Imagine if your Best Buy experience could be portable?  All the information, expertise, and relevant data could be accessibility any time, any place beyond the walls of a brick and mortar store.  Think about it and envision the possibilities for radical transparency.  Does this work with my existing gear? What did the crowds say about this Cannon?  Is this netbook available in pink near me? What should I possibly my 13 year nephew in Ladysmith WI that could be picked up in the Eau Claire store in time for his birthday? How many returns were there on this plasma TV?    Access to information, data, answers when customers want it regardless of platform and channel builds trust.    Oh, and the answers need to be the same across channel.   Yep, that’s right, customers don’t think channels; this is both the promise and the opportunity for Best Buy.  Amazingly (or not so much), we’ve built up strong functional silos; some more seamlessly integrated than others.    We all need to “rewire” a bit to achieve the accessbility and trusted perspective our customers deserve; I’m personally excited about the change.   Part of getting everyone rallied around the vision is to tell the stories.   I’ll be sharing videos from experts in the upcoming days.

Last year Facebook released Facebook Connect and about the same time Google released Friend Connect, they’re two very similar services that allow users to connect with information and with their friends of the respective native platforms from third-party enabled sites. The intention, as I’ve written about before, is to add a layer of social interaction to ‘non-social’ sites, to connect your information and activity on these third-party sites to your information and activity (and contacts) on the original platforms.

Then in March, Yahoo! announced their service sign-on, called Yahoo! Updates.

Now, this week, Twitter have announced their connection service, called ‘Sign in with Twitter‘. It too gives you a secure authenticated access to your information and contacts, in exactly the same way the others do – except this time, it’s Twitter.

You might ask if we have three, do we need a fourth? Have you ever used any of the other three?

But don’t dismiss it, or think it Twitter are jumping on to any kind of bandwagon, Twitter’s implementation is fundamentally different to the others – and it could cause quite a stir.

The problem with the other services (ultimately the problem with the platforms) is, more than often not, they are completely closed and non-portable. Although you can sign-in to a third-party site and access your data, there’s a lot of limitation to what you can retrieve and publish. These popular social networks have grown and amassed huge amounts of members and data which they horde and keep to themselves. I’m not talking about privacy, I’m referring to data portability.

The infrastructures are like locked-in silos of information and each built differently, because, either, they never considered that you’d want to make your data portable or they didn’t then want (or see value) in you moving your data anywhere else. The services they’ve created to ‘connect’ to your data are also proprietary methods – custom built to channel in and out of those silos. Each of those services too, are singularities, they won’t work with each other.

Twitter though, have come up with a solution that adheres to agreed upon standards, specifically, by using OAuth to facilitate it’s connection. Technically, it’s significantly different, but in practice, you can expect it to do everything the others can do.

The community’s thoughts

Yahoo’s Eran Hammer-Lahav (a frequent contributor to OAuth) has written a good post discussing his thoughts, he says it’s ‘Open done right’ – no proprietary ’special sauce’ clouds interoperability as happens with Facebook Connect. I think he’s right.

He looks at what happened when Facebook Connect was introduced, that they essentially offered third-party sites two key features: the ability to use existing Facebook accounts for their own needs, and access Facebook social data to enhance the site. The value of Facebook Connect is to save sites the need to build their own social layer. Twitter though, is not about yet another layer, but doing more with that you’ve already got.

Marshall Kirkpatrick also wrote about the announcement, his metaphor for the other ‘connection’ services best describes how they function – ‘it’s letting sites borrow the data – not setting data free’.

But then he talks about Twitter ‘as a platform’, and I think this is where things get interesting. He says:

Twitter is a fundamentally different beast.

All social networking services these days want to be “a platform” – but it’s really true for Twitter. From desktop apps to social connection analysis programs, to services that will Twitter through your account when a baby monitoring garment feels a kick in utero – there’s countless technologies being built on top of Twitter.”

He’s right. Twitter apps do pretty much anything and everything you can think of on top of Twitter, not just the primary use of sending and receiving tweets. I love all the OAuth and open standards adoption – but that’s because I’m a developer, but thinking about Twitter as a platform makes me wonder what kind of effect this will have on the users, how it could effect the climate, even landcape, of social media if, already being great, Twitter is given some real power. 

People have long questioned Twitter’s future – it’s business model, how it can be monetised, those things are important – but where can it otherwise go and how can it expand? Does it need to ‘expand’? It’s service is great it doesn’t need to start spouting needless extras and I don’t think it will. But in widening it’s connectivity, it’s adaptability, I think could change our perception of Twitter – it’s longevity and road map, the way we use it and think of ourselves using it.

My Thoughts

Irrelevant of Richard Madeley or Oprah Winfrey’s evangelism, Twitter is an undeniable success.

When Facebook reworked and redesigned their feed and messaging model, I almost couldn’t believe it. What was the ’status’ updates, basically IS Twitter now, and that’s it’s backbone. It’s Twitter’s messaging model, it asks ‘What’s on your mind?’.

I’m probably not the only one who thought this, I’d guess any complaints about this being a bit of a blatant rip-off were bogged down by all the negativity about the interface redesign.

I think Facebook realised that Twitter has become a real rival. I think (and I guess Facebook also think) that as people become more web-savvy and literate to these sociable websites, they want to cleanse.

The great appeal of Twitter for me was, ingeniously, they took a tiny part of Facebook (this is how I saw it two years ago anyway) and made it their complete function – simple, short updates. Snippets of personal insight or creative wisdom, it didn’t matter really, what was important was it ignored the fuss and noise of whatever else Facebook had flying around it’s own ecology (and this was before Facebook applications came around) and took a bold single straight route through the middle of it.

Looking back, a lot of Facebook’s early adoption could be attributed to people growing restless with the noise and fuss of MySpace at the time – Facebook then was a clean and more structured an option.

I remember Twitter was almost ridiculed for basing it’s whole premise on such a minute part of Facebook’s huge machine. Now look at the turnaround.

Now people are growing up out of Web 2.0 craze. A lot went on, there was a lot of ‘buzz’, but a lot of progress was made in connecting things. People now are far more connected, but perhaps they’re over-connected, struggling from what Joseph Smarr calls ’social media fatigue’. People they have multiple accounts in a ton of dispersed and unconnected sites around the web – true, each unique and successful for it’s own achievements – but it can’t go on.

Twitter for me is streamlined, cleansed, publishing. Whether talking about what I’m doing or finding out information from people or about topics that I follow, the 140 character limit constrains these utterances to be concise and straight-to-the-point pieces of information. The ‘@’ replies and hashtags are brilliant mechanisms conceived to create connections between people and objects where there is almost no space to do so.

I use my blog to write longer discourse, I use my Twitter to link to it. Likewise with the music I listen to, I can tweet Spotify URIs. I link to Last.fm events and anything particularly good I’ve found (and probably bookmarked with Delicious) I’ll tweet that out too.

Twitter for me is like a central nervous system for my online activities. I won’t say ‘backbone’ – because it’s not that heavy. Specifically a nervous system in the way it intricately connects my online life, spindling and extending out links, almost to itself be like a lifestream in micro.

Recently, I saw Dave Winer’s ‘Continuous Bootstrap‘ which although is admittedly a bit of fun, describes the succession of platforms deemed social media ‘leaders’ (see the full post here).

What I initially noticed is that he aligns successful platforms – blogging, podcasting – with a single application: Twitter. It doesn’t matter whether he is actually suggesting that Twitter alone is as successful as any single publishing form, but it did make me wonder if Twitter, rather than being the current ‘holder of the baton’, will actually be the spawn for whatever kind of Web-wide platform does become popular next.

If the real Data Portability revolution is going to kick in, if it’s on the cusp of starting right now and everything will truly become networked and connected – would you rather it was your Twitter connections and voice that formed that basis for you or your Facebook profile?

I know I’d much rather read explore the connections I’ve made through Twitter. The kind of information I’d get back from the type of people who’d connect in this way would be far more relevant from my pool of Twitter connections rather than the old school friends and family members (notoriously) who’ve added me on Facebook, the kind that just add you for the sake of it.

If Web 3.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is coming soon, I’d rather detox. Twitter is slimmer and still feels fresh to start it out with. For me, Facebook feels far too heavy now, out of date and messy. Maybe I’m being unfair and I feel that way because I’ve fallen out of touch with it and now I visit less frequently, but all the negativity hasn’t done it any favours – and those complaints aren’t unfounded.

Today the Media 2.0 Best Practices went live. I’m very happy to see this come to light.

I’ve been working on something like it for a number of years now, and with JS-Kit’s backing and the participation of my friends it has taken shape.

I’d like to thank all involved. I look forward to having conversations with the participants and creating something that vendors can use to make and keep user-centric promises to their participants.

I’m also very happy that the Media 2.0 Workgroup was able to take on this process and see it through. There is a lot of potential in that group that is yet to be realized.

Check it out…

Visit the site and view the strawman at www.mediabestpractices.com

I’m a little weary of the Twitter Vs. Facebook debate.

I posted this comment on Fred Wilson’s blog. I thought I would share here:

Twitter is the status service of the web-wide social network. Facebook status updates are the status update feature of Facebook. The web will always be bigger than Facebook therefore Twitter’s potential as a messaging bus will always be greater.

While Twitter continues to create loosely coupled links across the open web (a lightweight process), Facebook continues to try to expand the perimeter of its walled garden (a heavy weight process that is creating a backlash from major brands and savvy users).

Twitter is public and asymmetrical. It allows for bots and other innovations.

Facebook is private and symmetrical, forcing users to use their real names and deciding which updates get through to follower news feed.

The two services couldn’t be more different and the influence and effectiveness of their scale can not be measured 1:1.

Seems I was a little late in finding out about the BBC’s work on integrating and exposing semantic data in their (then) new beta trial of Artist pages a little while ago.

In an interview with Silicon.com, Matthew Shorter, BBC’s interactive editor for music, speaks about establishing data associations with MusicBrainz, an open user-contributed ‘metadatabase’, to roll out across all of their encyclopaedic artist pages on the BBC site.

MusicBrainz has been around for some time now, it’s a huge database of music metadata storing information such as artists, their releases, song details, biographies. Right now it has information on over 400,000 artists.

As early as 2001, it was described as a ‘Semantic Web service‘ (think a Semantic Web web service), in its offering of a massive store of machine-processable, openly available information (mostly public domain or Creative Commons-licensed), available via open protocols – in RDF format no less.

The BBC have adopted this open standard, mapping their data schema with that published by MusicBrainz to utilise the unique identifiers they provide. This allows the BBC site to leverage the public domain content, augmenting the profile pages found there.

Take a look at one of the records from MusicBrainz, for example, John Lennon’s information at http://musicbrainz.org/artist/4d5447d7-c61c-4120-ba1b-d7f471d385b9.html.

The unique ID here is the MBID, ’4d5447d7-c61c-4120-ba1b-d7f471d385b9‘.

The BBC then, have a dynamically generated page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/4d5447d7-c61c-4120-ba1b-d7f471d385b9.

Previously, writers at the BBC would have to write (and keep up to date) interesting and relevant content on every single artist pages they publish – which I’m sure you can imagine is as unenviable as impossible. Now, MusicBrainz populates a lot of the information here – see the Releases and Credits – and also provides the retrieval of the biography from Wikipedia.

At the same time, the BBC radio playout system (reportedly giant iPods in the basement of Broadcasting House) update the playlist information on the right of the page.

As Matthew Shorter says, automation and dynamic publishing means the pages can be created and maintained with a fraction of the manpower. Check the Foals page for a more recent artist and you’ll see news articles automatically aggregated also.

Gathering resources in this way and adding context around the artists enables machines to process the links between these data sets, establish relationships between the information and perform interoperation based on those.

In his article above, Tom Scott (the Technical Project Team Leader) also describes these URIs as ‘web scale identifiers’ and talks about the principles of Linked Data. Whilst in this use case these locators facilitate simple data retrieval, the notion of the absolute, global URI is a far larger idea, and here, could grow to be far more powerful.

The URIs facilitate the mechanisms, but stand to play a far larger role in opening and standardising information on the Web as a whole. The MusicBrainz MBID attempts to standardise the way we reference information online regarding music, it’s wide reuse, is in a sense, achieving that goal. But rather than thinking of these alphanumeric strings as pointing to locations of database records, they too can refer to the real world concepts they identify.

Imagine all online materials that feature a particular artist universally employing their single MBID string. Every semantically linked and annotated document and resource could be unified by an intelligent agent instructed to do so, collecting and amounting the information to describe that real world concept in it’s entirety. With consideration to the Semantic Web, ultimately, for a machine agent to understand that concept in it’s entirety.

In linking to MusicBrainz, the BBC then have equally made their data more portable to third parties wanting to use their data elsewhere. By agreeing on these unique IDs to identify resources, these pages can be automatically linked to and accessed based of this consistency.

The site provides a RESTful API, just add .xml, .rdf, .json or .yaml to the end of the artist url.

The value of online information isn’t determined by scarcity like physical good are in the physical world. Reuse, repopulation and increasing visibility means, for the BBC, an enriched repository for the purposes of making information more accessible and useful to the reader (surely the inital goal), but also in having the link now established to MusicBrainz, the information is connected out into the Web, therefore enriching the source (and then exponentially any other links thereon). Better for the BBC, better for the third party, better for the reader - everything is enriched – so hopefully any later applications can benefit from this network effect.

Anyway, it turns out this has been going on since July last year, so perhaps the Silicon.com article was an attempt to increase visibility - we’re six months down the line now, after all.

If so, it worked – Sarah Perez wrote up an article at ReadWriteWeb and reports over at MusicBrainz suggest things are hotting up for this year. But if not, they should be applauded for commendable transparency and their open-minded efforts (and accept the extra drive of users to the service that comes with it!). It’s frustrating when products that are intended to ‘open up the web’ are kept closed and private for commercial purposes.

Thing is, I’m surprised I hadn’t found out about this before now. Shorter also describes this as being part of a general movement that’s going on at the BBC, “to move away from pages that are built in a variety of legacy content production systems to actually publishing data that we can use in a more dynamic way across the web.” So I went digging for more – thinking that, if this (pretty awesome) beta went online relatively quietly and the BBC aren’t particularly shouting about these new innovation (which I think they should!), perhaps there’s more elsewhere?

Well, I found two presentations over at Slideshare, the first on “BBC Programmes and Music on the Linking Open Data Cloud“, the second titled “Semweb at the BBC“, but unfortunately without transcripts of videos I can only really marvel at what might be in the works.

Patrick Sinclair (software engineer at the BBC – see his post on the Music beta) said a video might surface, but I’ve yet to find one.

By the looks of things though, there could be some fully recognised Semantic Web applications coming out of the BBC in the future. They look to discuss a handful of the languages and technologies that make up the Semantic Web stack, refer to constructing their own ontologies, reason use cases for Linked Data and look to be applying the techniques of the Music pages to Programmes sections and onward.

Look forward to it!

Today it’s collaboration time. IBM, Google and Continua Health Alliance announced there new software platform. Patients can sent there medical data from home devices automatically to Google Health or een other Personal Health Record system.

More than 600 million people suffer from diabetes, 1 billion is overweighted and by 2025 over 1.2 billion people will be older than 60 years. These numbers provide a business case and a reason to join up.

“Our partnership with IBM will help both providers and users gain access to their device data in a highly simplified and automated fashion,” said Sameer Samat, Director for Google Health. The capabilities of Information Management, Business Intelligence Cognos and the WebSphere Premises Server sensor event platform are at the root of the new system.

BM developed the software based on guidelines from Continua Health Alliance. Continua is made up of companies like Nokia, Intel and Panasonic. They are a globally recognized organization, focussing on interoperable personal healthcare products and solutions. The platform is also based on open-source software available from Eclipse and Open Health Tools. Both outstanding open-source communities in there support to advancements in healthcare.

The platform will enable healthcare providers to leverage scale in ways that otherwise isolated medical monitoring can not. And by putting the software into widespread use, the group hopes to make significant headway in supporting open standards and “interoperable healthcare products and solutions.”

Open, standardized data, backed up by certified security measures and serving as the foundation of a new era of innovation. It’s the only strategy that can face the possible resistance of the multi-trillion dollar medical industry. The companies, collaborating on this platform, believe that consumer demand for informed care, combined with the vendor participation now gathered, will force the industry to open the use of portable data in treatment.

Also an article on Forbes, Medgatget and many to come.

One of the projects I am involved with is the EULA and TOS working group of dataportability.org. This is some interesting stuff, and I’d like to take a minute to discuss what we’re trying to accomplish and why we think it’s important.

If you were to attend one of our meetings (every other Wednesday at 20:00 UTC), you’d hear that we frequently invoke the Creative Commons. To my eyes, the CC performed two services (both equally important).  The most visible was the legal documents, but what I think is often overlooked is how brilliantly they framed the conversation.  They provided the terms and concepts that allowed the conversation to take place.  With the CC, it was possible for users to quickly determine what their expectations of the service provider were, and what the service provider expected of them in return.  Previously, a user had to understand the specific terms of each site independently.  The CC made it possible for users to quickly evaluate the terms offered by a site, know whether they were in compliance, and determine whether they wanted to take part.

This is, more or less, what we want to provide for Data Portability.  Our ultimate goal is a set of legal “modules” that can inform or be included in TOS and EULA documents.  That’s a way off, though, as right now we’re working through the terms and concepts that will help people understand what they’re agreeing can be done with their data.

It’s a sprawling topic, and touches questions of identity, privacy, individual control, and property.  Our hope is to provide the conceptual tools that help people understand the decisions they’re making when they sign up to a service.

While I’m on the subject of data portability, I thought I’d talk about DataPortability.

A loose analogy: Consider the definition of the Semantic Web – a conceptual framework combining standardised semantic applications on the web. Similarly, the DataPortability project aims to define and implement a set of recommendations of open standards to enable (entire and complete) end-to-end portability of data.

Both ‘capitalised’ terms denote distinct, considered models – composed of specific selections of the technologies that together embody their respective namesakes.

Not that DataPortability really has anything to do with the Semantic Web other than the shared idyllic standardisation and ‘boundless’ interoperation of data and services online..

In essence the project a volunteer-based workgroup, as transparent and ‘frictionless’ a movement as the borderless experience they promote. Their vision describes the web as place where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide, controlling their own privacy and respecting the privacy of others (read in full here).

They wish to see end to every problem I described in my last post – the social network fatigue, the fragmentation and walled-garden silo landscape of current web platforms – and too, promote the combination of a open source technologies and protocols (including OpenID and OAuth) for web-wide benefit, not only with regards to social networking.

The following video, quite simply but accurately, describes the already too familiar picture:

So what technologies are we talking about?

Although our Semantic friends RDF, SIOC and FOAF are present, it’s much more familiar territory for the rest. The line up includes RSS, OPML, again OAuth, OpenID and Microformats. These are existing open standards though, not technologies still in development awaiting a W3C recommendation like some of the Semantic Web projections.

There’s some other very cool stuff I’d like to go into more detail with later. Definitely APML, for example – Attention Profiling Markup Language – an XML-based format that encapsulates a summary of your interests, your informed ‘attention data’.

As well as identifying the components that make up their blueprint (the recognition of how their goals can be achieved – which, and I know I keep coming back to this, is one of the largest cause for doubters of the Semantic Web – that the speculative combination of some of the technologies is almost unimaginable) – the DataPortability project also documents best practices for why you should to participate in the initiative – specifically tailored as to how they can come together for you, as developers, or consumers, or service providers etc.

DataPortability is about empowering users, aiming to grant a ‘free-flowing web’ within your control.

How are they doing this? Are they likely to succeed? They’ve already got some huge names on board – Google, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Netvibes – the list goes on. This is really happening.

Find out more at dataportability.org.

Hopefully the last of the posts that I should have written last year – a while back I wrote about Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, I mentioned three open source data projects – OpenID, OpenSocial and OAuth.

I only mentioned them briefly in the thinking that they deserved attention separate to that topic – they’ll play a key part in the progression of social media technology, but the three are part of a bigger issue. That of data portability – one perhaps more concerned with my current Semantic Web conversation.

While the three have been separately developed over the past three (or so) years, their popularity and general implementation are becoming ever more widespread. In combination, they offer very powerful potential in leveraging data, interoperability thereof between systems and ultimately offer standardising methods and protocols in which data ‘portability’ becomes possible.

In very, (very) short:

• OpenSocial ^(wiki) is a set of common APIs for web-based social network applications.
• OpenID ^(wiki) is an decentralised user identification standard, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity.
• OAuth ^(wiki) is an protocol to simplify and standardised secure API authorisation and authentication for desktop, mobile and web applications.

 
There’s a ton of reading fired from each of those links.

But more than anything, I very strongly recommend watching the following presentation by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, taken from Google’s I/O conference last year:

Google I/O 2008 – OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth: Oh, My!

He covers each of these open source building blocks in detail, collectively considering them as a palatable set of options for developers in creating social media platforms. He presents the compelling engagement they can offer social websites, how they fit together in a holistic way so developers aren’t constantly building from scratch and how he envisions the social web evolving.

He critiques that today’s platforms are essentially broken, highlighting the fragmentation of social media sites – that their rapid growth forced developers to build each platform to be built separately, from scratch so therefore differently, so that each platform has their own silo, headed in a different direction. That the very nature of social network infrastructure and architecture is still very nascent.

We are at breaking point, social media sites still assume that a every new user has never been on a social network site before. We’ve all experience having to register and re-register, upload profile information, find friends to then confirm friends – it’s not scaling any more.

Not only has it gotten to the point that we as consumers are experiencing social network fatigue, but users are also, understandably, opting out of joining even newer networks, pre-empting the nauseous motions they’ll have to repeat.

It’s very easily digestible – not at all deeply technical until the Q&A section. Do watch!

8 декабря мы создали русскоязычный список рассылки полностью посвященный вебу данных (семантический веб, инициатива DataPortability.org, связанные данные – LinkedData и другие практические вопросы публикации данных в вебе).

Цель – создание русскоязычного сообщества и центрального ресурса для него – webofdata.ru, запуск которого запланирован на 10 февраля 2009 года (приурочен к рекомендациям спецификаций W3C по семантическому вебу). На первоначальном этапе на сайте будут собраны переводы англоязычных статей, агрегатор новостей, синдицированная лента заметок с русскоязычных тематических блогов (Иван Бегтин, Сергей Щербак, Даниил Братченко, Михаил Навернюк и др.), раздел ЧАВО (FAQ).

Мы уже перевели одну, интересную с нашей точки зрения, статью и опубликовали перевод на Хабрахабр. Сейчас активно допереводим другие англоязычные статьи (“Что такое RDF и для чего он хорош?” и “Часто задаваемые вопросы о семантическом вебе W3C”) и формируем глоссарий терминов. Также идет обсуждение различных аспектов веба данных.

Приглашаем в группу всех энтузиастов, кого интересуют технологии семантического веба и смежные дисциплины. У нас большие планы, и мы расчитываем на вашу поддержку.

I just posted a summary of the current data portability landscape to the Official DataPortability Blog.

From the post:

Closed platforms are like ice cubes in a glass of water. They will float for a while. They will change the temperature of the liquid
beneath. Ultimately, however, the ice cube must eventually melt into the wider web.

Facebook’s success with Facebook Connect can and will further drive innovation in the community to develop an open alternative.

Facebook’s success will (like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, AOL, Myspace, countless major media properties and countless small startups) to create alternatives. At least some of those participants will recognize (if they have not already) that the most open among them will earn both the respect and the market share of the next phase. Moving from Facebook Connect’s ‘data portability’ to Interoperable DataPortability.

A web of Data.

That’s a landscape where we can continue to innovate on a level playing field.

OpenID needs to be as simple as Facebook Connect if it has any chance of competing. The problem is User Experience. It’s a nightmare.

My proposal:

1. All Email providers and OpenID Consumers (particularly Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail) implement: http://eaut.org/
2. Until we have critical mass with step 1, a 3rd party, community controled “Email to OpenID mapping service” should be provided. Vidoop runs a related service at http://emailtoid.net/. It’s quite good but it should be donated to the OpenID foundation for independent control.
3. OpenID Connect login prompts ask for your email address on 3rd party sites.
4. When you hit ‘connect’ it generates a popup much like the FB Connect popup.
5. The contents of the popup is either:
   • The password screen of the OpenID provider as resolved via EAUT OR
   • The password screen of the OpenID provider as resolved via the community EmailtoID service OR
   • A prompt from the EmailToID service that walks you through creating a new OpenID or mapping an exiting OpenID to this email address.Here’s the important part: In all cases, the screens MUST conform to a strict UX Design Guideline set forth by the OpenID Foundation to ensure the process is as simple as Facebook Connect.Only providers that confirm to this OpenID Connect UX standard (as certified by the OpenID Foundation?) may have their OpenIDs validated in this popup. This is a harsh rule but it ensures a smooth UX for all involved.
6. This initial Email to OpenID mapping through a 3rd party service is painful since most email providers and OpenID consumers do not use EAUT yet.
7. This can be overcome if we get a series of OpenID Consumers and OpenID Providers involved as launch partners. A major email provider (Gmail, Hotmail and/or Yahoo) would also be be helpful but not a blocker.

Potential Concerns:

1. How do we deter phishing? Does this work-flow make phishing worse because of the predictable UX? Does it matter? Is there a way to ensure a distributed karma system is included in the work flow?
2. This only solves the login problem and does not go into the issue of connecting to, accessing and manipulating data as the full data portability vision describes. This is a conversation for another thread.

Bonus:

• If you provide OpenID but do not consume it you need to be named and shamed. There should be a 2 month grace period, then The OpenID Foundation, the DataPortability Project and everyone else who is interested should participate.
• “OpenID Connect” should be a new brand with a fresh batch of announcements with strict implementation guidelines (not just around UX but also around things like consumption).

To summarize, my proposal world:

1. Allow users to use their email address for OpenID
2. Standardize the User Experience for OpenID
3. Provide a stop gap while Email providers catch up with Email to OpenID mapping.

Get involved:

I’d love to do mockups for this – but I’m busy. Anyone interested in learning from the Facebook Connect UX and drafting OpenID Connect Mockups from which we can draw the strict UX guidelines I mentioned?

Could this work?

Ma thèse professionnelle est à présent téléchargeable ici.

Voici un extrait de la préface illustrant le sujet :

“Le web poursuit son évolution naturelle, surveillé de loin par son créateur. Auto-régulé, il évolue grâce à une profusion de courants qui peuvent sembler anarchiques et d’oscillations constantes mêlant usages et technologie, il s’agit de tiraillements incessants entre ses utilisateurs qui détiennent les clés de son succès et qui déterminent ses usages et les grandes entreprises du web qui promeuvent la technologie au service du business. Nous avons l’impression que le web a toujours existé tellement il parait inimaginable de s’en passer à l’heure actuelle mais celui-ci entre pourtant à peine dans sa crise d’adolescence, il est le support de tant de prose, d’innovation ou d’espoirs que ses possibilités semblent sans limite. A l’heure où il fait l’objet de tant d’interrogations je propose ici de prendre un peu de temps pour regarder d’où il vient, ce qu’il est et ce qui lui est promis, il s’agit de creuser un peu la surface d’un monstre polymorphe tout aussi complexe que passionnant.”

Les slides utilisés pour la soutenance sont disponibles sur SlideRocket.

Vos commentaires sont les bienvenus, quelque soit votre avis… !

Voici le nuage de tags correspondant pour vous donner une idée (ou non )des thèmes abordés  :

(Creative Commons by http://www.wordle.net/)

Bonne lecture !

Have you seen this?

Let me quote the highlights for you:

If the initial development race of Web 2.0 centered around “building a better social network” then the next phase will certainly focus on extending the reach of existing social networks beyond their current domain. How? By using the elements of the social graph as the foundational components that will drive the social Web. Where we once focused on going to a destination – particular social network to participate – we will now begin to carry components of social networks along with us, wherever we go. In the next phase of the social Web, every site will become social.

Agreed. That’s been the vision and promise of much of my work for more than a year.

Here’s the scary part

Facebook Connect proposes to make data and friend connections currently held within the walled garden of Facebook accessible to other services. This has two distinct benefits, one for the sites and one for Facebook.

For the participating sites, Facebook Connect provides more social functionality without a great deal of additional development. A new user can opt to share the profile information in Facebook instead of developing a new account. This gives the user access to the site and its services without the tedium of developing yet another profile on yet another site. In addition, users can use the relationship information in Facebook to connect to their friends on the other services. In short, it makes the new partner site an extension of Facebook.

Essentially, Facebook is trying to replace all logins with their own, and control the creation, distribution and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform.

The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative.

Is it Data Portability? Is the Open Web? is it Open Social? Is it Federated Identity?

At the start of this year one would have thought that the open standards movement got a huge boost by the massive explosion of the DataPortability project. It’s set of high profile endorsements catapulted the geeky standards conversation into the mainstream consciousness and helped provide a rallying cry for the community to embrace.

Instead of embracing it, though, many of the leaders in the community decided to squabble about form and style. They argued about the name, about the organization, about the merits of the people involved – on and on it went.

Instead of embracing the opportunity, they squandered it by trying to coin new phrases, new organizations and new initiatives.

The result is a series of mixed messages that have largely diluted the value of DataPortability’s promise this year. The promise of making the conversation tangible for the mainstream – the executives who are now partnering with FaceBook.

Will we let this continue into 2009? Will we continue to allow our egos to get in the way of mounting a real alternative to Hailstorm 2.0? Are we more interested in the theater of it, the cool kids vs. the real world or will we be able to reach the mainstream once again and help them to understand that entire social web is at stake?

I’ve not lost hope. There are countless reasons why Facebook and it’s Hailstorm 2.0 are not inevitable.

I have, however, lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I once admired. Maybe they can clean up their act and we can work together once again in the new year.

I put a call out to all those who are interested – technologists, early adopters, bloggers (especially bloggers), conference organizers, conference speakers, media executives – let’s get our act together and take this party to the next level.

I, for one, am looking forward to it.

As many of my readers know, the user experience (UX) for OpenID has been a source of confusion and an impediment to broader adoption. That gave rise to an OpenID UX Summit a few weeks ago, hosted by Yahoo and attended by Google, Microsoft, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, Facebook and many others. It also was a major focus of sessions and late-night discussion at last week’s Internet Identity Workshop. Today, we get to see some of the fruits of those efforts, as Yahoo rolls out (in a limited test) a new implementation of OpenID, currently live with just two test sites, Plaxo and Jyte; and AOL releases preview support for data portability via SREG.

Yahoo’s post describes the details:

Today, we are announcing the start of a limited test of the Simple Registration extension for the Yahoo! OpenID service. The Simple Registration extension allows OpenID RPs to request user profile data from the OpenID provider. Yahoo! will be providing Yahoo! OpenID users the ability to share the following Simple Registration fields for this initial test: Full Name, Nick Name, Email Address, Gender, Language and Timezone. The Yahoo! OpenID user will have full control on whether to share their profile data with the OpenID relying party. We will use the Yahoo! Profiles API to populate the user card which will be presented on the Yahoo! OpenID Review and Confirm page.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo also has a post on the matter, including screenshots of the improved onboarding flow. As Joseph points out, this is really something bigger than single sign-on; the key is that the identity can bring with it, at the user’s option, some of their social data. This is an important step forward for data portability:

I think we can continue to expect more and more data to flow across the OpenID link, which will make it increasingly valuable for Relying Parties like Plaxo, and should incentivize many more sites to become RPs themselves. It’s great to see this virtuous cycle in motion, and Plaxo is eager to work with any and all OpenID Providers who want to improve their UX and empower their users to use more of their data across the web!

So, if you don’t have a Plaxo account yet, you can sign up for one with your Yahoo OpenID. If you choose to share your basic account info, you’ll land on a registration form that is pre-populated with with almost every field you need to activate your account. You only need to add your birthday and your country. (In a future release, we hope to get those last two fields as well, so we can do away with the form entirely.) Oh, and the user’s language choice will come along, too, so we can drop them into the appropriate localized version of Plaxo. Sweet!

George Fletcher of AOL also has a post on the AOL and SREG, entitled “OAuth and SREG and MapQuest! Oh My!” I’m still trying to figure out where I can go see the AOL OpenID w/ SREG live. Any pointers, anyone?

It’s great to see the pace of innovation on the Open Stack begin to accelerate.

For more on Yahoo’s test release, we made it the primary topic of this week’s episode of The Social Web TV, complete with a “magical” demo. (We didn’t know about the AOL news when we shot!):

‘What about privacy and security’ is a question that comes up regularly when discussing Data Portability. I’d like to address some of the reasons why Data Portability is actually good for privacy.

More safe than today.

Data Portability is not about putting more personal data in the cloud. We’re dealing with data that’s already out there. The goal is to provide the ability to give access to your data to applications you trust.

Using proper protocols and formats to move the data such as oAuth and OpenID is safer than allowing sites to scrape your mail account by giving it your username and password. They are safer because you are not giving your username and password away and because the access is scoped. Scoped access mean that you can grant specific and precise access to only the data you want to share with the requesting application (e.g. just your address book) as apposed to giving them complete access to your entire gmail account (address book, email, account history, google searches etc).

Federated Karma – Market Forces made Explicit

It may be possible to build a distributed trust or Karma system that sites and services can expose on Authorization Screens so that users can make informed decisions before trusting an application.

Users could rate services and the ratings would be normalized and made available via trusted Karma aggregation services.

This would provide an explicit meta layer of market sentiment at the point of permitting a data portability transaction.

This solution is far better than the Facebook Protection Fee solution.

Privacy is the wrong word

The real issue should not be labeled Privacy. Privacy is an idea but it’s not actionable. It can not be converted into ‘functionality’. We should be discussing ‘access controls’, ‘portable permission metadata’ and ‘universal privacy models’. These ideas combined allow us to define and implement privacy preferences in concrete terms.

Hyper Transparency

Privacy advocates can never and should never come to peace with it, but it’s clear that traditional ideas of privacy are changing.

Remember that It was once thought unconscionable to share you photos, daily activities, location, relationship status and other personal information for the world to see. Now it’s standard practice for young people around the world.

What taboos of personal privacy will fade next? It’s quite possible the question asked by future generations of Internet users will ask not why their data is available for everyone to see, but rather why it isn’t.

“I think therefore I am”.

Maybe now it’s

“I tweet therefore I am”.

Ross Dawson has an excellent summary of a Gartner presentation on the Distributed Social Web by David Cearley. A web where each participant is their own central node on a web-wide social network.

It is the only natural conclusion of the vision of Data Portability.

It will be made possible by a series of futurists, technologists, philanthropists and engineers developing core building blocks like OpenID, oAuth, APML, PortableContacts, XMPP, RSS/ATOM, OPML, Microformats and more.

It will be commercialized by a series of entrepreneurial start ups with stars in their eyes running in and around the feet of the giants who are each fighting each other to keep up. Startups like JS-Kit.

It will be fueled by traditional and not so traditional media companies, steered by young, idealistic intrapraneurs, who are willing to take a bet in order to stake their claim on the next generation of social networking and human communication.

It will be monetized by a recognition that one can’t monetize word-of-mouth. Instead Attention will emerge as the ultimate way to measure, discover and interact with participants. See Faraday Media.

It will be popularized by bloggers, smart IT journalists and conference organizers who understand the importance of open over closed.

We have already started to see a preview of the world to come via the early attempts at rudimentary aggregators and proprietary data portability implementations. This is just the beginning of the beginning.

For a more details around the emerging trends, check out Ross’ post.

According to CNet, Facebook is going to start charging app developers a fee to achieve ‘Verified Application’ status. The fee is optional, but that doesn’t matter. Apps that are not ‘verified’ will quickly get buried by those that are.

I think in hindsight people will recognize this move as one of the final death knels of the Facebook platform as we know it today.

First, they de-emphasized applications all together by relegating them to a ‘boxes’ page and making the stream their primary interaction metaphor (Read: FriendFeed clone). Now they are trying to lock down the platform further, raising the bar for participation and charging what amounts to a protection fee for app developers to get any real attention at all.

The fact of the matter is, an increasing number of people are finally realizing that Facebook looks very similar to Pre Internet networks, AOL, Passport/Hailstorm, and any other proprietary implementation of a platform that can and must be open.

The only platform that matters on the web is the web itself, and Facebook through its actions and inactions is helping us all learn this lesson faster than ever.

An interesting viewpoint here: http://liako.biz/2008/11/you-dont-nor-need-to-own-your-data

Michael Arrington has a great piece up on TechCrunch entitled “The Very Curious Microsoft-Facebook User Data Relationship“. In it, he shines a spotlight on a most curious thing — that Facebook has given Microsoft access to data on Facebook users that they have said they would not give to anyone, as it would violate users’ privacy. Specifically, he shows screenshots of an import of a Facebook friends list into Microsoft’s IM client, Messenger, in which the user ends up with the email addresses of all of the their friends (and can then connect with them or invite them to Messenger).

As you may recall, this was at the heart of the controversy now know as “Scoblegate,” in which Plaxo had created a Facebook importer that brought a user’s friends list, including email address over into the Plaxo address book. Aside from the interesting questions Michael Arrington raises, I would add this observation: It is great to see this functionality out there, live since March, without a single bit of controversy. That speaks to the utility of data portability. If social networking really is about real people and real relationships, it would be great if sharing information were real sharing of information, not tethered-sharing , which is essentially “social DRM”.

Also, really funny how the official blogpost from Microsoft directly references the Scoblegate incident! That is a head-scratcher!

Updates:

One, I’d love to hear Dare Obasanjo’s perspective on this. A refresher on his position on this issue as of last January.

Two, check out the comment on TechCrunch from Facebook’s privacy officer, Chris Kelly. While he corrects a few things, he does not deny that they are sharing email addresses with Microsoft.

We have started a conversation over on the JS-Kit blog about data ownership when it comes to comments. This is one of the Data Portability grey areas that needs a resolution in the ongoing journey to create the data web.

This is also an important question for social media. If we are all participants, who owns the space inside which we are particiapting?

I would love your input!

L’idéologie se situe en fait au sein de toutes les autres ‘batailles’ ou interrogations autour de la portabilité des données, qu’il s’agisse de savoir s’il est correct de gagner de l’argent sur les informations fournies par les internautes sans que ceux-ci ne sachent vraiment ce qui est fait de ces données, qu’il s’agisse de s’interroger sur la légitimité de tel ou tel acteur ou sur ses vues de domination, de questionner l’avenir de la protection des données personnelles ou de s’interroger sur la notion d’identité digitale. Si les usages déterminent les services, les questions d’idéologie, de morale et de savoir-vivre conditionnent et bornent ces usages.

S’il est un nom qui est sur toutes les lèvres depuis quelques années c’est bien ‘Google’, l’hégémonie de cette entreprise est telle qu’elle en ferait presque oublier le géant Microsoft, qui passe pour être l’outsider le plus notable dans l’écosystème du web. Hubert Guillaud relate sur InternetActu un article de Nicolas Carr faisant état d’un concept tout à fait intéressant, connu mais à qui il donne un nom : le web centripète. S’appuyant sur la définition du terme centripète par Isaac Newton (« La force centripète est celle par laquelle un corps est attiré ou poussé vers un point quelconque considéré comme un centre ») , celui-ci détaille la manière dont Google a su se hisser au rang de super-puissance numérique en jouant presque naturellement le rôle de centre de-facto du web mondial grâce à la multitude de services qu’il propose, tous intégrés les uns aux autres.

En laissant le choix aux utilisateurs mais en n’ayant de cesse de leur rappeler furtivement qu’il est là, le mastodonte a réussi le tour de force d’être le chef d’orchestre de la popularité numérique via le fonctionnement de son moteur de recherche qui transcende le lien hypertexte (plus un site est populaire plus il le deviendra et inversement) en générant une force de convergence inéluctable là où le web se voulait à l’origine plat et divergent. Google est le centre de la popularité, de loin le plus puissant moteur de publicité du monde, ses services Google Mail, Google Reader, Google Desktop ou Youtube sont dans leur domaine les outils les plus globalement plebiscités, Google Maps est de loin l’API la plus utilisée par les milliers de mashups créées aussi bien par les développeurs indépendants que par les autres services web et même le marché des navigateurs web commence à frissonner devant la sortie de Google Chrome. Google nous tient. Les APIs Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial ou SocialGraph sont utilisées afin de créer des greffons universels, ramener l’ensemble des informations de réseau social vers leur éditeur, découvrir où sont cachées les données des utilisateurs afin de mieux les centraliser. Le roi du monde ne serait-il bientôt plus le président des Etats-Unis, mais le CEO de Google ?

Si Google centralise les données, il décentralise le réseau social : n’ayant pas vu venir à temps la vague (son service Orkut, relativement absent en Amérique du nord, en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique est cependant de loin le premier réseau social d’Amérique du sud), il tente tout de même de garder une main sur ces précieuses informations avec Google Friend Connect. Facebook a le fonctionnement inverse puisqu’il centralise le graphe social en autorisant la décentralisation des données, mais puisqu’il les aggrège sur son service il garde tout de même un œil intéressé dessus. Les deux travaillent à la centralisation de l’identité. La portabilité des données, elle, aimerait décentraliser le graphe social, les données, et l’identité au profit des utilisateurs, soucieux de reprendre le contrôle de leur vie digitale, surtout lorsque l’on relève que 80% d’entre eux prétendent n’avoir jamais diffusé d’informations personnelles en ligne alors que le constat est tout autre (source : Orange Business blog sécurité).

L’importance de savoir qui, demain, contrôlera nos données, de quelle manière et ce qu’il en fait est d’autant plus fondamentale que les informations extraites avec ou sans notre consentement se multiplient de manière vertigineuse. Le web connait notre identité, nos amis, nos centres d’intérêts, nos habitudes de navigation, de lecture, là où nous intervenons, ce que nous consommons et la manière dont nous le faisons. Notre mobile, via l’opérateur ou le constructeur c’est selon, qui fait de plus en partie intégrante de notre accès au web, peut déterminer d’après notre facture téléphonique le type de relations que nous entretenons avec notre carnet d’adresse, qu’il connaît par ailleurs parfaitement, il peut nous localiser et il va le faire de plus en plus, connaissant plus que notre position géographique il est capable de savoir ce qu’il y a en face de nous, avec qui nous marchons dans la rue et quels sont nos trajets quotidiens. Les possibilités offertes semblent autant sources d’ébahissement que d’appréhension parfaitement légitime.

Le prospectiviste américain Howard Rheingold affirmait déjà en 2005 sur LeMonde.fr, et on veut bien le croire, que « Dans dix ans, la notion de vie privée telle que nous la définissons n’existera plus. », il est encore temps de trouver des solutions pour qu’elle reste un minimum sous contrôle.