I haven’t posted in while because I have been busy following a new pursuit into Psychology in school. It’s been a long time since I was in school last so I have to take extra time to study all the information I have forgotten.

For those of you who know Kevin Marks from Microformats fame should enjoy this video on OpenSocial.

Found via ReadWriteWeb

Warning - Yahoo! Mash is beta software so what follows here is a knee jerk reaction to software that may not go live (please don’t put this live).

Yahoo!, look I love you guy’s. With that in mind I am going to give you a little advice, don’t put Mash live to the public. Once in a while you just need someone to tell you things directly. I am trying to help you here. If you were a drug addict this is where an intervention would happen. Please, I am telling you these things for your own good.

I’d like to say that Yahoo! just missed the boat on this and it might evolve into something over time. But I don’t want to lie to everyone. They didn’t miss the boat, they just built the dock in the desert. Yahoo! Mash is basically Yahoo! 360 with every thing editable minus the few improvements that Yahoo! 360 had going for it (like a blog, hello!). I couldn’t find a way to search for people with similar interests, I couldn’t find groups, basically you can connect to the people in your address book and that is where it seems to end. Maybe I should wait for it to go live and see what happens. They did add in modules which act similar to a Facebook application and it appears that at some point developers will have an API to create their own applications.

So let me recap. The good points: 1. Everything is editable, 2. Modules plus (in the future) an API. The bad points, well there are just to many to list so I will just point out this one, Yahoo! doesn’t get it. Save yourselves some time and effort, add the two good points to what you have started at Y!360 and toss it some developers and a community evangelist. In the end you will be better off.

Yahoo! inadvertently spilled the beans to the New York Times about a new service they are going to offer called Yahoo Mash. Well TechCrunch got it nearly correct when they reported that Yahoo! was working on their next generation social network called Mosh. So the big question I hope is on everyones mind is; what happened to Y!360?

I am glad you asked that question because it needs to be dealt with by Yahoo! in order to make their next social network site a success. I blogged about what I thought were some of Yahoo!’s mistakes back in July (see “Why Yahoo! 360 failed”). I have not changed my opinion on why Y!360 failed.

Facebook has been successful because it has allowed people to interact with each other in ways Y!360 never did. I hope Yahoo! has been watching.

I would add one more thing that caused Y!360 to fail. Yahoo! was nimble enough to change. Facebook and MySpace is not rocket science. Little innovation exists in either of these sites. Yahoo! has a lot of talented software engineers. Let them do their job and move management out of the way. If you don’t I don’t think Yahoo! will get a third chance.

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?)

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.

Fred Oliveira of the Webreakstuff blog decided to talk about the elephant in the room earlier this month. There’s a new social network going online every day and its a big elephant that everyone wants to ignore. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except for some reason people like to join them all. It’s gotten to the point that individuals are spending so much time managing their friends and different accounts that they tend to be a lot less social.

There several model’s for dealing with this out there right now:

• The Facebook Model: No world exists outside of Facebook. (Further reading)
• The Ning Model: If one network is good 80,000 must be better.
• The Spokeo Model: Why join another network. If you can find your friends feeds we will make it simple to follow the conversation.

None of these models as they exist today are really great. Some, like Spokeo, show great promise. Others, like Ning, seem just plain crazy (but really well funded).

Oliveira suggests an alternative that I feel shows promise. The OpenId/Microformats alternative. The specs exist. How to process and use the data is easy for applications. The fatal flaw right now is that it shoots right over the average persons head. OpenId is a mystery to most people. No one understands how to use it or even why. Microformats have yet to be adopted seriously by the blog software creators or other sites for that matter. Do you really expect every user to learn XFN?

If this model is to gain traction it needs wide spread adoption and it needs to be easy enough for the average person to use. It needs better marketing. People need to believe they can’t live without it. Somehow adoption of things like OpenId will make our lives easier but right now it just makes signing up to services harder and unclear.

This model needs an evangelist to rise up and champion the battle like we had for web standards. But at this point is it to late?

A ZDNet blog called Between the Lines reported today about the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 07, specifically the Social Networking 3.0 panel. It always amazes me that “startups” can afford the time and resources to send people to these panels, but its worse when they are quoted saying things that are so off the mark. Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, is quoted:

“In ten years we’ll see millions of social networks for every niche, need, language, location and passion. I disagree that people want a single profile-they want to have identities for different social networks.”

What planet is she on?

What a perversion of the meaning of a social network. Social networks are connections of people. Not collections of software to process assets that people collect. I do think we will have software applications for “every niche, need, language, location and passion.” These applications will facilitate the sharing of collected assets, like photo’s. People will migrate to each niche that is best suited for their needs say Flickr for photo’s and YouTube for video. But no one wants to subscribe to a slew of social networks just so they have some middleware application to facilitate their contact management and connect to the few assets people share in that particular network.

What people really want is a way to manage contacts that allow them to aggregate everyone “lifestream” information in a simple way. If I want to know when you put photo’s online I will subscribe to your photos RSS feed. I don’t want to join Flickr just to see your photo’s. People just want it simple. Social networks like Ning are not simple.

Give me a system that is so simple that when I add your photo feed the system says, I know who that person is and they also have a blog, would you like to receive updates when this person posts a new blog entry? Most blogs already facilitate conversation through the use of comments and trackbacks. Someone just needs to make that easier. Not build a new social network to handle conversations.

Facebook is a great example of a software application that does a lot of stuff, but doesn’t do any of it very well. Right now people use it because it’s easier to subscribe to Facebook to connect to their network and use a weak service than it is to manually aggregate everyones streams from better designed niche applications.

Tags: Lifestreams | Facebook | Ning

Think what you will of Jason Calacanis no one can dispute that he has been successful in the web space and I think what he did at Netscape has really moved social networking into the mainstream. So when he declares Facebook bankruptcy I think we should listen to what he has to say.

Basically his issue with Facebook is that, with applications, he is just being overwhelmed with information. And a lot of this information is not really all that useful to him.

This goes to point out the real flaw with social network thinking that is mainstream right now. Its connection centric. What does that mean? Good question. Basically all I am saying is that you want a way to stay connected with the people in your network but you don’t have a way to say who is in your network.

Yes, I know you can add friends. But every child on a playground knows that all friends were not created equal. I find some people more interesting than others. I want a level of interaction with some people more than other people. I have degrees of “friends.” But on all the social networks today all friends are created equal. Utopian perhaps, but not very useful.

Over at the Library Clips blog they have been having a lot of posts about lifestreams. This is what we want. An easy way to view or networks lifestreams from our vantage point looking out in the network. Apply the Apple principle to the design. Make is so simple it hurts. Add in a lot of the design patterns displayed by the socialstream demo and now you have the next generation social network. And this is one that will be sticky because it is all about your interests and not everyone in your networks interests.

Now as soon as someone hires me to build it we will all be successful together.

Tags: Lifestreams | Facebook | Jason Calacanis