Friday, February 13, 2004
Two Boyds on YASNSes
First up is the crib of danah boyd’s “Revenge of the User” presentation at the O’Reilly emerging technology conference, which offers a quick rundown of relevant sociological research then dives into an excellent illustrated tour of the issues and traps that await technologists who architect social software. It’s lengthy but she doesn’t waste space.
Second is Stowe Boyd’s notes on an event bringing together five executives of social networking system companies. Rather hard to summarize - just go read it. [Many-to-Many]
OK - so let's start with Stowe Boyd's report.
The business sector is floundering around - trying to "wrap their arms" around something - that is un-wrappable. Since social software is not a single market or even single trend - the VCs wanna know "where's the beef?" "What's the business model?" "Who do we invest in?"
But the thing about it is - social software is more than a trend or fad. It's a raising of the bar - bringing humans into the equation of software. Directly.
From now on - all software MUST recognize the fact that humans use it. That those humans have relationships with other humans and that those relationships are probably more important than that human giving money to the software vendor.
Those software vendors that grok this fundamental principle - will suceed. Those VCs that listen and learn - will profit.
Social software is somewhat akin to multimedia and 'the web'. They're certainly NOT one market, one trend, one thing at all. They're a raising of the ante - a whole new day. So just like multimedia and the web changed EVERYTHING - so will social software.
Now onto Ms. Boyd's - oh excuse me - boyd's points.
Yes she's right - we do need context. Digital ID without a context is.... - well there were plenty of dot com startups who tried to figure that one out. But it wasn't until Adrian Scott and Ryze - did the lightbulbs start going off.
But I make software.
I understand that social software takes an inherent analog, human process and trys to mold into something digital. But that's what up.
So instead of just complaining and discussing, perhaps danah can get a little specific. Like what's the button called? What gets put into the text field? What features and capabilties WOULD work?
I'll be seeing danah and the whole crowd up at Microsoft at the end of March. I'll make sure to make that point - there. 'cause without specifics - the whole "this stuff sucks' diatribe is gonna get real old - real quick. The goal of research should be to come up with solutions.
Speaking of Microsoft - Lili Cheng - our host up there - showed off Wallop. I just wanna say one thing.
Oh man, oh man, oh woman, oh shit, uh oh, here they come.
And the thing about it is...........
I awoke this morning to find our COMCAST cable broken.
I imagine athat Michael Eisner has dispactched legions of saboteurs around the country to destroy COMCAST cable systems - as his way of fighting back this hostile takeover battle.
This fight is gonna get ugly.
On a related note, here's some paranoia about Roy Disney winnning and Oscar and......
Disney/Dali Oscar nomination has execs in a tizzy. Sam sez, "Disney/Salvadore Dali film Destino nominated for Oscar. Disney PR isn't happy with the thought of Roy Disney speaking to 200 million viewers."
"This is really a lose/lose situation for the Walt Disney Company," said one studio insider. "If the studio doesn't mount a really aggressive promotional campaign in order to claim a Best Animated Short Oscar for 'Destino,' Roy and Stanley get the right to complain that the Disney Company deliberately torpedoed this film's chance. Out of fear over what Walt's nephew might say once he gets up on stage at the Kodak Theatre."Link [Boing Boing Blog]"On the other hand, if Disney does put together a great Academy Award promotional campaign for 'Destino' and the short does actually win, all the suits still have to sit there and sweat. Wondering if Roy is going to use his opportunity -- standing there in front of over 200 million television viewers worldwide -- to talk about his campaign to remove Eisner."
foaf:tipjar, Creative Commons and MusicBrainz. I've been talking with Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons and Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz about the idea of a foaf:tipjar... [RDFWeb and Friend of a Friend (FOAF)]
This is cool. I asked Tim O'Reilly at one of the press conferences at Etech - how he thought we could jumpstart and fund many of these open source projects.
His answer was "let the free marketplace decide."
So THIS TipJar idea is one of the ways we can do this. Affero is another.
| [etech] Peace, Love and XML |
Don Box of Microsoft, responsible for Longhorn Indigo (communications tech for building Web services, or "the SOAP messaging stack" that Don works on), is talking about how Microsoft is going to support standards, really this time. He says the following:
WordML, the current Word format, is optimal if you're a Word author, but is unusable if you are trying to do interesting XML-y things with it, like write an app to process it. It's designed to work well for Word. When Microsoft shipped it, people had a normal, human, emotional reaction: They hated it. Microsoft said that it didn't expect you to author it, only to process it.
[A whole bunch of stuff I don't understand it, and then:] We will be able to extend the Microsoft file system by providing our own schema. (Marc Canter calls out that this is "really coolio, dude.") "This isn't just about the API. This is about data extensibility," says Don.
Indigo is about "service-orientation" rather than object orientation. "We don't want you to run .Net on your Linux box."
[More stuff I didn't understand. I'm not complaining, mind you.]
[Since I am obviously in over my head - feel free to explain it to me - I should perhaps report that both Bob Frankston and Marc Canter, off line, were favorably impressed with the direction Don sketched.]
[Joho the Blog]Don Box is the man. His speech at the Microsoft PDC changed my life.
It's clear that Microsoft now feels that they've won, and that there's nothing to lose by supporting and cooperating with everyone.
God bless Don Box.
| [etech] FOAF |
Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It's an XML standard that allows people to express information about themselves...the sorts of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF descriptions in the world.
There are different styles of FOAF files. You can be very explicit about relationships: "Jane is my arch nemesis." But there's also a more implicit, evidence-based approach: Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same organization. ("I lean toward this one," says Dan.)
Here's a paragraph from the official FOAF FAQ:
FOAF provides conventions for saying the sorts of things that you might say in your homepage ('My name is...', 'I work for ...', 'I'm interested in ...', 'I live near ...', 'I'm pictured in these photos...', 'I write in this weblog...'), but in a way that is easy for computers to process. Since computers are pretty dumb, and can't read human languages, we provide simplistic FOAF descriptions, to help them answer questions such as 'Show me pictures of Weblog authors interested in ... who live near here', 'Show me recent articles written by people at this meeting', 'Is this person vegetarian?'. FOAF is a 'Semantic Web' project, which is an effort to make the Web easier for machines to help us navigate.
As Dan said recently on his blog: "A purpose of FOAF is to engineer more coincidences in the world."
"We're on the border of going mainstream." The social, legal and pricacy issues need serious attention, says Dan.
Now Edd Dumbill is talking about FoafBot. I had trouble hearing him because I'm in the back, but apparently it provides IRC channels with information gained by spidering FOAF files. Cool.
[Joho the Blog]It's great to see folks like Weinberger start to grok FOAF. In the next few months - I'm sure we'll all be hearing more and more about this burgeoning open standard for digital ID.
NOTE: FOAF does NOT include things like privacy, encryption, authentication, etc. It is just a standard wrapper for putting one or more of those technologies into some form of standard wrapper. Did I say that FOAF is just a wrapper?
That's the meme to grok - think wrapper for digital ID info. And I don't mean Eminem.
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