December 2007

I’ve been pondering a “Predictions for 2008″ post for most of the month. I had all kinds of ideas for crazy things I could predict (for example: giant Internet crash leaving millions without Twitter updates leading to mass riots and utter chaos) but with my record for this year, I’d be afraid they would all come true and then I’d be held responsible. Instead, I wanted to talk about trends in 2007 and what they will mean for 2008. Boring, I know … :-)

Almost Famous

Originally uploaded by seminomad.

We’re at a crossroads right now on our march to the “open web”. If you’ve ever seen the movie Almost Famous you might know what I’m alluding to. There is a great scene with Philip Seymore Hoffman (playing Lester Bangs) and Patrick Fugit (playing William Miller):

Lester Bangs: Your writing is damn good. It’s just a shame you missed out on rock ‘n’ roll.
William Miller: It’s over?
Lester Bangs: It’s over. You got here just in time for the death rattle. Last gasp. Last grope.

What Lester is referring to is the fact that rock n’ roll was already a big business. It wasn’t a place any more for the romantic rockers fighting the system. It was the system and it took a visit from Jimmy Fallon’s character to make that clear to William Miller during the movie.

I’ve always been curious about what happens to an industry as it matures. We saw it with newspapers, the telephone, railroads, etc … you name it. Disruptive technologies always cause a proliferation of new businesses but over time we see massive consolidation leading to just a few big entities that decide how things happen and when. The barrier to entry in the market grows and competing with these big companies becomes virtually impossible as competition melts away. The Internet and web are no different.

We’re at the same crossroads that Lester Bangs talked about that rock n’ roll ended up at. The Internet has already seen massive consolidation in 2007 and its clear that the trend will continue. Even more, the US government’s ears have finally perked up and the possibilities (network neutrality - what an oxymoron) by people who think the Internet is a series of tubes is chilling. We’re on the verge of this whole thing being owned by a few companies and regulated by their proxies in public office.

But there’s hope.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in 2007 its that the power of the user is growing. Power to the people and all that. Users want control, they want their privacy if they ask for it and they are voting with their feet. We’ve also seen the emergence of and the realization of a lot of technologies that are helping to define the “open web”. Its these technologies that are helping to answer the needs of users by allowing them to maintain control and manage their privacy. We have to see more of this in 2008 or I’m afraid we go the route of rock n’ roll.

OpenID, OAuth and microformats emerged as the key building blocks to the open web. Everyone jumped on the “open” bandwagon. OpenSocial, Android appeared from Google. Verizon got in on the action. Facebook. You name it. But things are still pretty darn painful. We have some of the pieces for helping make sure the web and the Internet stay open for good, but we have a ways to go.

Looking across the social networking world, I’m still of the opinion that its not something you just do. Your social network is a tool and it should be available everywhere you go. Social networking should be a feature sites, not a destination.

Of course, I’m not alone in thinking this:

The future of social networking is coming into focus and it looks like Facebook-ish features will be increasingly be integrated into your everyday applications.

- Larry Dignan, Social networking: Quietly being subsumed by your everyday apps, 11/14/2007

and of course:

Now it’s practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you’re expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the social networking sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It’s sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party. But that’s where we are, and right now, billions are being bet on monetizing the world of constant acquaintanceship.

- John Murrell, Good Morning Silicon Valley - SiliconValley.com

2008 to me will be about building the final pieces of the open web. I don’t see a world with one or two winners in the social networking space. I still don’t believe social networking is a destination; its a feature. How do we make that a reality? Well, we have to be able to interoperate among sites. Users need control of who they are and what relationship they have and those have to work everywhere they go. We need standards and protocols that are open to do that. 2008 will be about creating the final pieces of technology we need to make this reality and then it will be a mad dash to see it all come together.

I for one, will be working hard to make this happen … looking forward to a fruitful (and not Almost Famous) ‘08 … peace out!

Marcel Bokhorst sent me a note about Yahoo! and Microsoft CardSpace extensions for phpMyID stand alone OpenID server.

I made some pretty lofty predictions way back in January 2007 about where OpenID would be by now. Not everyone thought I was of sane mind. Let’s see how I did … predictions for 2008 are forthcoming … :-)

1. OpenID 2.0: First and foremost, OpenID 2.0 will get out the door. Not only will the spec be completed, but we’ll get the libraries out the door as well. I know I’ve been saying this for six months but I feel pretty confidant of it now. :-)

Wow. This was closer than I thought it would be. On December 5th, 2007 the authors of the OpenID Authentication specification got up on stage at IIW 2007b and announced OpenID 2.0 final. By the skin of our (my?) chinny-chin-chin.

2. 100 million users with OpenID’s: Yep, I’m going to say it. By the end of 2007 there will be 100 million OpenID enabled users out there. We’re at 16 million right now. Only 84 million more to go!

Depends on who you talk to about this but the ballpark figure (see slide 10) right now is 150 million OpenID’s enabled out in the wild.

3. 7500 OpenID Enabled Sites: By the end of 2007 there will be 7500 OpenID enabled sites. As of today, we’ve seen over 750 OpenID relying parties come across MyOpenID and in recent weeks the pace is picking up. We’re seeing 10-15 new relying parties a day. I think we’ll hit 7500 by years end.

According to this article that came from interviews with the JanRain guys, we’re at over 8,000 and growing at 5% week-over-week. We’re still seeing the momentum and that’s fantastic. Running myOpenID gives them insight into that number better than just about anybody else in the OpenID eco-system.

4. Big player adopts OpenID: One of the big players will adopt OpenID. That could be Google, Yahoo!, Apple, AOL, Digg (yes, they are big like it or not), etc. I don’t have one single data point on this; its more of a gut feeling. When one goes, I think more will follow there after.

So far we’ve got Google, AOL and Digg that have adopted this. Digg has announced support for it but is still on somebody’s sh*tlist for not following through.

5. OpenID Community formalizes: The OpenID community will formalize itself in some sort of trade organization or non-profit foundation. This will be a place for things like IP (domain names, etc) and trademarks to land. It will help solidify OpenID especially as companies start to build businesses around this technology.

The OpenID Foundation was incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit in the State of Oregon in May of 2007. Look for a membership drive coming in January 2008 and lots of exciting announcements in this respect (note: I’m cheating on this one; I’m on the board).

6. OpenID Services: We’ll see some very exciting services emerge that take advantage of OpenID’s. Its more than just that one username and password. Its being able to take advantage of the fact that you are the same person from site to site. This has some amazing possibilities in the realms of reputation and communication that are the most obvious. The best part about this one is that the really, really killer service hasn’t even been thought of.

This is easily the most nebulous and thus most difficult to quantify. Arguably the most innovative service right now is Pibb from JanRain (full disclosure: I used to work there so of course I think its cool). Lifestrea.ms is very promising as well.

Well, there you have it. Worst case we’re looking at 5 out of 6 (considering my bias for #6 I’m willing to eat that one) … that’s pretty good for a year. Its been amazing to watch the committed community around OpenID keep plugging along against all odds. I for one know I have never heard more “you can’t do that” or “that’ll never work” in my entire life. Well folks, we’re just gettin’ started here. 2008 is going to be about blowing the doors off the “social web” and making “social networking” a feature on every single site you visit. But more on that later …

One thing I do truly believe about OpenID and 2008 is that continued adoption is going to be driven by applications that solve specific user pain and not the want for an “open identity platform”. We’ve got the ball rolling with OpenID, OAuth and Microformats in 2007 and as I always say; the best is yet to come.

Happy holidays everybody!

We’re seeing this proliferation of life streaming services in the Web 2.0 world. Lifestrea.ms, FriendFeed, Scope and readr just to name a few. These sites work by aggregating user feeds into one combined feed, known as an activity stream, that is then readable by the user who sets it up. With a glance, they can see what all of their friends are up to (assuming their friends are using their streaming services of course). While these activity streams are interesting from a user standpoint, they aren’t very machine friendly. While I can read these streams on a web page for via RSS, getting at the data in these feeds is near impossible.

I’ve been talking with Chris Messina about this for the last couple of weeks and he had a really good post to the DiSo (distributed social networking) mailing list this weekend about it:

One of the things that I think is critical for DiSo to work on is the distribution of activity streams (aka lifestreams or newsfeeds). As Marshall Kirkpatrick called them, these “Standards Based Nerve Centers” or “Open Aggregators” (Dave Recordon) potentially provide the value of DiSo, harvesting activities from across the web, from friends but also from our own actions, and, with some work, can begin to provide some smarts in terms of “accelerating serendipity” — introducing us to new people or to interesting things that we might not otherwise have come upon.

Chris goes on to describe a possible example of marking up an activity stream with microformats (just POSH - plain old semantic HTML):

Turn this:

“Chris listened to Smells like Teen Spirit.”
“Chris blogged about DiSo.”
“Chris added Steve as a friend.”

Into this:


"At 5:10pm, Chris listened to Smells like Teen Spirit.”
“At At 5:15pm, Chris blogged about DiSo.”
“At 6:30pm, Chris added Steve as a friend.


In the case of music, this might help considerably with the resolution problem that’s been discussed. I could pull out the bits of information from the activity stream that are relevant/interesting to me and do more with them like resolve them to my own catalog (in the case of music). Same could be true with books, movies, videos and other types of media. The aggregate of all of this could be used to build a users personal profile (with their permission of course) or even provide recommendations (note: MyStrands is in the recommendation business). If we could get sites starting to support this kind of format, we could really start to see some extra value applications emerge for developers and users alike.

Where this gets really interesting is when we talk about this within the context of OpenID. When you think about the fact that your OpenID is just an end-point that you have proved ownership of (”I am scott.kveton.com” for example) you can think about landing these annotated activity streams there. Sites and other users will know its “you”. Looking further, with service discovery and things like OAuth, you could feasibly provide private feeds to specific friends or group of people. The possibilities are endless and all of them take advantage of the fact that we’re using very simple building blocks (such as RSS/Atom, microformats, OpenID) to do the heavy lifting. These are the tools that will become the basis for the distributed social network that will be a reality soon enough. Social networks are not a destination; they are simply a feature of every site.

Chris and the DiSo community are starting to discuss these annotated activity streams

This just in from the my-lord-these-guys-are-fast department we have word that OAuth Discovery 1.0 specification has just been published. OAuth is yet another building block that will be critical for the open web. Okay, so what’s the big deal?

OAuth Discovery 1.0 uses the XRDS format coupled with Yadis to do the actual work. I know what you’re thinking; more stinkin’ acronyms you need to remember. No, no … its not like that. I swear, this is a good thing. XRDS and Yadis are used with another well-known protocol: OpenID.

OpenID 1.1 and newer have used Yadis for service discovery but unfortunately there hasn’t been anything to discover other than “hey, your OpenID provider is here!”. Most of the big OpenID providers support Yadis discovery and these are the same folks in the conversation about supporting OAuth as well. With OAuth Discovery using the same mechanisms for discovery as OpenID, you could now land your OAuth credentials on your OpenID provider and have it handle the discovery for that as well. Alright, let me break it down like a fraction for ya … :-):

The geek of all of this is that your OpenID is an end-point that you (and only you) own. Being able to do discovery on things this end-point can do (like “who proves who you are?”, “how do you authenticate with OAuth”, etc) means other sites can take advantage of you proving who you are to do ever cooler things. OAuth is just one more thing you can do at this end-point (and reality, one of the first “cool” things other than the actual OpenID authentication).

What does the future hold? Imagine being able to use discovery to find other services. What if I could use the discovery services to tell other sites where I get my social network from? Where and how people can attach to my public and private feeds? Information on who is providing my authoritative activity stream? It all could all land at these end-points and give sites lots of valuable information about the user while keeping that user in complete control.

I’m really excited about what OAuth means and the fact that they are using the other building blocks to make it a reality. All of these tools are coming together to build the applications we’ve all been talking about for years. Portable social networking is just around the corner and with it will come the reality that social networking isn’t something you go to a site to do; its something you’ll do on every site.

I swear I’m getting old or something (we’re talking Internet old here) because it takes me a day or two to get my thoughts down from events from the past week … my real-time blogging abilities are clearly limited at best … :-)

On Tuesday of this week I had a chance to participate in a panel discussion entitled Portable Playlists and other POSH-ibilities that had myself, Lucas Gonze, Tom Conrad and Tantek Celic. This was part of the wider “Media Web Meetup” discussions going on and hosted by the Songbird folks.

We touched on quite a few topics (some of which I’ll comment on in another blog post) but the one I wanted to cover that didn’t get much airtime was (ironically) what it would take to make a portable playlist format a reality.

Before the panel both Tom and I were chatting about how there is really only one big problem that both Pandora and MyStrands face: catalog resolution. This is a huge problem that consumes quite a bit of developer time in both of our camps. Unfortunately, every playlist format out there simply punts on this problem. They point at some “resource” that is the catalog entry. Now, from a portability standpoint that’s great and I can appreciate the why’s of why you’d do that.

First off, what is this resolution problem I’m talking about? Imagine a user tells me they are listening to “These boots are made for walkin’”. I want to take that song and resolve it to some entry in my catalog. If I do a search for that I’m presented with oodles and oodles of possibles. Not only that, I may get the same song returned to me (that is the exact same waveform) that lives on a greatest hits album or a compilation of the 80’s, etc. We figure between Pandora and MyStrands we’ve got easily a couple of hundred thousand lines of code to solve the same problem. Bummer.

Just about everyone is going to have some sort of catalog entry. We have artist pages (for example, see U2) that are tied to specific catalog information that we get from several sources. We have to do resolution from ‘U2 - Beautiful Day’ to something in our catalog to give more information to the user when they click the link (or when we want to provide recommendations). It would be so much simpler if the user gave us an audio signature of that song so that we could use something like Musicbrainz to resolve what it is to our own catalog.

The other thing that has always struck me as a pain is the management of catalog data. When Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out this past Fall it took weeks for the data to propagate into sites catalogs. Wouldn’t it make sense to have something like a Wikipedia for song/track/artist information? User managed and available for free use complete with Musicbrainz signatures for all of the music? Then we could take a set of plays from iLike or Last.fm and do interesting things on MyStrands as could they. The big question is, would users want/need/be willing to update information as mundane as the track, album and artist listings for music?

I think a lot of companies don’t think of catalog management as their “core” thing they do. For us its recommendations. For Pandora and iLike its different. We all could benefit from a public commons of information that was referential across all of our sites. This kind of data negotiation is only going to get harder the longer we avoid doing it. I for one would love to see a project evolve (and not CDDB or FreeDB) that could provide this information in a timely fashion. Or is this all just Musicbrainz I’m talking about here?

Last week at the Internet Identity Workshop, OpenID 2.0 Authentication and OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 were both declared final. This has been a long time coming but it certainly worth the wait.

Okay, great. Now what? Adoption is going to be the key. Chris calls out his shit, wish and hitlist for 2008 and he’s dead-on. We’ll get there, but its this type of grassroots evangelism is what we need. We’re a long way from where we want/need to be, but not to worry.

OpenID to me has always been a key component to what the “open web” is all about. Its a building block. Just like microformats or OAuth. There are a lot more to come. We’re just getting started here. We already have the basic vocabulary we need now to do some very interesting things. OpenID, OAuth and microformats set the stage. 2008 will be about some of the exciting things this empowers as well as the next generation of technologies, standards and tools.

With the crazy high valuations and talk about all of this social networking stuff, people literally forget to talk about the the consumers and what this means to them. The “open web” is all about the consumer and they will be the winner in all of this. It won’t be Facebook, it won’t be MySpace, etc. Data wants to be free. Users want choice. That means not only will the consumer win, there will be unbelievable competition in this market. Nothing bad can come from that … :-)