Factory Joe

Identity Twenny is the new cross-platform

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.

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I told Stewart awhile back that he should implement m.flickr.com instead of flickr.com/mob. Google does this with m.gmail.com, and I think all sites that offer mobile versions should adopt the same convention.

Tumblelog

I’ve created the Tumblelog category to capture stream-of-conscious thoughts as they happen. In fact, I intend to start blogging more from my Crackberry. We’ll see how this goes. It’ll be different from Untitled, unfinished, incomplete as that category is reserved more for “public drafts”… stuff I never completed, had intended to, but will probably never get back to again.

You can find out more about Tumblelogs at the blog or at project.ioni.st.

Oh, and I’ll be titling all Tumblelog posts ‘—‘ (like this) … which will probably piss off you feed reader readers, but hey, I make up the rules around here. So there! :P~

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Will identity/login protocols become the next “add to X” chicklets?

Then there was BarCamp San Francisco

I really shouldn’t post anymore before at least mentioning that BarCamp San Francisco has come and gone, offering something between a roar and a whimper. The truth is, it was such a big, multi-tiered kind of experience that I think it’ll take me awhile to unravel it.

Fortunately there’s lots of photos and even some interesting video available in the meanwhile.

Thanks again to the folks who really made it possible: especially the lead organizer and my favorite co-camper, Tara, and Tantek, Nima and the host of awesome volunteers who pitched in throughout the event. And don’t forget our extremely supportive sponsors who fed us and gave us nice things to drink all weekend. The event simply wouldn’t have been possible — or nearly as satisfyingly exhausting — if it weren’t for all the additive efforts of these folks.

The War Tapes & the future of killing

My buddy Sean Coon pointed me The War Tapes (trailer) — a documentary I’d run into on his blog before — that was shot entirely by US soldiers in Iraq.

I’ve not seen it yet, but intend to tonight at a free screening at the Castro Theater.

What I’m looking forward to is the narrative offered by the people actually engaged in the battle and who were trained in warfare, as opposed to the embedded journalists we heard from earlier on, who were not trained so much in survival or in the rules of war, but in the telling of stories and of “objective analysis”. Think about it: when you’ve got a semi-automatic weapon, people are out to kill you (and you’re “allowed” to kill them) and you’ve got a video camera, your perspective is going to be vastly different from someone who’s just along for the ride to “report back” to TV viewers back home.

Put another way: you might not be suprised, but I’ve never shot anyone with a deadly weapon. I have been shot and shot at, but only with paintballs and BBs. My life was never at risk. I never put someone else’s life at risk. And it seems odd to me that there are humans, all over the world, with these weapons whose primary purpose is the destruction of other humans. Looking specifically at guns, but also at the lot of weaponry that has been developed over the course of human history, I can’t help but find the whole business of killing other people a tad… perplexing.

Still, it’s rather lucrative and there are even companies that offer people for hire who are exceptionally good at killing other people. And if that doesn’t seem palatable, well, there are always robots and remote killing machines that can do the job instead.

So anyway, this is so curious to me because of how “citizen journalism” enlarges the conversation. I mean, these stories now come from regular people, people who have left their families and their friends, on a mission to protect American interests and “National Security”, who can speak openly, and without the kind of spin, hyberole or censure that you might find elsewhere. Regardless, I don’t know or even care much about whether this is propaganda, because what it is is the telling of stories by people living in the trenches who get up everyday and might kill other humans by the time they go to sleep the same night.

And I just can’t fathom what that’s like.

I do hope — somehow, again, perhaps naively — that this connected medium, someday, will make it increasingly difficult to substantiate the killing of other people. It just strikes me that the coming generation of always-on connected kids will be far too connected to people across the Earth — to allow for their friends to be fired upon, shot at, or bombed. The test may come soon enough, depending on what happens with Iran — given that it seems much more wired than Iraq (even as of a year ago). I mean, what if? Should the Bush administration decide to take military action, will the Iranian blogosphere inspire the sympathies of the liberal digerati and make an act of violence against the Iranian people political suicide? When we can directly connect with the people that our government intends to bomb, how does that change diplomacy and the ability of the government to act?

These are not questions that I have answers to, but that this kind of documentary inspires. Objectively, whether the story is being told by US soldiers, the Taleban, Al Qaeda, Iranians, Canadians or anyone else directly involved, this changes things. And it changes our understanding and the proximity of killing. Will it, I wonder, change behavior?

Event In a Suitcase and Running Remote S5 Presentations

Continuing the tradition of the “Event in a…” meme, we came up with the notion of “Event in a Suitcase” at the most recent Mash Pit.

The idea is pretty simple: make it easy to walk into a room and make a presentation.

Well, among the five of us, we came to the conclusion that there’s nothing really that makes it easy. There are tools, both hardware and software, that make it possible, and writing them down was a good place to start from. But there really isn’t an open source or free workflow that gets us where we want to be… where everything is affordable and fits in a literal suitcase.

So anyway, we documented our work and could use more help. If you’ve got ideas, tools, solutions, workflows or whatever, add them!

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So, one of the cool hacks that we brainstormed and that Kevin Marks was actually able to implement before the day was out involved Eric Meyer’s public domain slideshow format S5. Essentially he made it possible for people watching an S5 presentation, like Tantek’s excellent Building Blocks for Independent, to see the slides change as the presenter changes them.

Of course bringing this awesome hack together with a Gizmo call-in means that people can at least watch and listen remotely as presentation happens — and participate in IRC. So voila, it’s like NetMeeting, but open source! Anyway, Kevin’s code is in Twisted and now that I’ve blogged this, hopefully he’ll be incented to clean it up and publish it!

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!

Yahoo! Local goes Cuckoo for CoCo Puffs!

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.