centric services becomes the norm.

Inspired by the fact that even Mitchell Baker of Mozilla is talking about Firefox’s role in the issue of data ownership (In 2008 … We find new ways to give people greater control over their online lives — access to data, control of data…), this is going to be issue that most defines 2008 — or at least the early part of the year. And frankly, we’re already off to a good start. So here are the things that I think fit into this picture and what needs to happen to push progress on this central issue:

Economic incentives and VRM: Doc is right to phrase the debate in terms of VRM. When it comes down to it, nothing’s going to change unless 1) customers refuse to play along anymore and demand change and 2) there’s increased economic benefit to companies that give back control to their customers versus those companies that continue to either restrict or abuse/sell out their customers’ data. Currently, this is a consumer rights battle, but since it’s being fought largely in Silicon Valley where the issues are understood technically while valuations are tied to the attractiveness a platform has to advertisers, consumers are at a great disadvantage since they can’t make a compelling economic case. And given that the government and most bureaucracy is fulled up with stakeholders who are hungry for more and more accurate and technologically-distilled demographic data, it’s unlikely that we could force the issue through the legal system, as has been approximated in places like Germany and the UK.
Reframing of privacy and access permissions: I’ve harped on this for awhile, but historic notions of privacy have been out-moded by modern realities. Those who do expect complete and utter control need to take a look at the up and coming generation and realize that, while it’s true that they, on a whole, don’t appreciate the value and sacredness of their privacy, and that they’re certainly more willing to exchange it for access to services or to simply dispense with it altogether and face the consequences later (eavesdroppers be damned!), their apathy indicates the uphill struggle we face in credibly making our case.
Times have changed. Privacy and our notions of it must adapt too. And that starts by developing the language to discuss these matters in a way that’s obvious and salient to those who are concerned about these issues. Simply demanding the protection of one’s privacy is now a hollow and unrealistic demand; now we should be talking about access, about permissions, about provenance, about review and about federation and delegation. It’s not until we deepen our understanding of the facets of identity, and of personal data and of personal profiles, tastestreams and newsfeeds that can begin to make headway on exploring the economic aspects of customer data and who should control it, have access to it, can create, read, update, and delete
Data portability and open/non-proprietary web standards and protocols: Since this is an area I’ve been involved in and am passionate about, I have some specific thoughts on this. For one thing, the technologies that I obsess over have data portability at their center: OpenID for identification and “hanging” data, microformats for marking it up, and OAuth for provisioning controlled access to said data… The development, adoption and implementation of this breed of technologies is paramount to demonstrating both the potential and need for a re-orientation of the way web services are built and deployed today. Without the deployment of these technologies and their cousins, we risk web-wide lock-in to vender-specific solutions like Facebook’s FBML or Google’s OpenSocial, greatly inhibiting the potential for market growth and innovation. And it’s not so much that these technologies are necessarily bad in and of themselves, but that they represent a grave shift away from the slower but less commercially-driven development of open and public-domained web standards. Consider me the frog in the luke warm water recognizing that things are starting to get warm in here.
Citizen-centric web services: The result of progress in these three topics is what I’m calling the “citizen-centric web”, where a citizen is anyone who inhabits the web, in some form or another. Citizen-centric web services, are, of course, services provided to those inhabitants. This notion is what I think is, and should, going to drive much of thinking in 2008 about how to build better citizen-centric web services, where individuals identify themselves to services, rather than recreating themselves and their so-called social-graph; where they can push and pull their data at their whim and fancy, and where such data is essentially “leased” out to various service providers on an as-needed basis, rather than on a once-and-for-all status using OAuth tokens and proxied delegation to trusted data providers; where citizens control not only who can contact them, but are able to express, in portable terms, a list of people or companies who cannot contact them or pitch ads to them, anywhere; where citizens are able to audit a comprehensive list of profile and behavior data that any company has on file about them and to be able to correct, edit or revoke that data; where “permission” has a universal, citizen-positive definition; where companies have to agree to a Creative Commons-style Terms of Access and Stewardship before being able to even look at a customer’s personal data; and that, perhaps most import to making all this happen, sound business models are developed that actually work with this new orientation, rather than in spite of it.

So, in grandiose terms I suppose, these are the issues that I’m pondering as 2008 approaches and as I ready myself for the challenges and battles that lie ahead. I think we’re making considerable progress on the technology side of things, though there’s always more to do. I think we need to make more progress on the language, economic, business and framing fronts, though. But, we’re making progress, and thankfully we’re having these conversations now and developing real solutions that will result in a more citizen-centric reality in the not too distant future.

If you’re interested in discussing these topics in depth, make it to the Internet Identity Workshop next week, where these topics are going to be front and center in what should be a pretty excellent meeting of the minds on these and related topics.

Apple source code pointing to social features?

File this in the wild conjecture/handy-waving category.

I did some random digging today and stumbled upon something that could be pretty interesting, or, could be nothing more than the equivalent of the human appendix of Leopard: remnants of a good idea that somehow along the way never got completed, but traces of it still exist in the modern state for no apparent reason than to confuse and confound those with too many mental faculties at his disposal.

But let’s go with the what if? take. What with my interest in getting people into software in interesting ways, this one seems, like cave paintings, to point to earlier attempts at some fundamental type of expression of a very contemporary idea.

Anyway, the thing is this. While poking around Articles.js in Leopard’s PubSub.framework (you’ll need to be running Leopard for the Articles.js link), I noted a call to a couple functions having to do with FOAF, in particular function loadFOAF( ) and function receivedFOAF( html ). I talked to Tantek about this and apparently it had to do with some misbegotten effort to bring FOAF support to Safari but that it was effectively stillborn for reasons I can’t recall, but what was interesting was that, tucked away, I discovered a seemingly orphaned file called Friends.html (again, Leopard only).

This got me curious.

I started poking around the PubSub.framework for other clues… (And so you know, the Leopard PubSub.framework is effectively a system-level toolkit for subscribing to RSS and ATOM feeds and maintaining read/unread status universally — something that Windows Vista also apparently has. In any case it’s pretty cool, and it’s also new with Leopard).

So, after poking about, I eventually ended up here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/PubSub.framework/Versions/A/Headers

Within this directory is a file called PSAuthor.h and its contents are quite intriguing. The file describes a class of object called ABPerson (short for “Address Book person”). The various properties of an “ABPerson” are summarily listed, primarily pulled from the ATOM spec: things such as name, email and URL. There is also a conspicuous method at the end of the file called person, which is not listed in the docs, and which is apparently used to associate an author of a web feed with a person from the Apple Address Book. This is huge. Let me pull the method in its entirety:


/*
    @method     person
    @abstract   Returns the Address Book record associated with the receiver.
    @result     The associated record.
    @discussion Currently, associations to Address Book records must be made manually, by calling
                the setPerson: method. In the future, this method may attempt to locate a default ABPerson
                by looking up the email address or URL in the Address Book.
*/
@property (retain) ABPerson * person;

@end

Note the discussion: In the future, this method may attempt to locate a default ABPerson by looking up the email address or URL in the Address Book.

This means that Apple intends (or at least as far as I can make out from reading the tea leaves) to use the Address Book as a store for feed authors… and that — who knows — you may end up using your Address Book to read feeds from so-called “ABPersons” or, moreover, their interest in FOAF might have been a means to automagically grab your list of friends (say, from LiveJournal) to populate your Address Book — then, using ATOM discovery and the PubSub.framework, could have pulled in feed updates from all your friends, giving you effectively a local social network that could power — who knows what kinds of applications!

In any case, I could be totally off here, but there’s something in this… could it be somehow related to the Mail.app feedreader functionality? I’ll offer one more hint that seems to suggest that my Coverflow for People idea isn’t too far off… If you take a look deep in the QuickLook.framework directory you’ll find a couple of very curious images: Vcard16.png, Vcard32Base.png, Vcard32Border.png, Vcard128Base.png, Vcard128Border.png, Vcard512Base.png and Vcard512Border.png. There aren’t any other filetype-specific graphics in this directory, and yet QuickLook is useful for all kinds of files across the OS. Is it significant then, when I browse the Address Book Metadata that I get cards like this?

Privacy, publicity and open data

This one should be a quickie.

A fascinating article came out of CNN today: “Intelligence deputy to America: Rethink privacy“.

This is a topic I’ve had opinions about for some time. My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!).

Still, the more reading I’ve been doing lately about international issues and conflict, the more I agree with Danny Weitzner that there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep. He sums up the conversation space thus:

Privacy is not lost simply because people find these services useful and start sharing location. Privacy could be lost if we don’t start to figure what the rules are for how this sort of location data can be used. We’ve got to make progress in two areas:

technical: how can users sharing and usage preferences be easily communicated to and acted upon by others? Suppose I share my location with a friend by don’t want my employer to know it. What happens when my friend, intentionally or accidentally shares a social location map with my employer or with the public at large? How would my friend know that this is contrary to the way I want my location data used? What sorts of technologies and standards are needed to allow location data to be freely shared while respective users usage limitation requirements?

legal: what sort of limits ought there to be on the use of location data?

can employers require employees to disclose real time location data?

is there any difference between real-time and historical location data traces? (I doubt it)

under what conditions can the government get location data?

There’s clearly a lot to think about with these new services. I hope that we can approach this from the perspective that lots of location data will being flowing around and realize the the big challenge is to develop social, technical and legal tools to be sure that it is not misused.

I want to bring some attention to his first point about the technical issues surrounding New Privacy. This is the realm where we play, and this is the realm where we have the most to offer. This is also an area that’s the most contentious and in need of aggressive policies and leadership, because the old investment model that treats silos of data as gold mines has to end.

I think Tim O’Reilly is really talking about this when he lambasts Google’s OpenSocial, proclaiming, “It’s the data, stupid!” The problem of course is what open data actually means in the context of user control and ownership, in terms of “licensing” and in terms of proliferation. These are not new problems for technologists as permissioning dates back to the earliest operating systems, but the problem becomes infinitely complex now that it’s been unbounded and non-technologists are starting to realize a) how many groups have been collecting data about them and b) how much collusion is going on to analyze said data. (Yeah, those discounts that that Safeway card gets you make a lot more money for Safeway than they save you, you better believe it!)

With Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, taking an equally pessimistic (or Apocalyptic) attitude about privacy, I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly. In another post, I talked about the value of this data — calling it “Data Capital“. People need to realize the massive amount of value that their data adds to the bottom line of so many major corporations (not to mention Web 2.0 startups!) and demand ongoing and persistent access to it. Hell, it might even result in better or more accurate data being stored in these mega-databases!

Regardless, when representatives from the government start to say things like:

Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all, said Kerr, 68. Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that.

Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety, Kerr said. I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.

…you know that it’s time we started framing the debate on our own terms… thinking about what this means to the Citizen Centric Web and about how we want to become the gatekeepers for the data that is both rightfully ours and that should willfully be put into the service of our own needs and priorities.