Posts Tagged ‘Dataportability’

A call for focus from the open standards community

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

Time to refocus the open community
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 efforts 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.
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 Fox News to shame.
The result, of course, has been a diversion from the important work of providing common area services to the standards community to a self-protection state of creating governance and creating our own ‘deliverables’ in order to justify and protect its own existance.
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. Ny 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.
In my book that is not only a very worthy effort, it is increasingly critical to the success and health of the web.

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.

A failure of Imagination and Conviction

// December 4th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Business, Dataportability, synapticweb

As you might know if you follow my work even remotely, my projects almost always come from a place of philosophical supposition. That is, I first create a model that I think matches the current and emerging state of the world, and then I create a product, project, format or other that works inside, encourages or commercializes that model.

Many of my colleagues at JS-Kit do the same thing. Khris Loux and I, for example, spend hours and hours discussing our shared world views and how this translates to features, business direction and general life goals.

This methodology allows us to couch our decisions in well thought out mental models to make them more consistent, predictable and, we hope, more effective.

Over the years, and with my friends, I’ve proposed a number of these philosophical models including APML, DataPortability and most recently (this time working with Khris) SynapticWeb.

One of the hardest aspects of creating a philosophical model, however, is truly letting it guide you. To trust it. To take it’s premise to the logical conclusion. Another challenge is explaining this methodology (and the value of the resulting outcomes) to others who a) don’t think this way and b) have not taken the time to examine and live the model more fully.

Many times, the choices and decisions that I/we make from these models are nuanced, but the sum of their parts, we believe, are significant.

Let me make some concrete examples.

Social Media

There is this ongoing tension between the value of social/user generated media and the media produced by ‘Journalists’. Sure social media is amazing, some say, but bloggers will never replace the role of Journalists.

The fact of the matter is, if your philosophical world view is that Social Media is important, that it is a return to one-to-one personal story telling and that it allows those in the know – involved in the action – to report their first hand accounts, then you must necessarily expand your imagination and have the conviction to follow that line of logic all the way to the end.

If you do, you must necessarily discover that the distinction between Journalists and ‘Us’ as social media participants (all of us) is authority, perspective, distribution and an attempt at impartiality.

In the end, however, we are each human beings (yes, even the journalists). Journalists are imbued with authority because a trusted news brand vets and pays them, they are given the gift of perspective because they sit above the news and are not part of it, they have distribution because their media outlet prints millions of pieces of paper or reaches into the cable set top boxes of millions of homes and their impartiality is a lie.

Can’t these traits be replicated in social media? Of course they can.

Reputation can be algorithmically determined or revealed through light research/aggregation, perspective can be factored in by intelligent human beings or machines that find both sides of a story, distribution is clearly a solved problem through platforms like Twitter, Digg and others and impartiality is still a lie. At least in social media bias is revealed and transparency is the new impartiality.

I don’t mean to provide an exhaustive reasoning on why Social Media as a philosophical framework holds up as new paradigm for news gathering and reporting here – only to give an example of how we must allow ourselves to imagine outside the box and have the conviction to fully believe in our own assumptions.

Streams

The same type of artificial mental barriers have appeared at every step of the way with each of the philosophical frameworks in which I have participated. Streams, is the most recent.

When we launched Echo we proposed that any conversation anywhere, irrespective of the mode or channel in which it was taking place, had the potential to be a first class part of the canonical and re-assembled lifestream of a piece of content.

Many pushed back. “Oh a Tweet can’t possibly be as valuable as a comment” they lamented. They’re wrong.

A Tweet, an @ Reply, a Digg, a Digg Comment, a Facebook Status Update, a Facebook Comment, an ‘on page’ comment and any other form of reaction each have just as much potential for value as the other.

Some have created artificial distinctions between them. They separate the stream into ‘Comments’ and ‘Social Reactions’. I have news for everyone. A comment is a social reaction. Thinking of it as anything less is a failure of imagination and conviction. The trick is not a brute force separation of the two, but rather a nuanced set of rules that help diminish the noise and highlight the signal – where ever it might be – from any mode or channel. We’ve started that process in Echo with a feature we call ‘Whirlpools’.

Communities

Another interesting failure of imagination that I come up against a lot lately is the notion of community building.

With Echo, we have taken the philosophical position that users already have a social network – many have too many of them in fact. There is no reason for them to join yet another network just to comment. Not ours, not our publisher’s.

No, instead they should be able to bring their social network with them, participate with the content on a publisher’s website, share with their existing friends on existing social networks, and leave just as easily.

By using Echo, you are not joining ‘our community’. You already have a community. If anything you are participating in the Publishers community – not ours.

We don’t welcome new customers to ‘Our community’. Instead we help their users bring their community to a piece of content, interact, share and leave.

Publishers invest large quantities of capital in producing high quality content only to have the engagement and monetization opportunities occur on Social Networks. In these tough economic times, publishers can not afford to bleed their audience and SEO to yet another social network just to facilitate commenting. That is the opposite of the effect they are trying to achieve by adding rich commenting in the first place.

If we use our imagination, and have the conviction to see our ideas through, we realize that publishers need tools that encourage on-site engagement and re-assemble offsite reactions as well – not bolster the branded 3rd party communities of the products they use.

Be Brave

In summation – be brave. Observe the world, define a philosophical framework, imagine the possibilities and have the conviction to follow through on your ideas. Stop being lazy. Stop stopping short of taking your impulses to their logical conclusions because I’ve found, when you consistently execute on your vision it might be a little harder to sell your point of differentiation – but your contributions will ultimately be better, more consistent and more long lasting for your company, the web and the rest of the world.

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?

Blogs are Back

// July 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Blog, Business, Dataportability, Media

When Khris and I showed Robert Scoble Echo prior to the Launch at the Real-Time Crunchup he said “Wow, Blogs are Back!”.

I couldn’t agree more. It looks like his sentiment is starting to propagate.

When I say Blogs are Back I mean that the balance between other forms of social media (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed etc) are now finding their rightful balance with the first and foremost social platform, Blogging.

This is not to suggest that other forms of interaction are going away, only that there is a natural equilibrium to be struck.

There are a number of factors that are helping this trend along.

They include:

  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 realization that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
  5. The broader themes of the Synaptic Web

I also discussed this with Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Marshall Kirkpatrick the other day on the BadHairDay podcast.

You can also see previous references to this in my ‘What is Echo‘ post. I’ve also posted a more detailed account of how Echo fits into this notion on the JS-Kit blog.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have also posted on this. I also registered ‘BlogsAreBack.com’ (what should I do with it?).

I look forward to see what this new trend brings!

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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You can't compare Twitter to Facebook

// February 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Personal

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.

An update on the data portability landscape

// December 18th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Dataportability, Technology, Work

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.

The web-wide social network

// November 19th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Personal

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.

Facebook charging a protection fee?

// November 19th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Dataportability, Me, Technology, Work

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.

Who owns your comment data?

// November 11th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Dataportability, Media, Work

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!

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