Scott Kveton

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.

OpenID is well on the way to being the defacto standard for identifying yourself across the Internet. With that settled, people are really starting to look hard at the next things we can do now that we know who everyone is. My favorite one (and one of the main reasons I got into this OpenID stuff) is portable social networking.

Social network fatigue is getting worse with every new site that comes along and it doesn’t have to. I should be able to sign up for a site with my OpenID and be prompted to import my contacts/friends accordingly. Ideally I could import them based on some criteria or tag; friends, colleagues, co-workers, etc. In the very near future, you won’t go to social networking sites to interact with your friends … every single site will have social networking built in.

There are a couple of solutions coming down the line. Tom and the folks at Barnraiser have been working on a portable social network solution that is based on OpenID. Videntity and claimID have also been working on ways to share contacts based on XFN. Both of these solutions adhere strictly to the limited format defined for XFN. These solutions suffer from the fax problem; faxes weren’t interesting until everybody had them … so how did they take off? There are also several other efforts as well.

Brian Oberkirch has some really great posts on portable social networking and I really like his approach: “let’s outline a series of use cases from the user’s point of view”:

The ’social network fatigue’ problem stems from a few things:

• Need to re-enter profile information for new services
• Need to search and re-add network contacts at each new service
• Creation of yet another login/password to manage
• Need to reset notification and privacy preferences for each new service
• Inability to manage and add value to these networks from a central app/work flow

Coming from the OpenID world, I tend to see that as my hammer looking for nails. OpenID today has SREG which does provide 9 fields but this is a stop gap to what users and sites really want. Attribute exchange is also an interesting possibility as its directly linked to OpenID, will most likely be included in all of those libraries out there supporting OpenID and gives you the flexibility of sharing just about any name/value pair you could imagine. Define the name/value pair with a schema document (not necessarily for the faint at heart) and you’re off an running. I like the simplicity of attribute exchange but people in the community are shying away from wanting to couple this too closely to what OpenID does as its core strength; authentication. Also, attribute exchange doesn’t solve the portable social networking component although I imagine it could be hacked up to do so. OpenID just doesn’t have what it takes to solve this problem natively today unless we burden it with a lot more complexity.

It looks like Brian and company are really going to take a run at this and I for one would love to help. They had a meetup last week to talk over the possibilities. I think this is the perfect set of folks to get this going; if you need any OpenID love guys, just say the word and I’m all over it.

Out of that meeting came a basic roadmap and action items. What’s interesting about this approach is that its simple, has plenty of room for growth, leverages existing standards and IMHO, helps OpenID focus on its core. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this for sure.

I would also like to mention that there is going to be a conference on data sharing the first week of September. I’d love to get folks out to that to talk more about ways we can get this thing moving forward and cultivate some early adopters. Hope to see you there.

Brian Oberkirch has a great post (that was picked up by ZDNet) about one of the biggest opportunities around OpenID.

An OpenID is more than just the identifier you use to login to OpenID enabled sites. Its also a destination. Its your unique place on the Internet that you can call your own. Identity has always had a hard time with 1) finding a unique, global name space and 2) making that name space addressable. OpenID solves that by using domain names and leveraging the global DNS infrastructure. I was talking with someone last week who mentioned a great Tim Berners-Lee quote:

If it isn’t a URL, it doesn’t exist.

Now, I’m para-phrasing that. Actually its a second-hand para-phrasing. So if Tim didn’t say that, I’ve got dibs on being the one that said it … :-) In any case, the quote applies to your digital identity as it relates to OpenID.

As Brian mentions, there are a bunch of possibilities with what you could put at that URL. Maybe a list of your friends in XFN format? How about your hCard? Since you’ve made the claim that this is your personal identity page, people should know they can trust that that information is in fact yours. I also like the idea of publishing my busy/free information from that URL in iCal format. Note, just the busy/free information. If the user was logged into my “page” they could view more or even possibly schedule a meeting. If the user can login to your personal identity page you could put all kinds of interesting information behind an access control list of OpenID’s. OpenID and microformats together seem to be the logical next step for what you can do with your OpenID.

There have been some great proposals about ways to build access control lists for fighting blog spam or even locking down some content you only want your social network to see. These could easily be consumed by sites that want/need your information. Now these really cool Web 2.0 companies could focus on making their blog, photo/video sharing or wiki sites that much better for the users. They could consume OpenID’s and groups automatically from users that login. Its that much less they have to do.