Chris Saad – Paying Attention

Guest Post: Facebook’s world view

// June 8th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Blog, Dataportability, Media, Personal, Technology

Just wanted to share with you here that I wrote a guest post on Mashable last week about Facebook’s world view. Be sure to check it out here.

Are these blunders a series of accidental missteps (a combination of ambition, scale and hubris) or a calculated risk to force their world view on unsuspecting users (easier to ask for forgiveness)? Only the executives at Facebook can ever truly answer this question.

What’s clear, though, is that their platform is tightly coupled with countless other websites and applications across the web, and their financial success is aligned with many influential investors and actors. At this stage, and at this rate, their continued success is all but assured.

But so is the success of the rest of the web. Countless social applications emerge every day and the rest of the web is, and always will be, bigger than any proprietary platform. Through its action and inaction, Facebook offers opportunities for us all. And in the dance between their moves and the rest of the web’s, innovation can be found.

The only thing that can truly hurt the web is a monopoly on ideas, and the only ones who can let that happen are web users themselves.

Diaspora is not the answer to the Open Web, but that’s ok

// May 13th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Dataportability, Politics, Technology

For whatever reason, a new project called Diaspora is getting a lot of attention at the moment. They are four young guys who have managed to crowd source $100k+ to build an open, privacy respecting, peer-to-peer social network.

A number of people have asked me what I think, so instead of repeating myself over and over I thought I would write it down in one place.

First, I don’t think Diaspora is going to be the ‘thing’ that solves the problem. There are too many moving parts and too many factors (mainly political) to have any single group solve the problem by themselves.

Second, I don’t think that’s any reason to disparage or discourage them.

When we launched the DataPortability project, we didn’t claim we would solve the issue, but rather create a blueprint for how others might implement interoperable parts of the whole. We soon learned that task was impractical to say the least. The pieces were not mature enough and the politics was far too dense.

Instead, we have settled for providing a rolling commentary and context on the situation and promoting the efforts of those that are making strides in the right direction. We also play the important role of highlighting problems with closed or even anticompetitive behaviors of the larger players.

The problem with the DataPortability project, though, was not its ambition or even it’s failure to meet those ambitions, but rather the way the ‘old guard’ of the standards community reacted to it.

The fact of the matter is that the people who used to be independent open advocates were actually quite closed and cliquey. They didn’t want ‘new kids on the block’ telling them how to tell their story or promote their efforts. Instead of embracing a new catalyzing force in their midst, they set about ignoring, undermining and even actively derailing it at every opportunity.

Despite my skepticism about Diaspora, though, I don’t want to fall into the same trap. I admire and encourage the enthusiasm of this group to chase their dream of a peer-to-peer social network.

Do I think they will succeed with this current incarnation? No. Do I think they should stop trying? No.

While this project might not work their effort and energy will not go to waste.

I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.

What they might do, however, is strongly consider how their work might stitch together existing open standards efforts rather than inventing any new formats or protocols. The technologies are getting very close to baked and are finding their way into the web at every turn.

We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.

Welcome to the party Diaspora team, don’t let the old guard (who have largely left for BigCo’s anyway) scare you off.

Open is not enough. Time to raise the bar: Interoperable

// April 29th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Attention, Dataportability, Media, Personal, Technology

Last week Elias Bizannes and I wrote a post Assessing the Openness of Facebook’s ‘Open Graph Protocol’.

To summarize that post, it’s clear that Facebook is making a play to create, aggregate and own not only identity on the web, but everything that hangs off it. From Interests to Engagement – not just on their .com but across all sites. To do this they are giving publishers token value (analytics and traffic) to take over parts of the page with pieces of Facebook.com without giving them complete access to the user , their data or the user experience (all at the exclusion of any other player). In addition, they are building a semantic map of the Internet that will broker interests and data on a scale never before seen anywhere.

In the face of such huge momentum and stunningly effective execution (kudos to them!), aiming for (or using the word) Open is no longer enough. The web community needs to up it’s game.

The same is true for data portability – the group and the idea. Data portability is no longer enough. We must raise the bar and start to aim for Interoperable Data Portability.

Interoperability means that things work together without an engineer first having to figure out what’s on the other end of an API call.

When you request ‘http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com’ it isn’t enough that the data is there, or that that its ‘open’ or ‘accessible’. No. The reason the web works is because the browser knows exactly how to request the data (HTTP) and how the data will be returned (HTML/CSS/JS). This is an interoperable transaction.

Anyone could write a web server, create a web page, or develop a web browser and it just works. Point the browser somewhere else, and it continues to work.

Now map this to the social web. Anyone could (should be able to) build an open graph, create some graph data, and point a social widget to it and it just works. Point the social widget somewhere else, and it continues to work.

As you can see from the mapping above, the interaction between a social widget and it’s social graph should be the same as that of a browser and a web-server. Not just open, but interoperable, interchangeable and standardized.

Why? Innovation.

The same kind of innovation we get when we have cutting edge web servers competing to be the best damned web server they can be (IIS vs. Apache), and cutting edge websites (Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Google vs. Every other site on the Internet) and cutting edge browsers (Netscape vs. IE vs. Safari vs. Chrome). These products were able to compete for their part in the stack.

Imagine if we got stuck with IIS,  Netscape and Altavista locking down the web with their own proprietary communication channels. The web would have been no better than every closed communication platform before it. Slow, stale and obsolete.

How do we become interoperable? It’s hard. Really hard. Those of us who manage products at scale know its easy to make closed decisions. You don’t have to be an evil mastermind – you just have to be lazy. Fight against being lazy. Think before you design, develop or promote your products – try harder. I don’t say this just to you, I say it to myself as well. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else out there developing product. We must all try harder.

Open standards are a start, but open protocols are better. Transactions that, from start to finish, provide for Discoverability, Connectivity and Exchange of data using well known patterns.

The standards groups have done a lot of work, but standards alone don’t solve the problem. It requires product teams to implement the standards and this is an area I am far more interested in these days. How do we implement these patterns at scale.

Customers (i.e. Publishers) must also demand interoperable products. Products that not just connect them to Facebook or Twitter but rather make them first class nodes on the social web.

Like we said on the DataPortability blog:

In order for true interoperable, peer-to-peer data portability to win, serious publishers and other sites must be vigilant to choose cross-platform alternatives that leverage multiple networks rather than just relying on Facebook exclusively.

In this way they become first-class nodes on the social web rather than spokes on Facebook’s hub.

But this is just the start. This just stems the tide by handing the keys to more than one player so that no one player kills us while the full transition to a true peer-to-peer model takes place.

If the web is to truly stay open and interoperable, we need to think bigger and better than just which big company (s) we want to hand our identities to.

Just like every site on the web today can have its own web server, every site should also have the choice to host (or pick) its own social server. Every site should become a fully featured peer on the social web. There is no reason why CNN can not be just as functional, powerful, effective and interchangeable as Facebook.com.

If we don’t, we will be stuck with the IIS, IE and Netscape’s of the social web and innovation will die.

Missed opportunities in Publishing

// February 21st, 2010 // 0 Comments // Attention, Media, Technology

MG Siegler over on Techcrunch yesterday wrote a story about how the AP is tweeting links to its stories. Those links, however, are not to its website. Instead those twitter links lead to Facebook copies of their stories!

Here’s a snippet of his post:

The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve been doing this, but Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted the oddness of this, and how annoying it is, tonight. The AP obviously has a ton of media partners, and they could easily link to any of those, or even the story hosted on their own site. But no, instead they’re copying all these stories to their Facebook page and linking there for no apparent reason.

As Sullivan notes in a follow-up tweet, “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.”

What’s really odd about this is the AP’s recent scuffle with Google over the hosting of AP content. The two sides appeared to reach some sort of deal earlier this month (after months of threats and actual pulled content), but now the AP is just hosting all this content on Facebook for the hell of it?

To me this isn’t unusual at all. In fact it’s common practice amongst ‘social media experts’. Many of us use/used tools like FriendFeed, Buzz, Facebook etc not just to share links, but to actually host original content. We actively send all our traffic to these sites rather than using them as draws back to our own open blog/publishing platforms.

I completely agree with MG. Sending your audience to a closed destination site which provides you no brand control, monetization or cross-sell capability shows a profound misunderstanding of the economics of publishing.

Some will argue that the content should find the audience, and they should be free to read it wherever they like. Sure, I won’t disagree with that, but actively generating it in a non-monetizable place and actively sending people there seems like a missed opportunity to me. Why not generate it on your blog and then simply share the links in other places. If those users choose to chat over there, that’s fine, but the first, best place to view the content and observe the conversation should always be at the source, at YOUR source. YOUR site.

Some will argue that those platforms generate more engagement than a regular blog/site. They generate engagement because your blog is not looked after. You’re using inferior plugins and have not taken the time to consider how your blog can become a first class social platform. You’re willing to use tools that cannibalize your audience rather than attract them. You’re willing to use your  blog as a traffic funnel back to other destination sites by replacing big chunks of it with FriendFeed streams rather than hosting your own LifeStream like Louis Gray and Leo Laporte have done.

Some will argue (or not, because they don’t realize or don’t want to say it out loud) that they are not journalists, they are personalities, and they go wherever their audience is. They don’t monetize their content, they monetize the fact that they HAVE an audience by getting paying jobs that enable them to evangelize through any channel that they choose. Those people (and there are very few of them) have less incentive to consolidate their content sources (although there are still reasons to do so). Unfortunately, though, media properties sometimes get confused and think they can do the same thing.

The list of reasons why publishing stuff on Buzz or FriendFeed or Facebook as a source rather than an aggregator goes on and on, so I will just stop here.

I’m glad MG has picked up on it and written about it on Techcrunch.

#blogsareback

Update: Steve Rubel is agreeing with the AP’s approach. Using all sorts of fancy words like Attention Spirals, Curating and Relationships Steve is justifying APs ritual suicide of their destination site in favor of adding value, engagement and traffic to Facebook. Sorry Steve, but giving Facebook all your content and your traffic and not getting anything in return is called giving away the house.

Again, I’m not advocating that you lock content away behind paywalls, I’m simply saying that you need to own the source and make your site a first-class citizen on the social web. Not make Facebook the only game in town by handing it your audience.

[Audio] ET Conversation 4: Buzz’s Mixed Focus of Content Creation and Collection

// February 15th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Attention, Dataportability, Media, Technology

Over on EdgeTheory Conversations Louis Gray and I discuss Buzz and Google’s missed opportunity to be a pure aggregator.

Head on over to the site and check it out.

Google Buzz = FriendFeed Reborn

// February 9th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Dataportability, Media, Technology, synapticweb

FriendFeed was dead, now it is re-born as Google Buzz.

I’ve not been able to try the product yet, but philosophically and architecturally it seems superior to FriendFeed.

Here are my observations so far:

Consumption Tools

Buzz is better than FriendFeed because Google is treating it as a consumption tool rather than a destination site (by placing it in Gmail rather than hosting it on a public page). FriendFeed should have always been treated this way. Some people got confused and started hosting public discussions on FriendFeed.

That being said, though, I’ve long said that news and sharing is not the same as an email inbox and those sorts of items should not be ‘marked as read’ but rather stream by in an ambient way.

While Buzz is in fact a stream, it is its own tab that you have to focus on rather than a sidebar you can ignore (at least as far as I can tell right now).

How it affects Publishers (and Echo)

The inevitable question of ‘How does this affect Echo‘ has already come up on Twitter. Like FriendFeed before it, Buzz generates siloed conversations that do not get hosted at the source.

So, the publisher spends the time and money to create the content and Buzz/Google get the engagement/monetization inside Gmail.

For some reason, all these aggregators think that they need to create content to be of value. I disagree. I long for a pure aggregator that does not generate any of its own content such as comments, likes, shares etc.

That being said, however, the more places we have to engage with content the more reasons there are for Echo to exist so that publishers can re-assemble all that conversation and engagement back on their sites.

Synaptic Connections

Note that they don’t have a ‘Follow’ button – it’s using synaptic connections to determine who you care about. Very cool! I worry though that there might not be enough controls for the user to override the assumptions.

Open Standards

Already, Marshall is calling it the savior of open standards. I don’t think Open Standards need to be saved – but they certainly have all the buzz words on their site so that’s promising.

That’s it for now, maybe more later when I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Update: After playing with it this morning, and reading a little more, it’s clear that this is actually Jaiku reborn (not FriendFeed), because the Jaiku team were involved in building it. They deserve a lot of credit for inventing much of this stuff in the first place – long before FriendFeed.

Also, having used it only for an hour, the unread count on the Buzz tab is driving me nuts. It shouldn’t be there. It’s a stream not an inbox. Also it makes no sense why I can’t display buzz in a sidebar on the right side of my primary Gmail inbox view. That would be ideal.

It’s also funny to me that some people have tried to give Chris Messina credit for Buzz even though he’s been at Google for no more than a month. They clearly don’t understand how long and hard it is to build product. Messina is good, but he aint that good

Facebook and the future of News

// February 4th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Business, Dataportability, Media, Personal, Technology, synapticweb

Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices.

In it, he states that news consumption has barely changed in the last 10 years. RSS and Feed Readers drive very little traffic and most people still get their news from hand selected mainstream portals and destination sites (like MSN News and Yahoo news etc). In other words, mainstream users do not curate and consume niche subscriptions and are quite content to read what the mainstream sites feed them.

This is troubling news (pun intended) for those of us who believe that the democratization of publishing might open up the world to niche voices and personalized story-telling.

Marshall goes on to argue that Facebook might be our last hope. That since everyone spends all their time in Facebook already, that the service has an opportunity to popularize the notion of subscribing to news sources and thereby bring to life our collective vision of personalized news for the mainstream. Facebook already does a great deal of this with users getting large amounts of news and links from their friends as they share and comment on links.

Through my work with APML I have long dreamed of a world where users are able to view information through a highly personalized lens – a lens that allows them to see personally relevant news instead of just popular news (note that Popularity is a factor of personal relevancy, but it is not the only factor). That doesn’t mean the news would be skewed to one persuasion (liberal or conservative for example) but rather to a specific topic or theme.

Could Facebook popularize personalized news? Should it? Do we really want a closed platform to dictate how the transports, formats and tools of next generation story-telling get built? If so, would we simply be moving the top-down command and control systems of network television and big media to another closed platform with its own limitations and restrictions?

Personalized news on closed platforms are almost as bad as mainstream news on closed platforms. News organizations and small niche publishers both need a way to reach their audience using open technologies or we are doomed to repeat the homogenized news environment of the last 2 decades. The one that failed to protect us from a war in Iraq, failed to innovate when it came to on-demand, and failed to allow each of us to customize and personalize our own news reading tools.

That’s why technologies like RSS/Atom, PubSubHub and others are so important.

What’s missing now is a presentation tool that makes these technologies sing for the mainstream.

So far, as an industry, we’ve failed to deliver on this promise. I don’t have the answers for how we might succeed. But succeed we must.

Perhaps established tier 1 media sites have a role to play. Perhaps market forces that are driving them to cut costs and innovate will drive these properties to turn from purely creating mainstream news editorially toward a model where they curate and surface contributions from their readership and the wider web.

In other words, Tier 1 publishers are being transformed from content creators to content curators – and this could change the game.

In the race to open up and leverage social and real-time technologies, these media organizations are actually making way for the most effective democratization of niche news yet.

Niche, personalized news distributed by open news hubs born from the ‘ashes’ of old media.

Don’t like the tools one hub gives you? Switch to another. the brands we all know and love have an opportunity to become powerful players in the news aggregation and consumption game. Will they respond in time?

Due to my experience working with Tier 1 publishers for Echo, I have high hopes for many of them to learn and adapt. But much more work still remains.

Learn more about how news organizations are practically turning into personalized news curation hubs over on the Echo Blog.

My New Years Resolutions

// January 1st, 2010 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Me, Personal, Technology

Be even more true to myself and others

There are too many times when there are people in our ecosystem, and in our world, who bully or bluster their way through things. This is corrosive to us all and blocks innovation and real discourse. I plan to be true to myself and others when dealing with these kinds of people.

We need to remember that those who have a voice are not necessarily right. And those who are right are not necessarily being heard.

Forget the numbers – Make a connection

All too often our community turns into a game of numbers and influence instead of real friendships. Sure having an audience is important for some of the things we do, but I’d rather have a group of 5 real friends, than 5000 ‘friends’ on facebook.

This will include less parties and more private dinners or gatherings with people I love and respect.

Remember to pay attention

All too often we are too busy looking up to others, trying to get on the next big level, and we forget that there are really valuable people and projects right here next to us. I want to meet more people who have less voice, but have equal (or better) ideas, projects or companies.

I want to help those people succeed.

Maintain optimism

I don’t want to become jaded or complacent about where I live and the opportunities I have. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley going on a year now (+ all the time I spent there before that) – it could be easy to forget just how lucky I am.

I will continue to try my best to avoid that this year.

A call for focus from the open standards community

// December 11th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Dataportability, Personal, Technology

Over on the Open Web Foundation mailing list Eran Hammer-Lahav who, despite his gruff and disagreeable personality, I respect greatly for his work in the development of open standards, is effectively calling for a complete shakeup of the foundation and the work being poured into the ‘common ground’ of the standards efforts.

Let me define the ‘Common Ground’ as I see it.

Building strong common ground is like building strong open standards deep into the stack. Just like a software stack, our community needs a stack of organizations that are loosely coupled and open to participation. Groups like the W3C and IETF provide a rock solid core, more agile groups focused on specific standards like OpenID and Oauth are in the middle and a project like the DataPortability project was supposed to be on top – a kind of user interface layer.

You see, good standards efforts are neccessarily projects that work to solve one small problem well. The problems are often deep technical challenges that attract passionate and, let’s face it, geeky people to hack, debate and decide on details that don’t hit the radar for 99.9% of the population.

The problem, of course, is that the rest of the world has to care for a standard to matter.

Leaders and project managers need to be found, real companies need to get involved (not just their staff), collaboration platforms need to facilitate real and open discussion, calls for collaboration need to be heard, specs need to be written (and written well), libraries need to be written, governance needs to be put in place and so on.

Also, once the standard is (half) baked, less involved hackers need to participate to test the theories in the real world. Less savvy developers need to hear about the standard and understand it. Business people need to understand the value of using a standard over a proprietary solution. They also need IP protections in place to ensure that by using the standard they are not putting their company at risk. Marketing people need to know how to sell it to their customer base. Customers need to know how to look for and choose open solutions to create a market place that rewards openness.

All of this is ‘Common Ground’. It is common to any standards effort and there should – no must – be an organization that is just as lean, mean and aggresive as Facebook in place to provide these resources if we are ever going to compete with closed solutions.

At the start of 2008 the DataPortability project became very popular. It’s goal was not to build standards, but rather to promote them. To provide much of the common ground that I described above.

The DP project’s particular mission, in my mind at least, was to focus on the marketing effort. To build a massive spot light and to shine that intense light on the people, organizations and standards that were getting the job done.

Is the OWF providing a generic legal/IPR framework? Fantastic! It was the DPP’s job to let everyone know – developers, business execs, media, potential editors, contributors and more. Our job was not, and should never be to start the framework itself, but rather to advocate for, provide context around and promote the hell out of someone else’s effort to do so.

Is a conference happening next year? Excellent. It was the DPP’s job to get in touch with the conference organizer, organize not just a DP panel, but a DP Track and to create room (and perhaps even a narritive) inside which the people doing the actual work can speak.

Has Facebook just announced a new feature that could have been achieved through a combination of existing open standards? Then it is the DPP’s job to consult with each of those standards groups and create a cohesive response/set of quotes for the media to use.

What is the relationship Facebook Platform, OpenSocial, Open Standards, OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts and Twitter’s ‘Open API’? DataPortability.org should have the answer neatly described on its website.

Unfortunately, though, many in the standards community chose to fight the creation of the project for whatever reasons crossed their mind at the time. They used all sorts of methods to undermine the effort. Some that would put Fox News to shame.

The result, of course, has been a diversion from the important work of providing this common ground  to the standards community to a self-protection state of creating governance and creating our own ‘deliverables’ in order to justify and protect our own existence.

I have, as a result of a series of unfortunate events, fallen out of touch with the Steering group at the DPP. Moving to the US, getting disillusioned with the community I admired (not those involved with DPP. My friends at the DPP Steering group have always performed very admirably and worked extremely hard) and ultimately shifting my world view to realize that the best contribution I can make – the best way to really move the needle – is to ship Data Portability compliant software at scale.

At this juncture, however, I think it’s time for us all to refocus on our original mission for the DataPortability Project.

To restate my humble view on the matter:

• To provide a website that explains data portability to various audiences in neat and concise ways. It is the onramp for the standards community. You should be able to send anyone to ‘dataportability.org’ and they ‘get it’ and know what to do next.
• To provide context and advocacy on news and development from inside and outside the standards community so that media, execs and less involved developers can understand and react
• To build a community of interested parties so that they can swam to the aid of standards groups or the standards effort in general.
• To act as a market force to (yes I’m going to say it) pick winners. To highlight what works, what doesn’t and what should be done next to move the whole effort forward. Nothing is as powerful as removing confusion and planting a big red flag on the answer.
• To recognize that we have the authority to do whatever we want to do because we are an independant, private group who has chosen to create public/transparent processes. We need to believe in ourselves. If we do good work, then people will listen. If we don’t then they can listen to someone else.

This necessarily means that the only real deliverable from the project would be a small set of communication tools that build community, context and advocacy around what we believe is the ‘truth’ (or at least things worth paying attention to) in the broader standards community.

Many have scoffed at that these goals in the past claiming that there was no ‘value’. In my book this set of goals is not only a very worthy, it is increasingly critical to the success and health of the web.

Redefining Open

// December 1st, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Blog, Media, Technology

In my mind, there are four kinds of open.

• Torvalds Open.
• Zuckerberg Open.
• Not Open but we use the word Open anyway.
• Saad Open.

This fragmentation has diluted the word open to the point where it almost has no value.

It’s time to re-define the word open. First let me explain each category.

Torvalds Open.

In Linus Torvalds world (the guy who invented Linux) Open means that the software is developed through a community process. The source code is visible and modifiable by anyone and is available for free.

This is called ‘Open Source’.

Companies may package and bundle the software in new and novel ways, and provide support and services on top for a fee.

The problem with Open Source on the web is that the software itself has less value than the network effects and up-time provided by a branded, hosted experience. Running Twitter.com on open source software, for example, would have very little value because Twitter’s lock-in is not their software, but rather their name space (@chrissaad) and their developer ecosystem all developing software with dependencies on their proprietary API.

Open Source is useful, interesting and important, but is not what I mean when I talk about the Open Web. I feel like its value is well understood and it is not the first, best way of making our world (and the Internet) a better place – at least not in the same way it once did when client-side software was the primary way we used computers.

Zuckerberg Open.

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about open, he is not talking about Technology. He is talking about human interactions.

Ever since the popularity of Data Portability (via the DataPortability project) Facebook has gone to great lengths to redefine the word Open to mean the way people interact with each other.

In doing so, they have managed to, in large part, co-opt the word and claim their platform makes people ‘more open’.

In many respects, and by their definition, they are right. Facebook has encouraged a mind bending number of people to connect and share with each other in ways that had been previously reserved for bloggers and other social media ‘experts’.

Facebook deserves a lot of credit for introducing social networking to the masses.

Their definition of Open, however important, is not the kind I’m talking about either.

Not Open but we use the word Open anyway.

This is when a platform or product has an API and therefore claim that they have an ‘Open Platform’.

There’s nothing open about having an API. It’s just having an API. The platform could be closed or open depending on how the given application and API is built and what limitations are placed upon it.

In most cases, an ‘Open Platform’ is not actually open, it’s just a platform.

Saad Open

My definition of open is very specific. In fact a better way to describe it would be Interoperable and Distributed.

To explain, let me provide some compare and contrast examples.

Twitter is closed because it owns a proprietary namespace (e.g. @chrissaad). The only way to address people is using their username system. They own those usernames and have final authority over what to do with them.

They are closed because they do not provide free and clear access to their data without rate limiting that access or cutting deals for improved quality of services.

They are also closed because they are not a federated system. You can not start your own Twitter style tool and communicate with users on Twitter or vice versa. The only way to message people on Twitter is to use Twitter’s propietary APIs for submitting and retrieving data.

A proprietary API is an API that is special to a company and/or produces data that is not in an open standard.

WordPress, on the other hand (and to contrast) is an open system. Let’s compare point for point.

It does not own the namespace on which it is developed. The namespaces are standard URLs. This blog, for example is hosted at blog.areyoupayingattention.com. WordPress does not own that domain.

WordPress produces a single type of data – blog posts. Those blog posts are accessible using an open standard – RSS or Atom. There is no rate limit on accessing that data.

WordPress is a federated system. While they provide a hosted solution at WordPress.com for convenience, there is nothing stopping me from switching to Blogger or Tumblr. The tools that you would use to consume my blog would remain unchanged and the programmers who make those tools would not need to program defensibly against WordPress’ API. They simply need to be given the URL of my RSS feed and they are good to go.

This makes WordPress an open tool in the open blogosphere.

Blogging is open.

Microblogging should be open too.

To summarize. Open, in my definition, does not mean the software is open source or free. It means that the software receives open standards data, provides open standards data, has an interoperable API and can easily be switched out for other software.

Today I was challenged on Twitter that Echo is not ‘Open’ because it is proprietary code and costs money to use.

This person does not understand my definition of Open. Echo is open because it is not a destination site, it sits on any site anywhere. The owner of that site can take it off and replace it with another engagement tool at any time. The data being absorbed by Echo, for the most part, is RSS or Atom, and the data coming out of Echo is RSS.

It does not have any proprietary namespaces (except our useless legacy login system which we are trying to get rid of as quickly as possible) and does not pretend to create some amazing social network of its own. It is just a tool to communicate on the open, social web.

Is Echo perfect? No, of course not, but our intention is to make each and every aspect of the product as interoperable and distributed as possible. We will even use and contribute to open source where appropriate.

How does your product, or the tools you choose, compare? Tell me in the comments.

Next up, we should start to redefine the ‘Open’ community that creates open standards. Much of it is not very open.