What I do – Page 22 – Factory Joe

Picoformats: microformats for mobile

Andrew Turner pinged me about a project I started up as an offshoot to my work with Mozes called Picoformats. He wrote that a picoformat is a standard-means for defining markup in small, probably mobile, devices.

That’s not exactly the original idea, but it actually makes a lot of sense and, the more that Tara and I use our Blackberries, the more we see a need for standard micro-interfaces. Sure it’s great that you can download my hcard into your address book from your regular web browser, but the same seems not to hold true on mobile devices.

Anyway, that’s an issue that needs to be addressed in mobile browsers, and Opera‘s well on their way working on such problems.

Andrew’s post did highlight both the need for me to get the word out about this project and also explain it a little more clearly since Microformats could actually address the formating of data for mobile devices (especially when we start pairing up microformatted content with relevant media-specific CSS).

The goal of the Picoformats project is to use an open process that reflects existing behavior and come up with standards for an SMS-based dialect for interacting with mobile services.

Dodgeball already has a pretty good SMS/email dialect. In fact, I use it all the time. What I want is service interoperability, so that when I send a message to (okay, I’ll reveal my bias) Mozes, I can use the same syntax to compose the command or message. For example, if I send a message formed like this: “! heading to the movies at 10pm”, it shouldn’t matter if I’m on Dodgeball, Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, or FactoryCity Mobile — each service that supports Picoformats should send out the blast message to my friends, just as I’d expect it to. But already there’s divergence — with Mozes using “@” for blast messages and Dodgeball using “!”. This is the kind of thing that will make it extremely hard for people to move between services or, worse yet, use a multitude of services.

You can probably begin to see how this is similar to life before Adium or Trillian. Personally, I like not having to run 5 different instant messenger apps. I like having them all in one and being able to IM my friends regardless of the service they’re on from one interface. I’d like to be able to do the same with the mobile services I use. And that’s why this Picoformats idea is important — it’s syntactic interoperability.

What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

I can’t help but notice that not much has happened with Spread Firefox since I left, even though my good friend Jamey continues to feed me mockups and possible redesigns of the site (note: the photo at right isn’t Jamey’s work but an early redesign attempt between me and Josh Jarmin).

And though the Firefox Flicks Campaign was a considerable success, it didn’t seem to arouse the same kind of passionate support that the New York Times ad campaign did in its time (though it did drive a considerable amount of traffic). It seemed isolated and somewhat self-congratulatory… preaching to an audience that was already aware of and promoting the open source browser, rather than those who wouldn’t be able to separate the “Internet” from “MySpace” from “the blue E”.

And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism so much as something I’ve been stewing on for some time, trying to figure out, y’know, what comes next?

When I was at Flock (and I continue to champion this idea mind you) I wanted Flock and Firefox to team up — to work together to show their collective usefulness across a wider and more diverse community — one that a single browser simply wouldn’t be able to appeal to as effectively as two designed with different intents. In fact, with Internet Explorer 7 on the horizon, incorporating many of the features that have set Firefox apart, I wonder whether either Flock or Firefox will have much of a chance at widespread adoption without a concerted effort to spell out more clearly the benefits of both platforms — and how developers can leverage their work across both simulataneously.

This is the challenge as it stands and as I see it. As the features that formerly set Firefox apart become standard fare in modern browsers, one way to form the question is to consider whether Firefox has served its purpose — causing Redmond to wake up and to change its flagship browser. If so, then ok, keep building it out and improving it, but tell the fans that they can go home until next season.

If the fight or the battle or the … non-violent conflict … is only beginning, then I guess I’d like to see a clear declaration of intentions. I’d like to see Mozilla stand up and declare the principles, ideas, dreams and ambitions that set it apart and keep its proponents up at night, dreaming of ways to get the story out there to an ever-widening audience. Anything less, and the juggernaut will bowl us over, diminishing the effects of the incredible achievements that have been made in the past two years. I’m looking at this as a ten-year struggle — as a hugely powerful Hydra that must be faced on each branch, what I’m talking about is the future of the web and the tools that we will use to navigate, explore, publish and own it with. In order to stay in the game and continue to participate in the conversation (or ever set the tone), we need a strategy, we need a plan, we need people and we ought get started now.

I’m open for ideas, have a few of my own, but mostly just want to know: What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

ClaimID makes the OpenID connection

I have to say that it’s things like this that really make me shiver with excitement…

I mean, it’s pretty simple, but it’s also pretty important.

What’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, it’s yet another site adopting OpenID, a decentralized identity system. And, as more and more sites adopt this system (which should remain transparent to end-users if they don’t want an OpenID), we near ever-closer to a lightweight, single sign-on solution.

To be sure, OpenID isn’t a panacea. It’s not intended to be one. The primary attractiveness of OpenID is its simplicity: it’s decoupled the issue of trust from identity and simply offers a way of staking your identity to a given URL. In a sense, if you can trust the credentials of Website X, then you (as a web service provider) can trust accounts created on that domain as well. The benefit for the account holder is that they don’t have to re-register on Website Y.

Note that this is a web-centric solution and doesn’t carry well into the real world where people don’t identify themselves by URLs (hmm, what if instead of a social security number, we were assigned a URL at birth? whoa.).

The other thing that’s great about this announcement is that it’s the work of Scott Kveton’s new startup, JanRain. I brought Scott and Terrell Russell together some time ago, so it’s awesome to see the fruits of this connection already — and that Scott’s going off to do this kind of work full-time.

What I want to see? Well, the proliferation of OpenID across all the various sites that I use. The cost is minimal since the libraries are being developed on all kinds of platforms — and it should integrate fairly well with existing login schemes. Then I want to see either Ma.gnolia or ClaimID add support for XFN (they already support hCards and ClaimID allows for custom rel values). Then, of course, we need to be able to string together (loosely coupled, mind you) my contact list and my group membership list so that I can import and export them wherever I go (obviously this should be done with microformats). Once we’ve got that situation fleshed out, and I’ve claimed my sites with either MicroID or (preferrably) rel=me, I’ll have a pretty portable social network to carry around the web!

Drupal founder coming to San Francisco

Dries has announced a trip to San Francisco from June 25-30. Surely we’ll have to make sure he gets to meet all the fine folks in our community while he’s in town!

The future of open leadership

With the Feed Icon Trademark debate, I’ve become fascinated by a number of Mitchell Baker‘s recent posts on open source leadership (or perhaps more appropriately community stewardship).

Just last night we held our second coworking meeting to discuss a number of topics (of which we were able to plow through very few)… Key among them was the question of how to best open up the space for non-anchors while not overly burdening the existing key-holders. And, in opening up the space, how to we set a fair pay-for-the-time-you-use rate that doesn’t burden the project with excessive overhead or rules.

After an exhausting discussion for over an hour and a half, we had to adjourn the meeting following Brad’s Snooze Button Guideline. We covered quite a number of possibilities, from hourly rates to hosting quarterly “supporters”, but ultimately ended up without a final resolution other than to submit proposals to the mailing list for continued debate.

Here’s what’s strange about it: throughout the meeting (I can’t be sure but…) I did feel like I was sitting in the role of facilitator — not exactly the leader, but close enough. I mean, that’s a pretty common role to play, right? Most meetings need a leader of sorts, right?

So now the question that I have is, or perhaps what I’m most confused about, is what kind of leadership does the coworking project need? What kind can it stand? I agree with Mitchell that relying on the “community to decide” will moreoften than not result in disappointment or frustration for communities actually don’t decide anything, they only appear to make decisions. And yet, there is this apparent allergy in open source communities that forces the subversion of the ego and the consequent vilification of those who attempt to make a decision on behalf of the group.

Ian responds to Mitchell:

Good leaders do not make decisions – they simply help the community to make better decisions. To do this they listen well, and they think long and hard. Then, when they see the prevailing wisdom surface, they communicate those decisions more fruitfully.

…which sounds pretty good and egalitarian on the surface. In fact, not a bit unlike what they call representative government. And yet, I think that that only captures a fraction of what a leader, in the community context, really does.

It is my belief that good, reflective and responsive leadership is needed for any project to find success. But that leadership need not be hierarchical. Or dominant. Or, most of all, exclusively masculine. And it also can’t be cowardly or cow-tow to the imposing and voluminous voice of the community it serves. That’s why leadership is important; it’s not about power, it’s about clarity of purpose and of seeing things through to their desired conclusion, deterring that which threatens to scuttle the intentions of the group.

Case in point, the witch-hunt that O’Reilly recently survived suggests that communities can easily be turned into echo chambers for groupthink and channeled hostility. Without strong leadership, you’re liable to end up with a neverending succession of teapot tempests without accomplishing anything productive.

So, coming back to the meeting last night, we have goals in common, even if the path is not clear. Which is precisely the kind of opportunity in which leadership emerges — the kind that isn’t focused in any one individual but is shared among the individuals in the collective. In a very real sense, it is the BarCamp model of leadership, of self-determination, of personal responsibility and of realizing your own role in consciously creating circumstances for yourself.

The point is this: open source leadership is not a contradiction, it’s just deeply misunderstood. And it seems high time that, as we open up to serving wider markets and communities, that we learn what it really means to embrace a kind of leadership that does not rely on traditional concentrations of power or of exclusivity or malevolent competition, but instead works to helps us each reach beyond ourselves to reveal each our own potentials. I don’t know clearly what it looks like, but I do think that Mitchell is on to something and that somehow, this little coworking experiment of ours might bring us steps closer to discovering just how open, modern leadership will actually bring us forward.

Patent the baby, trademark the bathwater

If you take anything away from the second trademark brouhaha in as many weeks, it’s this quote from Mozilla Chief Lizard wrangler, Mitchell Baker:

I believe the Free and Open Source Software world is due for a long discussion of trademarks, how we use them, what their value is and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see some Creative Commons type options available for trademark- type purposes. (Creative Commons licenses are all copyright licenses, and do not purport to address the trademark – like issues of providing clarity to consumers about what consumers are getting.) We haven’t had this discussion yet.

So obviously, this points to the discussion I’ve been waging towards the establishment of something akin to the Community Mark idea. It’s not that trademark should necessarily go away; instead it’s about providing a choice when traditional trademark law simply does not make sense and only stands to incense and divide communities — which, ironically, such laws were intended to protect.

I don’t think the question in this case really revolves around the question of the meaning of icons so much as the enforcement and consistent use of symbols that come to mean something to a given community. For what Mitchell is really proposing is something more like reverse trademark, where you compel someone to use your mark in a certain way in order to produce consistency. Let’s face it, by restricting the use of the mark or icon, you’re actually moving away from your goal, which in this case is to establish a symbol, to be used in common, to identify a particular interface interaction.

It doesn’t seem like trademark is the appropriate means to the end in this case… and I’m very happy that Mitchell has proposed that the best solution is likely her option #3, “to try a less formal process with more authority resided in community norms and [see] how that works.” This is, I believe, the only true option that stands a chance of gaining widespread adoption as well as heading off the kind of scorn and antipathy that members of the open source community simply don’t need.

OMG Flickr goes gamma!!!

Whoa. Whoa. Someone’s been effin’ with my Flickr…! And hmm… do I like it (maybe you care, but probably not)? But, well… I dunno.

It’s bright, ok…

It’s seemingly shinier…

It’s not quite black MacBook sexiness…

It actually seems more complicated. It seems less explorable… I mean, it’s… neat.

I guess I’m kind of dumbfounded. Maybe it will grow on me. I don’t like the two columns of photos with sets on the right… I mean, consider my uploads next to Thomas Hawk’s:

I dunno — it just doesn’t seem as pretty as the previous single column.

Am I wrong? Who’s with me on this? Hmm?

Pulling back the curtain on Shuttle

Matt drops a link to Khaled’s announcement about Shuttle, a long-term project to overhaul the WordPress admin UI.

Looking it over (and as someone who participated from afar some time ago) I have to say that I actually prefer Steve Smith’s WP Tiger Admin. I use it on this blog and love it. There are a few glitches here and there, but for the most part it’s a huge improvement over WordPress’ old school default.

In any case, it’s great to see such major changes coming to WordPress — I just hope that it maintains the original simplicity that makes WordPress so widely successful.

Out of Towner Meetup: Teh Boris & ClaimID

Everyone’s favorite hand waver, Boris Mann of Bryght is here as well and Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell of ClaimID for Startup School and IIW and are huuuuungry!

It’s last minute, I know, but if you can make it to tonight’s Out of Towner at Osha Thai at 7:30pm you can expect some great food and very captivating conversation!

…specifically:

Identity 2.0
Drupal
Microformats
NP Tech
Coworking
Open source
…other yadda yadda!

Ok, c u there. Kbai!

Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review

According to VP of Engineering Mark Towfiq, Flock has apparently found a new Director of User Experience… a fella named Will Tschumy. On first glance, I can’t seem to produce a Google Resume for him but I’m eager to find out more about him!

While I’m on the topic of Flock, I have to admit that the latest hourlies of Flock’s upcoming public beta (dubbed Cardinal) are starting to looking really pretty thanks to Bryan Bell (and not ironically reminiscent of his other project, NetNewsWire). So, here’s a brief review (based on Milestone 4).
Continue reading “Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review”