Scott Kveton

When I first started using Open Source back in 1997 I thought for sure; this is the thing that’s going to change the world. And for the most part, that’s how it has played out. The software industry has been transformed because of the innovations of communities of people across the globe. This kind of collaboration had to move up the stack.

I discovered OpenID in February of 2006 and I knew it was the seed of something fantastic. Collaborative software development had given us the operating system, desktop applications and pretty soon we were starting to talk about the implications of the Open Web.

The Open Web was a nebulous concept but once the realization became that it was about the data, things really started to make sense. After the data was in the cloud, a whole host of issues arise on how to describe, share and control that data. There were missteps and half-attempts at how to do it and even today we’ve got some of the biggest players on the Internet “opening up”, but really only part-of-the-way.

It dawned on me in early 2007 that we needed to do something more if OpenID was going to take off. People weren’t going to the Internet saying “Please give me OpenID!!” Users want things that work. Users want solutions. OpenID is a fantastic technology, but the reality is, my mom got email, she didn’t get SMTP. The same will be true of OpenID.

I didn’t realize that as we moved up the stack, so too would the complexity and needs of the users. Its not about geeky things like how do I open a Word document or serve HTTP requests. Instead, how do I collaborate with many like-minded people? How do I move my data between devices and services? How do I organize quickly into an ad-hoc group? These are real problems looking for real solutions.

Around about this time new technologies started to emerge solving similar but different problems that OpenID had solved. Defining the data (microformats). Enabling access (OAuth). Enabling communications (XMPP). All of these technologies existed and were immensely open but completely decoupled. Slowly but surely a lot of people (and I mean a lot of people) started to connect the dots. In the immortal words of my Father-in-law: “We have the technology.” It just wasn’t a full-fledged solution yet.

We needed small pieces that were loosely joined to get where we were going.

I’ve been watching the work of Google, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! closely as they all have a vested interest in “social networking”. Its only Google today that understands that social networking is a feature of every site and not the function of a site. Even there, I think Google is missing the point that we need to make this user-centric and not site-centric. In any case, these big companies are working hard to open up. They are headed towards something the people working on the Open Web have already discovered.

One of the most interesting projects to me as of late has been DiSo. DiSo is short for Distributed Social Networking and is the work of several developers working out in the open, developing real solutions for real users. The mantra of the DiSo team has been one that I can relate to coming from the open source world; lead with code. This touches me right where my Open Source roots come from and I love it.

The reality is the solution for users that makes social networking a feature on every site has OpenID as a foundational component but its not the one thing. Now don’t get me wrong, I love OpenID. Its been an amazing ride for me and I will always continue to support it. However, I firmly believe that OpenID is but a building block (albeit an extremely important one) in the grand scheme of things. This building block needs to be crafted, tweaked and modified over time to work well and fit nicely with the other building blocks that make up the Open Web.

Getting to where we’re heading it going to take time and the right people. Since I’ve joined Vidoop in February of this year I’ve known that this is an amazing team on a path to change the Internet. That’s why I’m really excited that Chris Messina and Will Norris are joining the fantastic team at Vidoop. I’ve known both of them in different capacities over the past few years and I’ve always wanted to work with them on real solutions for real users.

In the coming months, you’ll be seeing myVidoop evolve around some of the work that they have been doing as well as the introduction of some new products that solve real problems with open technology. I’m excited to see what they can contribute to the DiSo project when they are fully focused on it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … the best is yet to come.

Interesting morning today. Did a podcast with Brian Oberkirch on trends in ‘07 and what to look for in ‘08 with respect to digital identity, portable social networking and activity streams. While I’m on the call, I get a twitter (see insert) from @dan_mcweeney saying “Why won’t the OpenID guys just add onto their server the ability to ‘friend’ other OpenIDs?” This I get at the same time as seeing a tweet from @kevinmarks talking about URL’s are people too. Moments later I see another tweet from Kevin talking about Scoble and his recent run-in with Facebook. Talk about the perfect storm for data portability.

I said it on Twitter this morning and I’ll say it again:

@jkuramot i still hold that the single most interesting thing about OpenID is that you prove you own a possible service end-point.

Yes, I just blockquoted myself … ha! None of this stuff is going to proliferate because its open, because it has an awesome community, etc. Its the data stupid. If I can prove that I own the URL (and guess what, its actually me and I’m a person) now I can do all sorts of interesting things there. Put my friend list there. My activity stream. My updates. Contact information. You name it. Plug in a little OAuth love and now I can start talking about having sites talk to me when I’m not in front of my browser. Wowzers.

The fact is, data wants to be free. It doesn’t care about Google or Facebook, etc. Users will do interesting things with their data and trying to stop them is like trying to catch a fly with a set of chopsticks. My lord 2008 is going to be fun.

Update: I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.

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