Back in December Joi blogged about Fotolog and I ignored it. Silly me.
Fotolog, along with Ryze represent a new kind of community tool which implements what I call 'identity browsing'. These sorts of tools are intuitively intuitive. They capture the essence of what great software is all about!
I had lunch with Adrian Scott on Friday - to make sure a) that he was putting the XML-RPC wires we need into Ryze, b) that he knew what we were up to and how we're gonna get the Ascio identity server technology to connect into the world of Ryze and c) to make sure he saw how all this led to the semantic web (via a mesh open standards.)
Joi likes Fotolog as it has a friends feature like LiveJournal, but it's actually more like Ryze. LiveJournal's indentity browsing is accomplished mainly via it's search capabilities - as they're up to 800k+ users now and that's just the way they do things. But Ryze has about 30k members and Fotolog is just at 1,700-ish. Both Ryze and Fotolog allow you to directly 'browse' pages and add anyone as a friend - quickly - which you instantly notice. This leads to a direct sort of social networking and creates a new kind of instant community effect.
LiveJournal's process is a little more convaluted, but it's still powerful. Regardless of the navigation metaphor - basing a system upon end-user's profiles is where it's at. If we could imagine a) a way of encrypting and securing profiles so that one could be compatible with something like the Liberty Alliance standard, while at the same time control their own identity profile = that's what PingID is.
And b) if you could imagine all of these identity systems interlocking between each other - enabling Ryze, Fotolog or LiveJournal users - to access and add each other as friends of one another - that's what we're hoping to do with the open People server idea - I floated. Hopefully this is what we'll get Ascio to put into open source.
BTW Let me give you another insight into how standardized idenity browsing can unfurl - and we don't have to look any further than Joi's digital lifestyle. Joi (as most of you know) is a leader in the world of moblogging. In that role - he has a moblog photo album, which (I guess) is where he flows all his email moblogging photos. Joi exposes his latest moblog photo on his blog home page, and if you click on that photo - it takes you to his moblog album.
Now this is where it gets confusing and where an open standard for media management could help. Joi ALSO has a photo album built-into his blog - which is no where as elegant or cool as his moblog album, but I guess it serves a different purpose. If for no other reason - the images inside the blog album were not generated via cell phone.
OK - so what's wrong with this picture? Between his fotolog, his moblog album and his blog album - Joi has his imagery in three different locations. Now it's not too hard to imagine that a standard for media could create a level playing field and connect up photos from Joi's three different albums, with artwork from the Internet Archives and the entire Creative Commons. Now this is where it gets fun.
A open standard people server could unite disparate identity systems (like Ryze, Fotolog or LiveJournal) with standard media management. That means that by clicking on Joi's face or any of his media, we could add Joi as a friend, wherever we ran into him - in the lobbby of the Hotel Okura, in Davos or in cyberspace - and cruise through his digital lfiestyle.
This sort of inter-connecting will be possible once a series of open standard servers gets promulgated. Hopefully the SocialText folks will help make standard open conversations possible and hopefully Evan (and the folks at Pyra/Google) will implement Evan's idea of not only a Movie Review Blog (and associated micro-content type and server), but all sorts of other kinds of reviews as well - which we all can share.
And that's one way we can get to the semantic web.
