Posts Tagged ‘data portability’

FriendFeed is over – Time for a Blog Revolution

// August 22nd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Blog, Dataportability, Me, Media, Technology

The blog revolution that I spoke of in my previous post ‘Blogs are Back” feels to me, right now, like the Iranian revolution that almost happened a couple of months back. It is in danger of fading away as we get wrapped up in ‘what will Facebook do next’ mania.

You see, a couple of months ago there seemed to be an awakening that blogs are the first, best social networking platforms. This realization seemed to be driven by many converging factors including…

  1. Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community – particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
  2. Facebook’s continued resistance to true DataPortability
  3. The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
  4. A broader understanding that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
  5. FriendFeed selling out to Facebook
  6. A flurry of great posts on the subject
  7. The broader themes of the Synaptic Web

Instead though, it now seems that many bloggers are holding on desperately to the notion that FriendFeed may survive or that Facebook may get better. They continue to pour their content, conversation and influence into a platform that does not hold their brand, their ads or their control. We all seem desperate to see what next move these closed platforms make.

I have news for you – FriendFeed is dead. The team has moved on to work with the core Facebook team.

At best, FriendFeed will go the way of Del.icio.us and Flickr – stable but not innovating. At worst, it will go the way of Jaiku or even Dodgeball.

It’s time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms. Blogs. Blogs are our profile pages – social nodes – on the open, distributed social web.

Blogs missing a feature you like from FriendFeed? Build a plugin. There’s nothing Facebook or FriendFeed does that a blog can’t do with enough imagination.

Our job now, as early adopters and social media addicts, should be to build the tools and technologies to educate the mainstream that blogs and blogging can be just as easy, lightweight, social and exciting as Facebook. Even more so.

All that’s need is a change in perspective and slight tweaks around the edges.

Blogs are back.

Who’s with me?

Media 2.0 Best Practices goes live

// February 28th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Business, Media, Personal, Technology, Work

media-20-best-practices-logo

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

Follow along

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Proposal: OpenID Connect

// December 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Dataportability, Me, Technology, Work

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?