August 2007

David Recordon has a great response to Stefan Brands “Fox News”-style FUD laced post about OpenID. Nice post David.

It looks like Comcast is now throttling BitTorrent users on their network. I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve used BitTorrent before (*gasp*). I may have a piece of software that I own but lost the media for or maybe I really want to see a crappy cam capture of the latest movie in theaters to decide if I want to get the DVD or not (side note: took my son to Rattotoie this weekend with my wife; $17.50 just for the tickets … no wonder people steal). This news of Comcast throttling BitTorrent is no surprise and it means users will most likely start using encryption to solve the problem.

When I worked at OSU we had a lot of the same limitations in the dorms as well. What did the students do? They used the local network to share like crazy. There were even sites (what were those sites again?! I forget) that were setup to help facilitate this sharing of data among students within their own networks. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with Comcast? That’s like 30 million subscribers … that’s a lot of users to share with.

I would imagine something like this could manifest itself as a site that allows users to share what they have (most likely via BitTorrent) among the Comcast network. Heck, I bet you could even uncap your modem for traffic _within_ the Comcast network and they wouldn’t know. Of course they would ban you for life if you got caught but that’s another story. Legal problems aside (yep, I’m just sweeping them away) this could even be a fantastic driver for new subscribers to Comcast; all-you-can-eat transfers with other Comcast customers.

Does it get any better than this?! I swear its palpable this opening of the web that’s happening. I can see and hear the cracks forming in all of those walled gardens, their users busting through the seams and finding new ways to engage, share and participate in conversations across the Internet. If ever there was a breakin’-down-the-walls kind of event, it would be BarCamp. I’m really looking forward to this year’s version (the 3rd annual and original BarCamp) which has been coined BarCampBlock because they are taking over an entire Palo Alto city block.

I’ve been operating under a few assumptions (I know, my mother said never to assume … ass out of u and me and all that) about the current direction of the open web which have helped me to direct my energies … I’ll present them in the form of three questions:

1. Who am I?: Fill in profile information. My email. First name and last. Date of birth. Mother’s maiden name. Filling out forms and signing up for new sites. All of it gets tiresome. Wash, rinse, repeat.
2. What’s mine?: What’s the content that I’ve created and how can I get to it in a “standard”, easily-consumable way? How do I get what’s mine (tied to who I am) to other sites?
3. Who do I know?: Oh yeah … social network fatigue. I swear I need to start a self-help group on this. “Yes, you have friends. No, they aren’t on this site. Sorry.” I know who my friends are; give me the means to define them once-and-for-all and let me take it with me to every site I go to. You shouldn’t have to go to social networking sites, social networking should be a feature of every site.

We’re close to answers for all of these. The key to the open web is the development of standards that solve the above problems. We’ve OpenID and microformats (see #1 and #2) now all we need is something to bring those together to solve #3. I know that’s what I want to try to get done this weekend at BarCampBlock. Fortunately, we’ve got some very cool things happening with OAuth (think of it as the Flickr API for the Internet) and portable social networking.

Why are we seeing these technologies emerge now? I think Firefox helped pave the way by wrestling the Internet towards support for open standards. The emergence of a vocabulary for defining collaboration that started with ‘diff’, ‘email’ and ‘patch’ way-back-when the Internet started and how that has matured to allow anyone to collaborate. Finally, its the maturation of the underlying components that make up the Internet. HTTP, HTML (and its derivites), the ubiquity of decent technologies for managing/aggregating data, etc.

The open web is quickly becoming a reality. Its more than just free software and great browsers. Data wants to be free and open standards are the way to making that happen. What’s this all going to enable in the coming years? Services; I know who you are, what’s yours and your relationships … now I want recommendations, I want suggestions, I want meaning and I need services to make sense of all of this data. Distill it down to something that makes sense, that’s something I’ll pay for.

I hope you can make it out for BarCampBlock this weekend … its going to be one to remember.

I’ve got some TripIt invites … track your travel via itineraries, etc. Send me your email to scott at my last name dot com.

Seems like this portable social networking stuff is catching on … after my post last week, more feed surfing reveals I’m not the only one talking about it (that point goes in the ‘duh’ category):

Brian Oberkirch is continuing his awesome tear with post after post in his portable social networking series.

Marc Canter gets in on things (yeah Marc, we know you’ve been talking about this since the dawning of time) … :-) … I’m looking forward to the Data Sharing Summit in September.

Dave Winer even chimes in with another view of somebody who’s been there, done that.

You know you’re onto something too when Wired does an article about it.

Finally, we get Fred Wilson argues that open social network is probably pointless for the average user. Drilling down in the comments you see Winer’s great rebuttal.

Its coming; in the near future, you won’t go to social networking sites to interact with your friends. Social networking will be a feature of every site. Powered by open standards that enable control, privacy and ease-of-control of personal data streams, the applications that are about to emerge are truly going to be phenomenal.

It was in 2001 that I first developed Ampache (technically, I hacked it up). I needed something that would let me stream music from my home library to me when I was connected to the Internet. I traveled quite a bit back then and didn’t have a laptop so having my music in one place and streamable was the next best thing.

I developed the software for about 2 years but then my excitement faded but that of people in the community didn’t. This is when Karl Vollmer picked up after I let the project lag and I handed it over to his insanely capable hands. I noticed this morning that Karl has launched version 3.4 (well, its out there in SVN now) and I’m amazed that after 6 years the project is still going strong. Karl has been able to get it integrated into several distros and has always make sure to make it an easy installation.

I still use a private instance of Ampache and am always pleased to see the software continuing to evolve and be something way more than I had ever originally envisioned.

Props to you Karl … keep up the great work.

Speaking at a rather subdued LinuxWorld Expo at 3pm today.

OpenID creator and uber geek Brad Fitzpatrick announced his departure from Six Apart today. Good luck Brad.

Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up - It won’t be long before this happens … I’m with Dave Winer; the big winners are the people opening up now.

I scheduled a flight in mid-May when I was doing some consulting. Due to a schedule mishap, the gig got canceled and I was left with a ticket to nowhere. I didn’t use it but now want to get a refund on it (or at least pay the $100 and use it for something else). This should be simple, right? I mean this happens to people all the time. Let’s go to the the carrier’s website and make it happen!

I’m a frequent fly with United and I referenced my frequent flyer number when I made the reservation. C’mon, they love to see repeat business so this should be a snap. I sign-in and quickly find the E-ticket refund area … sweet! Even easier. I enter in my ticket number (see below) and click submit. Bam! Crash and burn. I’m presented with the following dialog:

Bummer. Well, easy enough. I’ll just click through and contact United:

Huh?! Is this an accident? A random happening on a Friday afternoon? Ineptitude? Or the most genius ploy ever conceived?! If we turn off our web servers, people can’t actually get refunds easily. They’ll be forced to call in and wait a long time on their phone lines wasting the time of our underpaid minions. I want to believe its not that bad.

Let’s get on the phone then and just sort this out. Armed with my ticket number I call the 800 number and am pleased to hear the automated responses, etc. Ticking through the options I realize there isn’t actually an option to do the refund automatically. I go with plan B and select the option to speak with a customer service representative. *Click*. Wha?! Yep. After 7 minutes of air time the line goes dead. Subsequent attempts result in the same thing. Now I’m to the point where I’ve wasted 30 minutes of my time and am seriously questioning if its worth it to me to try and recoup the loss on this $438 ticket. I’m twiddling my thumbs here blogging my anger out … :-)

If I were a company that wanted to keep my customers business I’d look at it from my customer’s point of view. My customers are busy people who don’t have time to waste. Sure, I missed the scheduled flight and its my fault but odds are the flight was full (it was on a busy leg) so somebody probably filled my seat anyways. Not only that, I’ll still need to kick in $100 more just to use it as a penalty. No sweat … I don’t mind. But make it easy for me. Now I don’t want to trust you with my time as my provider. That’s a bummer and this is a no brainer. Treat your customers right and you’ll build trust and loyalty.

Or did the credit card companies take over running the airlines?