It’s fun to get the echosphere to play together, isn’t it?
So when Chris gets up to kick off Gnomedex and asks us to link to this post to upset the TechMeme robots, well, I have to call party foul and mention that this party trick isn’t exactly new.
In fact, it was done last year, and there was even a screencast produced explaining how it works.
If you’re going to hack the echosphere’s radar, man, at least provide proper attribution!
I’ve been spending a lot of time working over the idea of identity representation and validation over the past couple weeks… a topic that is both deep and wide and includes many players.
For the moment, I’m partial to OpenID, as it seems lightweight, decentralized and championed by my buddy Scott Kveton at JanRain (who is now also a Citizen Agency advisor). In fact, now that ClaimID has implemented OpenID, I have a good working example to show off.
But OpenID isn’t the only game in town. And many people are aware of this — in fact, wanting to become the next Passport standard that actually gets widespread adoption. Because once you become that standard, you have a lot of power, both over individual meta-data as well as the social networks that someone is connected to.
In our beginning conversations with Marc on his PeopleAggregator, this is apparent (we’re taking Marc on as a client to act as the community advocate, shortening the product feedback loop). As is increasingly clear, identity lock-in is where the next big battles will be fought, especially as more and more Web Twenny sites open up ports on their data but require authentication in exchange for access (the PeopleAggregator, for example, offers distributed login choices including SXIP, OpenID via LiveJournal, Flickr auth).
Over on the Identity 2.0 blog, there’s an interesting post by Dick on Google Account Authentication — looking at the desktop-based side of authentication (that you’d find in Picasa or Google Earth or even GTalk, for example) and web-based applications, like Joga). He makes the point, as ZDNet latches on to, that Google is “deepening of the identity silo”. And, of course, with Google Checkout, you can see the tenacles of the beast spreading out further without any likelihood of opening up.
So what’s interesting in seeing all these implementations emerge is the opportunity, as Marc has caught on to, of providing a man-in-the-middle “Debabelizer” between auth standards and social networks — what’s been called a “meta social network”. My buddy Scott, though, has also seen this opportunity. And both, fortunately are taking the open source approach (even if not all parties call it that).
So anyway, with all this going on and big players making moves in the space, the one thing that is clear to me about where we’re going is this: in the not-too-distant future, when someone asks if you’re “cross-platform” they’ll no longer be referring to the operating system that you’re running, but whether their identity or authentication standard is supported on your site. And furthermore, whether you’ve made it possible to bring in their existing social network/buddy list from other networks — because, let’s face it: it’s irrelevant whether you build for the Mac, PC and Linux; you’ve got the web, you can make your app universal. The big concern will be whether the social environment that I’ve spent years cultivating can travel with me and cross the chasm from the place where I first built it to populate the host that you’re building.
The title means nothing, but today at Supernova, Andy Baio announced that Yahoo! Local has added support across the board for hCard, hCalendar and hReview, following Flickr, Upcoming and Yahoo! Tech (blurry video 1, video 2 — turn it up!).
I can’t exactly say what adding 10s of millions of microformatted bits of data will do for the web, but it certainly makes the rush to develop UI around this new opportunity all the greater…
Oh, and bonus: when I was at Flock, I wanted to see ground-level integration of microformats in the browser. Imagine having Lucene indexing all the microformatted content that you come across on the web (whether you know it or not) and then having that data separated out for use in extensions, in filling out forms, in generating new cross-sections and views of your ‘history’. And Rohit gave me another side of that idea: being able to autofill forms anywhere by creating an index of microformat classes-to-input value pairs for specific websites… Yeah, the client/browser part is going to be key to making all this work have obvious value for folks on the web. Can’t wait to see how this moves forward.
Well, thought we’d try something a little different — do a little crowd-sourcing ourselves. We’re coming up to Gnomedex at the end of the month and rather than stay at a hotel, we thought we’d see if we could tap our network and find someone to stay with in Seattle…!
We checked out Can I Crash but unfortunately, they only offer is already booked…
So, if you’re in Seattle or know someone who is and has space (and is also not evil), Tara and I would love a place to crash! Oh, and just so you know that we’re decent, here’s what we look like, if you didn’t know already:
…there will be nothing but events. I kid you not.
(And yes, you can add these events to your calendar easily.)
Oh, and cool sidenote, Senator John Edwards will be keynoting Gnomedex. Guess if you can’t get the inventor of the internets, you can at least get a running mate.
So in case you missed it, Tara left Riya very recently, following a trend that’s at least a couple months old (but blowing out recently).
The obvious question is: “what comes next?”
Well, without much time and without much hesitation (which means going on the sense in our collective gut, which our worldly president espouses), we decided to take the plunge and start our own consorgency.
We’re calling it Citizen Agency. And we’re still trying to figure out what we’re gunna shape it into… but we’ve got some initial ideas.
The name was spontaneous to be sure, as we’re on a tight deadline to get this thing launched, but it captures some of the important organizing principles behind what we’re doing. And of course, no good project or idea is without a kickoff track to its soundtrack… so, substitute “Patriot” with “Citizen” in the eponymous song by Pearl Jam and a picture starts to emerge:
And I ain’t no communist
And I ain’t no socialist
And I ain’t no capitalist
And I ain’t no imperialist
And I ain’t no democrat
I sure ain’t no republican either
I only know one party, and that is freedom
Whatever this thing we’re building is, it’s gunna be consistent with everything that’s lead to our shared success so far, including starting with a community model and building it out through channels that respect the dignity of our consorgents and partners.
Ah, and if you have an idea of what kind of symbol might represent this idea, we’re all eyes.
In case you missed it (and I don’t really blog too much about personal stuff much, but it’s okay to be a little human once and again), Tara and Riya have bid each other their farewells and both are moving on to the next chapters of their storied Web 2.0 lives. Not unlike a certain fella you may know. Hmmh. Funny, n’est-ce pas?
We also packed up most of my stuff from Teh Langpad this weekend and moved it over to Tara’s place where I’ve pretty much been livin’ anyway. But yeah. Ho boy.
And, as you know, Teh Space is off and running. Like, a real workspace (but it’s still not the same as finally having something of a home). But still.
Oh, and tomorrow I leave for France until Sunday. Yowza.
And did I mention Picoformats (shuddup, yes I am serious)?
Well, anyway, this whole post is really about Tara and how brave she is to be going out on her own in all this. There’s a lot that she has to figure out, but even more opportunity that she needs to figure out how to make the most of it… I’m proud to be her PiC and to watch eagerly as she ponders her next steps and where she’ll lead the Pinko Brigades from this point onward.
I’ll tell you one thing, it only gets more interesting from here.
I had an interesting exchange at the Net Squared conference last week involving privacy and tags. It came down to a question from someone new to tags: “So if you tag everything with this tag, doesn’t that mean that everyone can find what you’ve tagged?”
The answer is, of course, yes.
Which drew some rather wide eyes and a breath, “Oh”.
And that’s when I went off on my anti-privacy rant. About how privacy is like sand between your fingers and that the more you try to hold on to it, the less you really can maintain control over. And subsequently, over time, more and more spills out into the hands of others, often those who you least expect or want to have information about you.
Like the government or like your paranoid employer beholden to laws of the government. Like insurance companies or the folks who run the ATM card networks. Like people who determine how much you should pay for certain things.
Anyway, sniveling aside, a long time ago I decided that there is no privacy in anything digital (which is both a beautiful and a terrifying thing, depending on how much you know about technology). Knowing a bit myself, but not quite enough, I’ve decided to try and flood the network with as much information about myself as possible in the naive and desperate hope that by creating more positive and truthful information I can counter whatever lies may someday be advanced against what I’m really up to. I mean, when the government is spying on your cell phone calls, your boss is paying people to read your emails and who knows who’s snooping on your WiFi connection, what else can you do? Certainly not pretend that you have an iota of privacy anymore! Enh, whatev. At least the kids get it.
The next brouhaha? Or is it jsut my lack of understanding of IP law showing again? Here at the FactoryCity, we make the news, you decide (Tim would be so disappointed in me, stirring shit up again!)!
But, the point is this: is the recent collaboration between Yahoo-Flickr-Nikon a legitimate re-use of people’s photos with commercial intent? Or, in the case that photos are explicitly designated as licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license, as in the case of Flickr employee Heather Champ, is the license simply being ignored? (Heh, not to mention the fact that featured photo was taken with a Canon Digital Rebel, but I digress.)
I mean, this is really interesting. I guess I don’t care so much about there being product placement on Flickr where it’s relevant — I mean, Scott Beale and Thomas Hawk take awesome photos with Canon EOS‘ — that’s useful information! And now I want to buy a Canon EOS 5D!
But to go all out with some lame-ass big bucks ad campaign not of the community smacks of Chevy Tahoeism. And frankly, turns me off. Oh well.
So how about them licenses? Am I shooting blanks here or, if your photos are showing up in Nikon’s campaign, are ya feelin’ a bit taken advantage of? After all, the TOS say very clearly that “What’s Yours is Yours”. So what’s the deal here? Eh eh?
In case you haven’t heard, this weekend is the 10th SuperHappyDevHouse, otherwise known as “DHX” and will be held at France Telecom’s South San Francisco HQ.
This devhouse is different than previous devhouses in that it’s taking place somewhere other than David Weekly‘s house and it’s also being run as a contest to see who can build the best self-sustaining and self-running money-printing machine in a weekend.
As David says in this video (from Ryanne), if you can build a business in a weekend (like he did with PBWiki) that says something pretty interesting about the time that we’re living in (not to mention the irrational exuberance picking up again).
Read the competition FAQ and then go sign up on the wiki. Oh, and there’ll be a party this Friday kicking off at 7pm, leading into the weekend-long event.
Bonus trivia: all proceeds will be donated to the CCCP.
Factory Joe 