I have finally found my dream application - Tabber. It’s rough around the edges. It lacks the usability that Spokeo has for reading your friends posts. You add your feeds/sites and it will auto-discover your friends. It builds a list creating your lifestream and attaches you to a list of your friends lifestreams.

This seems to all be accomplished by using a combination of the hCard microformat and RSS feeds. I admit it isn’t perfect. For instance I have someone I am linked to on Twitter and also linked to in del.icio.us, but since they have different screen names they show as two contacts. Perhaps they have a way of telling them apart if the hCard contained more information.

The big thing that I see lacking, besides the desperate need of a graphic designer, is the inclusion and utilization of FOAF information. Once I put in my FOAF info it could grab my friends info and possibly de-dupe.

Despite the minor roughness, this is the ideal social application and a fantastic use of microformats. I can’t believe Google hasn’t snatched this up to integrate into Blogger or Yahoo! to integrate into Y360 (did they abandon this?)

I have blogged about lifestream’s before (see Lifestreaming outside the box). I looked around for a good service to deal with creating and publishing a lifestream but haven’t been completely impressed by any of them. I had been using Lijit for a while, but it didn’t give me the ability to publish out a stream like I am doing here. It didn’t give me the ability to edit the feed title so I had this list of verbose feeds some not entirely making sense. And, as I found with most of them, they wanted to add extra junk I didn’t want, like search my feed. If you want to search my feed go to Google and limit by url.

Too much clutter.

So it had to go in and be replaced by the much cleaner list you see in the center. I publish an aggregated feed of my lifestream using Yahoo! Pipes which is perfect for this although I did look at Feed Digest to deal with this but found it’s interface muddled and I wasn’t clear what it was going to produce in the end so I went back to what I know. Probably not a fair evaluation but it is what it is.

Now for the interested, you can see everywhere I post on the Lifestream page. Not really I limit it to six of my most used feeds and I limit the web page to only display the last three days. If you are interested in what I posted older than that subscribe to the feed.

This is built using a brilliant PHP software package called SimplePie to manipulate the RSS feeds. If you need to parse RSS feeds, use this class.

I have been following the Social Network Portability(SNP) group setup at Google. The conversation there has been lively and dynamic at times. But the conversation always seems to boil down to the need for a centralized approach to managing friends. I just don’t see where that is much different than using Facebook. And why is it everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel? Create their own “unique” protocol or data format.

Henry Story from Sun Microsystems chimed in yesterday with a fantastically detailed dialog on the whole social graph or SNP problem. What I found really interesting about the whole post is that he never attempts to develop a new standard, format, or protocol.

Henry dives right into the elephant in the room, security. Stating the obvious: “Not everyone lives in the open the same way” He is the first one to make me understand the beauty of the mbox_sha1sum. Then he goes on to give an example of providing different foaf’s based on the amount of trust you assign to each person.

This was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it.

Trying to find that one ring to rule them all seems to run counter to the whole reason this conversation is happening. It’s time to turn the conversation to a truly open system, much in the way DNS or even OpenID is.

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.

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.

I stumbled across Stowe Boyd’s write up on a service called Lijit. It’s a fantastic application that, given just your blog url, does a fantastic job of finding all the services that you belong to. It then provides a widget that you can place in your site with some various configuration options for display to show all the services you use.

The auto-discovery as part of the sign-up process is just remarkable.

This is a tool that makes it simple to aggregate your online identity. Place it on your blog and now it is simple to share with anyone that wants to stay connected to you.

This is a fantastic service I urge everyone to give it a try.