A solution in search of a problem

I ran across a post that mentioned profilebuilder this evening. I didn’t remember checking that site out so I went over there. I remembered the site nearly immediately. It received a lot of talk not to long ago so I remember testing it out. I also remember that the first time I went creating an account didn’t work. Giving them the benefit of the doubt I held off for a few days and went back. This time I was able to get an account created but little else on the inside seemed to work.

Well today I checked it out again and everything seems to be working again. Profilebuilder lets you go in and, wait for it, lets you create your online profile. And it does what it says.

But that is where I have a problem. Why?

You put in information and they spit it back out at a fancy url. But thats it. Where is the nice FOAF file? You have my information why don’t you do something useful with it?

All right, I may be a bit harsh here. It’s a nice site that does what it claims to do and nicely assembles my online profile into one short url.

Not that my advice is worth a lot, but it’s free so do what you will with it.
This short list will make this a really great application.

1. Drop the flash. You don’t do anything that needs it and it sure gets in the way of the data being useful.
2. Generate an FOAF file with all that data.
3. Don’t ask me for more links. Ask me for the tag or group of tags to pull the links from the numerous bookmarking sites that I have already indicated I belong.
4. Provide an RSS link to my blog and networks. You asked for them. I provided them. So let’s share them.
5. Again with the photo’s. I already told you I had a flickr account. Just ask me for the tags or sets to pull in. Why reinvent the wheel? I am not uploading these things twice.

That should keep you busy. You have a slick interface to work with and a nice short domain name that I would be willing to use to share this information, but right now it isn’t much use to me or anyone else.

If you have been awake sometime in the last 48 hours or so I am certain you have heard about the Social Graph. Even the name is a source of debate. This seems to me similar to the ajax “web 2.0″ explosion. It was nothing new, XMLHttpRequest had been there a long time. It just took the browser to get to the tipping point then some programmer to decide to stick his neck out and use it.It seems that is where this social graph discussion is heading. Formats like RDF and FOAF have been hanging around in one fashion or another for some time. Suddenly everyone has taken notice as though it’s a new revelation.This is a good debate.I have to say that I am beginning to shy away from the central repository idea (non-profit or not) that has been being bantered around. I see this as moving the stove pipe from one side of the house to the other. Never solves the problem that its still a stove pipe, that its to small and constraining.I prefer the idea of people owning their data. I have seen some simple ideas come up to resolve friend relationships by necessitating any friend that you point to would need also point back at you. Astro is my friend because I have indicated it in my FOAF. Astro confirms this by indicating I am his friend in his FOAF.The FOAF documents need some work. The FOAF project website is in shambles. So there is some work to be done. To consider moving my data from his site to your site doesn’t fix the problem. I want my data on my site. Then provide a solid way to share that data so it can then be used effectively.Now that is the real problem that needs a clever solution.

In tech years it seems like eons ago, but in 2003 Google purchased Pyra Labs aka blogger. Pyra Labs made an innocuous software application that made bloggin easy for the masses. Much to everyones amazement, Google has done relatively little with the software since.

Fast forward to 2007, social networks are the craze. The are popping up so rapidly no one can keep up with them all. They started out as the shiny diamond in the palm of the internet. Now the cracks are starting to form and the luster is beginning to dull. What is the problem? They all seem to forget that the social part of a social network is center on people.

This is where Google missed the boat and could be Yahoo!’s golden ticket. Google has software that is focused on the person called blogger. In general a blog is the center of ones digital life. This blog takes many forms, but its basically like a house. It’s were a person resides. Facebook or MySpace is where you go for an extended vacation, but once it’s over you want to return home. Google never advanced the blog to make it an inviting place to return.

Yahoo!, who is looking for a way to get ahead of the pack, has done so well at being a sticky site that it could build a package like I am about to describe. Using it’s huge user base to turn people away from the stove pipe social networks and embrace an open, user centered social product.

Imagine a blogging application that embraced microformats like hAtom and hCard. Sprinkle in XFN support and OpenID. Standardize trackbacks and open up comments so that I can add your comments to my conversation and exchange them back to you with a reference to my post.

No that we are pretending that a blog package like this exists lets push things a little further. So say I have photo’s and I want to share them. Let’s use Flickr as an example. So I use my OpenID to sign up to flickr, which in return provides back the detail of my blog url. Flickr checks my blog url and finds that I have a friends list in hCard format with xfn data. It pulls in all those friends and says, hey, I know some of these people. Would you like me to notify them that you are sharing photo’s? And about these individuals that I don’t know, would you like me to send them an invite to connect to your sharing feed.

By the way, did I mention that a person could just subscribe directly to a lifestream feed provided as part of my blogging service?

So know you are zipping through a results set from a search you did to find information on individuals blogging about cool blogging ideas and you found a blog you find interesting and want to add this person as a friend. A little bookmarklet titled “Add to Friends list” is nestled nicely in your browser so you add them to your friends list on your blog. Behind the scenes this is taken care of by your blogging software that pulls this persons hCard from their site.

This scenario provides ample opportunity for value added services like Flickr and YouTube, etc. but renders meaningless the need for a site like MySpace and Facebook or forces them to become more open so they can exchange data.

This post, I hope, builds on ideas from this 2006 blog post and Social Network Portability page on the microformats wiki.

Streamy is a new site in the digital life aggregator category that I just got an invite to join. I have to say that I am impressed so far. It’s in private beta, but you can request an invite on the home page.

My first impressions of Streamy are wow! It takes the good of Spokeo. Allowing me to add my feeds (one at a time or with an OPML upload), organize them and read them in a variety of layouts. In addition to this it gives me access to friends in which I can share the stories, comment on stories or even just chat with friends with the in window chat box. I can create groups as well. So all the friend interaction is there.

One key item that starts to break streamy out from the pack is the filtering on feeds. I won’t be able to do the service justice by describing it here so at the end of the post I added a webcast introduction that will knock your socks off.

I have to admit that I found the interface less than intuitive at first, but the 4 minutes it took me to watch their webcast introduction cleared it all up and pointed out to me some very exciting features.

No the interface is a little buggy, and somewhat sluggish. So sluggish in Netscape 9 that I switched to using Safari. This sped things up nicely. None of this is unexpected in a beta and certainly no bugs big enough to stop me from using it as my primary aggregator.

Maybe later I will post my thoughts on some next steps that will put this site into a classification of next generation social networks. For now I am just going to enjoy the fact that it is by far the best aggregator that I have tried.

I bounce around the web a lot searching out new information. Yesterday I stumbled across a video presentation given by Kevin Marks and Mary Hodder on Microformats. This in turn inspired me to stop being lazy and fix my blog to support the hAtom format.

I use Wordpress as my blog software. This makes it really easy to change the templates. I spent about 15 minutes skimming the hAtom standard. Using the examples as a guide it took about 20 minutes to convert over the posts. I jumped over to a site called the Almost Universal Mocroformat Parser to verify that my blog could be read as an hAtom feed. Everything looked good.

So in less than an hour I was able to convert over the main site page. Maybe if I get ambitious I will convert the archives and single post pages too. Who knows. It could happen.

• The Social Graph Problem
  (tags: community socialnetworks openid)
• The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project
  (tags: FOAF social semanticweb)

Dare Obasanjo blogs about Brad Fitzpatrick thoughts on the Social Graph (definition). Brad has this to say:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

Dare Obasanjo hits the nail on the head when he says:

I’m skeptical of a lot of the talk about social network portability because the conversation rarely seems to be user centric.

However I disagree with him when he says:

As for the various claims of social network overload only the power users and geeks who join a new social network service a month … have this problem. A real social network is a community and users don’t change communities at the drop of a hat.

I think that he is narrowly defining a social network. I think that Flickr is a social network that is really great for sharing photo’s but not so good for staying in contact with friends. YouTube is a great site to share videos, but I am not going to carry a conversation there like I would on my blog.

Brad’s idea of have an independent way of maintaining a universal social graph is a good idea. Provide a consistent way for access to the data in much the same way openID has standardized the process of authentication.

I think the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is a good step in this direction. The FOAF project is working to create machine-readable pages describing people, their relationships, and the things the create and do. Lofty goals I realize, but necessary for the next evolution of the web.

There is a good conversation going on about this at Brad’s blog.

I firmly believe that a service like OpenID is necessary and going to take off like wild fire in the next couple of years. I also believe microformats are going to save us from ourselves and Digital Life Aggregators are going to rise up and social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, are going the way of the dinosaur where they belong.

When you let the patients run the asylum you really are in for a bumpy drive and that is what we have going on at OpenID. Nearly the first entry on the text heavy page reads this way: “For geeks.” Look, if you have to specify that its for geeks and that is so important that it is at the top of a page that would fit nicely in encyclopedia britannica, you should know that this is not going to get widespread adoption.

So Jeremiah Owyang ran across a posting at flow|state that provided seven recommendations for improving openID:

1. Redesign the OpenID home page for consumers. The page’s main content should contain a brief explanation of OpenID in consumer-friendly terms, along with a giant Get an Open ID button. Move all the developer material behind a Developers button.
2. Design an end-to-end process for getting an OpenID from a service operator’s site. Since most services won’t care which provider the user uses, let these services send the user into a real flow for picking a provider, getting an ID, and most importantly coming back to the original service to use the new ID. When they get back to the service, the new OpenID should be prefilled.
3. Give the above flow a sidebar titled “Do you have a blog?” that explains that, if they have a blog on LiveJournal, TypePad, etc., they can use that for their OpenID. A link in the sidebar should shunt the user into a page that has them pick their blog provider, then tells them what the (blog service dependent) form of their OpenID is. The flow should then return the user to the service they started on (again, with their OpenID prefilled).
4. Organize the list of providers around factors that can actually influence a user’s decision. Consider offering provider ratings based on ease of use, uptime, etc.
5. Refine reference designs for the complex range of cases that come up in using OpenID with a service. E.g., define the expected behavior and terminology that should be used when a user tries to log in with an OpenID but does not already have an account with that ID.
6. Define guarantees that services should offer to users in the event their OpenID provider goes out of business.
7. Build an organization that can do real usability testing on this service with real consumers.

To this list Jeremiah added:

Perhaps fixing the text heavy homepage so it’s aimed at consumers, the second sentence says “For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman)“. That’s not a way to encourage adoption. The first sentence doesn’t even have a value proposition for the technology. Perhaps segment the homepage for two different users, with two different experiences. Visual demos would be great too.

All of these are great suggestions. I would also like to see openID become the single point for all of my online identity. I want a place I can add all my feeds whether its to my flickr, my blog, etc, so that when I sign up for a site they know all of this about me so I don’t have to enter it again and they can’t integrate my digital life into their experience, thus enhancing my experience.

Marc Canter has an incredibly insightful interview on The Scoble show. I enjoyed this interview so much I thought it was worth sharing with all of you.

Update: Marc Canter has posted about his interview with a number of links to very interesting information on the subjects he discussed during the interview.

• JavaScript Style Attributes
  (tags: JAVASCRIPT reference style)
• ActiveSupport for PHP - Ruby style
  (tags: php ruby class)