Tag: openid

An update to my my OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist

OpenID hitlist

Back in December, I posted my OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist. I listed 7 companies on my shitlist, 14 on hitlist and 12 on my wishlist. Given that it’s been all of two months but we’ve made some solid progress, I thought I’d go ahead and give a quick update on recent developments.

First, the biggest news is probably that Yahoo has come online as an OpenID 2.0 identity provider. This is old news for anyone who’s been watching the space, but given that I called them out on my wishlist (and that their coming online tripled the number of OpenIDs) they get serious props, especially since Flickr profile URLs can now be used as identity URLs. MyBlogLog (called out on my shitlist) gets a pass here since they’re owned by Yahoo, but I’d still like to see them specifically support OpenID consumption

Second biggest news is the fact that, via Blogger, Google has become both an OpenID provider (with delegation) and consumer. Separately, Brad Fitzpatrick released the Social Graph API and declared that URLs are People Too.

Next, I’ll give big ups to PBWiki for today releasing support for OpenID consumption. This is a big win considering they were also on my shitlist and I’d previously received assurances that OpenID for PBWiki would be coming. Well, today they delivered, and while there are opportunities to improve their specific implementation, I’d say that Joel Franusic did a great job.

And, in other good news, Drupal 6.0 came out this week, with support for OpenID in core (thanks to Walkah!), so there’s another one to take off my hitlist.

I’d really like to take Satisfaction off my list, since they’ve released their API with support for OAuth, but they’ve still not added support for OpenID, so they’re not out of the woods just yet… even though their implementation of OAuth makes me considerably happy.

So, that’s about it for now. I hear rumblings from Digg that they want to support OpenID, but I’ve got no hard dates from them yet, which is fine. There’re plenty more folks who still need to adopt OpenID, and given the support the foundation has recently received from big guys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Verisign and IBM, my job advocating for this stuff is only getting easier.

The OpenID mobile experience

Two days ago, Ma.gnolia launched their mobile version, and it’s pretty awesome (disclosure: Ma.gnolia is a former client and current friend/partner of Citizen Agency).

In the course of development, Larry asked me what he thought he should do about adding OpenID sign-in to the mobile version. He was reluctant to do so because, he reasoned, the experience of logging in sucks, not just because of the OpenID round-trip dance, but because most identity providers don’t actually support a mobile-friendly interface.

Indeed, if you take a look at the flow from the Ma.gnolia mobile UI to my OpenID provider (using the iPhone simulator app), you can see that it does suck.

Mobile Ma.gnoliaiPhoney OpenID Verification

I strongly encourage Larry to go ahead and add OpenID even if the flow isn’t ideal. As it is, you can sign up to Ma.gnolia with only an OpenID (without a need for creating yet another username and password) and so without offering this login option, the mobile site would be off-limits to folks in this situation.

So there’s clearly an opportunity here, and I’m hoping that out of OpenIDDevCamp today, we can start to develop some best practices and interface guidelines for OpenID providers for the mobile flow (not to mention more generally).

If you’ve seen a good example of an OpenID (or roundtrip authentication flow) for mobile, leave a comment here and let me know. It’s hard to get screenshots of this stuff, so any pointers would be appreciated!

It’s high time we moved to URL-based identifiers

Ugh, I had promised not to read TechMeme anymore, and I’ve actually kept to my promise since then… until today. And as soon as I finish this post, I’m back on the wagon, but for now, it’s useful to point to the ongoing Scoble debacle for context and for backstory.

In a nutshell, Robert Scoble has friends on Facebook. These friends all have contact information and for whatever reason, he wants to dump that data into Outlook, his address book of choice. The problem is that Facebook makes it nearly impossible to do this in an automated fashion because, as a technical barrier, email addresses are provided as opaque images, not as easily-parseable text. So Scoble worked with the heretofore “trustworthy” Plaxo crew (way to blow it guys! Joseph, how could you?!) to write a scraper that would OCR the email addresses out of the images and dump them into his address book. Well, this got him banned from the service.

The controversy seems to over whether Scoble had the right to extract his friends’ email addresses from Facebook. Compounding the matter is the fact that these email addresses were not ones that Robert had contributed himself to Facebook, but that his contacts had provided. Allen Stern summed up the issue pretty well: My Social Network Data Is Not Yours To Steal or Borrow. And as Dare pointed out, Scoble was wrong, Facebook was right.

Okay, that’s all well and fine.

You’ll note that this is the same fundamental design flaw of FOAF, the RDF format for storing contact information that preceded the purposely distinct microformats and :

The bigger issue impeding Plaxo’s public support of FOAF (and presumably the main issue that similar services are also mulling) is privacy: FOAF files make all information public and accessible by all, including the contents of the user’s address book (via foaf:knows).

Now, the concern today and the concern back in 2004 was the exposure of identifiers (email addresses) that can also be used to contact someone! By conflating contact information with unique identifiers, service providers got themselves in the untenable situation of not being able to share the list of identifiers externally or publicly without also revealing a mechanism that could be easily abused or spammed.

I won’t go into the benefits of using email for identifiers, because they do exist, but I do want to put forth a proposal that’s both long time in coming and long overdue, and frankly Kevin Marks and Scott Kveton have said it just as well as I could: URLs are people too. Kevin writes:

The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that its affordance is backwards — it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there’s no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance — people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

This is clearly the design advantage of OpenID. And it’s also clearly the direction that we need to go in for developing out distributed social networking applications. It’s also why OAuth is important to the mix, so that when you arrive at a public URL identifier-slash-OpenID, you can ask for access to certain things (like sending the person a message), and the owner of that identifier can decide whether to grant you that privilege or not. It no longer matters if the Scobles of the world leak my URL-based identifiers: they’re useless without the specific permissions that I grant on a per instance basis.

As well, I can give services permission to share the URL-based identifiers of my friends (on a per-instance basis) without the threat of betraying their confidence since their public URLs don’t reveal their sensitive contact information (unless they choose to publish it themselves or provide access to it). This allows me the dual benefit of being able to show up at any random web service and find my friends while not sharing information they haven’t given me permission to pass on to untrusted third parties.

So screen scrape factoryjoe.com all you want. I even have a starter hcard waiting for you, with all the contact information I care to publicly expose. Anything more than that? Well, you’re going to have to ask more politely to get it. You’ve got my URL, now, tell me, what else do you really need?

Public nuisance #1: Importing your contacts

Facebook Needs OAuth

I’ve talked about this before (as one of the secondary motivators behind OAuth) but I felt it deserved a special call out.

Recently, Simon Willison presented on OpenID and called the practice that Dopplr (and many many others) uses to import your contacts from Gmail absolute horrifying. I would concur, but point out that Dopplr is probably the least offender as they also provide safe and effective hcard importing from Twitter or any URL, just as Get Satisfaction does.

Unfortunately this latter approach is both less widely implemented and also unfamiliar to many regular folks who really just want to find their friends or invite them to try out a new service.

The tragedy here is that these same folks are being trained to hand out their email address and passwords (which also unlock payment services like Google Checkout) regularly just to use a feature that has become more or less commonplace across all social network sites. In fact, it’s so common that Plaxo even has a free widget that sites can use to automate this process, as does Gigya. Unfortunately, the code for these projects is not really open source, whereas Dopplr’s is, providing little assurance or oversight into how the import is done.

What’s most frustrating about this is that we have the technology to solve this problem once and for all (a mix of OpenID, microformats, OAuth, maybe some Jabber), and actually make this situation better and more secure for folks. Why this hasn’t happened yet, well, I’m sure it has something to do with politics and resources and who knows what else. Anyway, I’m eager to see a open and free solution to this problem and I think it’s the first thing we need to solve after January 1.

Blogger adopts OpenID site-wide

Twitter / Case: OpenID FTW!

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.

My OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist for 2008

OpenID hitlist

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 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):

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

OFFICIAL OAuth logoIIW 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 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.

Blogger supports OpeniD!

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 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,

  • 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 , 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.

hCard for OpenID Simple Registration and Attribute Exchange

Microformats + OpenID

One of the many promises of OpenID is the ability to more easily federate profile information from an identity provider to secondary consumer applications. A simple example of this is when you fill out a basic personal profile on a new social network: if you’ve ever typed your name, birthday, address and your dog’s name into a form, why on earth would you ever have to type it again? Isn’t that what computers are for? Yeah, I thought so too, and that’s why OpenID — your friendly neighborhood identity protocol — has two competing solutions for this problem.

Unfortunately, both Simple Registration (SREG for short) and its potential successor Attribute Exchange (AX) go to strange lengths to reinvent the profile data wheel with their own exclusive formats. I’d like to propose a vast simplification of this problem by adopting attributes from the standard (also known as ). As you probably know, it’s this standard that defines the attributes of the and therefore is exceptionally appropriate for the case of OpenID (given its reliance on URLs for identifiers!).

Very quickly, I’ll compare the attributes in each format so you get a sense for what data I’m talking about and how each format specifies the data:

Attribute SREG AX vCard
Nickname openid.sreg.nickname namePerson/friendly nickname
Full Name openid.sreg.fullname namePerson n (family-name, given-name) or fn
Birthday openid.sreg.dob birthDate bday
Gender openid.sreg.gender gender gender
Email openid.sreg.email contact/email email
Postal Code openid.sreg.postcode contact/postalCode/home postal-code
Country openid.sreg.country contact/country/home country-name
Language openid.sreg.language pref/language N/A
Timezone openid.sreg.timezone pref/timezone tz
Photo N/A media/image/default photo
Company N/A company/name org
Biography N/A media/biography note
URL N/A contact/web/default URL

Now, there are a number of other other attributes beyond what I’ve covered here that AX and vCard cover, often overlapping in the data being described, but not in attribute names. Of course, this creates a pain for developers who want to do the right thing and import profile data rather than having folks repeat themselves yet again. Do you support SREG? AX? hCard? All of the above?

Well, regular people don’t care, and shouldn’t care, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a trivial matter.

Microformat glueInstead, the barriers to doing the right thing should be made as low as possible. Given all the work that we’ve done promoting microformats and the subsequent widespread adoption of them (I’d venture that there are many million hcards in the wild), it only makes sense to leverage the upward trend in the adoption of hcard and to use it as a parallel partner in the OpenID-profile-exchange dance.

While AX is well specified, hCard is well supported (as well as well-specified). While AX is extensible, hCard is too. Most importantly, however, hcard and vcard is already widely supported in existing applications like Outlook, Mail.app and just about every mobile phone on the planet and in just about any other application that exchanges profile data.

So the question is, when OpenID is clearly a player in the future and part of that promise is about making things easier, more consistent and more citizen-centric, why would we go and introduce a whole new format for representing person-detail-data when a perfectly good one already exists and is so widely supported?

I’m hoping that reason and sense will prevail and that OpenID and hCard will naturally come together as two essential building blocks for independents. If you’re interested in this issue, please blog about it or express your support to specs@openid.net. I think the folks working on this spec need to hear from folks who make, create, build or design websites and who recognize the importance and validity of betting on, and support and adopting, microformats.