I attended the Federated Social Web Summit yesterday. I saw some old friends and met lots of new ones.
Here is a quick brain dump of what I caught:
These people
first did a lightening talk about these projects
We then broke out into sessions. Most of my day was dominated by low level discussions of the protocols and formats that could shape the Federated Social Web. These include:
There was a session on private messaging. Blaine Cook proposed a method for subscribing to a feed which contains public and private entries. It used the From HTTP header, Webfinger and a Dialback to authenticate the request.
Next Bret Slatkin proposed a similar technique for sending a private message that used OAuth for authentication, which was much more complicated than Blaine’s dial-back method.
It turned out that these two ideas were Isomorphic. Then the term isomorphic was used about 20 times in the next 5 minutes. These ideas were seen as generalizations of the Salmon protocol. Speaking of which… Salmon’s public key crypto requirements were discussed as an impediment to adoption. The protocol has been simplified as much as possible, but many technologies have been doomed to obscurity due to the propeller head nature of properly implementing various schemes properly.
Account Manager and Contacts in Firefox
Dan Mills ran a session to ask “How can we change the client to make federation easier?”. There are some great notes. It seems like Michael Hanson’s XPrefs concept is needed to avoid a centralized broker like XAuth. Currently if you log into Identi.ca and visit Mozilla’s StatusNet node and you want to follow Paul Booker, you have to type in your identi.ca url as it can’t discover that your logged in to a valid OStatus node due to the same origin policy.
The importance of interoperability testing was discussed. I watched Evan Prodromou work with Diaspora team and I expect to see lots of work between Appleseed, Crabgrass, and other systems working together over these decentralized protocols.
Update: – The standard test we’ll work towards passing by Sept 30th is SWATv0.
This meeting was in Portland… check out the photos below for your Portland moment of zen…
Many people who are members of the Mozilla community, don’t give themselves permission to affiliate or consider themselves Mozillians. There was a lot of good conversations around Membership at the Mozilla Summit.
If you do any of the following… you should consider yourself a member of the Mozilla Community:
You’re passionate about a Mozilla project
You suggest to others that they try a Mozilla product
You’ve advocated on behalf of user control for privacy, data, and code
You’ve explained why the Open Web is superior to proprietary technologies
You wear Mozilla t-shirts and discuss these ideas with your friends and family
and many more
You don’t have to be a hardcore C++ programmer to be a Mozillian. Teachers, bloggers, and internet enthusiasts are part of the Mozilla Community also! It took me a long time to realize this personally. Let’s help the next group of community members realize it sooner.
I got some great feedback during Thursday’s Science Fair. Apologies in advance if I missed mentioning your name and feedback, some of my notes were a little illegible. Please leave a comment to capture your thoughts.
The terminology “Stream” is no good and confuses everyone. Describing the project as a stream editing and publishing platform is a non-starter. More work needed here.
On the other hand, people would get excited about specific use cases such as a Mozilla profile page or research topic page.
Luis Villa was excited about the possibilities of giving people control over their online identity.
zwol had some ideas around deployment from version control systems instead of tarballs to help user’s keep their installs patched.
Guillermo Movia thought that sudoSocial was just like Feedly and that he should be able to search content for items. I really enjoyed Guillermo’s lightening talk and thought his graphitti Add-on idea is in a very similar spirit to sudoSocial… which is to get more Designers involved with creating the web.
Ryan Snyder liked the idea of owning your own data and suggested pushing the project towards the direction Tantek Çelik has gone with his blogging engine.
Anant Narayanan had a cool idea for people to create FamilyStreams by linking together sources from various family members, so they could keep in touch.
Lucas Adamski responded to the idea that sudoSocial is a middle ground towards MySpace and liked the idea that people can completely control the look and feel of their profile.
Atul Varma visited for awhile (which is an honor) and we did a bunch of brainstorming. We talked about how his “daily edition” tool could be re-built on a platform like sudoSocial. He brought up Howard Reingold’s work around having non-programmer students use Yahoo Pipes to create radars and dashboards. He championed the idea of pushing client side elements into sudoSocial to increase hackability. We discussed his Tweetblog experiment.
A common theme was that the name sucks. Join in and help name it. A related issue is that I’ve learned that it’s much better to talk about concrete use cases before talking about building a platform.
I wonder if the introduction shouldn’t focus on very specific ideas:
A Mozilla profile page that you control
A Homepage Elixir (drop in replacement for homepages)
etc
The science fair hosted several other Drumbeat projects and it was a good chance to discuss the Drumbeat model.
This is a call for you to create some interesting themes using sudoSocial.
Many users have started customizing their CSS. Two people I wanted to highlight are Turmel Antoine and Charlie November, who have created some pretty cool themage.
To make customizing your HomeStream easier, there is a new release of sudoSocial. This 0.4 release brings a new tab in the editor
called “Page Widgets”. Here you can:
Add HTML or Text around your profile
Add HTML or Text around your stream
Show/Hide the profile blurb
Show/Hide the “Follow Me on the Web” list of links
Another change is that you can edit CSS directly from the “Design” Tab.
So let’s keep hacking on customized themes and sharing CSS/JavaScript with each other. We’ll take the best themes and make them part of sudoSocial for non-technical users, kind
of like Personas for your sudoSocial stream.
Streams are so pervasive and so slippery, it’s easy to think that our goal in building sudoSocial is to build an “X” Killer.
Here are 4 applications that we’re not setting out to build:
A FriendFeed Killer
Cliqset, Jaiku, Google Buzz, Sweetcron, Pubwich, and other lifestreaming socialnetworks are pretty dope and I’ve followed this space for several years. I use them. I love them. But, it is possible none of these applications will ever achieve mainstream adoption, because they are hyper geeky. (That’s okay, it’s fun to live in the future).
Facebook’s “news” feature is a lifestreaming service for mainstream audiences. And they are killing it [sic].
Okay, kinda
I want to see more self-hosted lifestreams. I want to see them heavily customized by look and feel, through backend code, etc. I think that lifestreams could be the QBasic of the iPad generation.
A Facebook Killer
There is a lot of energy around creating a massive new suite of de-centralized, but integrated apps to replace Facebook. Candidates include:
I’d put established projects like Status.net and Drupal on the short list of hopefuls. This is a very exciting space, but sudoSocial is from the unix tradition of small tools that do one thing extremely well.
Okay, kinda
I think we have to chip away at de-centralizing the web (Facebook Like buttons arggh).
Once decentralized socialnetworking standards are baked, sudoSocial simply has to honor and champion them.
0.1 supports OpenID and I’m looking forward to Salmon, XAuth or other cross application protocols for solving the Commenting and Liking problems.
If I could harness the energy around the Dispora project, I’d channel it into creating new social networking protocols for strengthening the OpenWeb.
A Google Reader Killer
Content aggregation is pervasive. Feed readers were the first killer app for syndicated website content. We are not trying to build one of these guys.
The cutting edge here is things like Feedly or TwitterTim.es which try to cut down on information overload. It’s done via metadata and algorithms to determine which entries should rise above the noise.
Okay, kinda
With the sudoSocial platform, it should be possible to create something like Atul’s daily edition, which is a private stream of must read entries.
Classic Lifestream Killer
I guess you can’t have a “Classic Lifestream Killer”, since that category has never had a 800 lbs gorilla. I’m talking about the Freeman/Gelernter style lifestreaming application, something like MylifeBits. It would organize repositories of your entire digital life. Not tryin’a build it.
Okay, kinda
You will (eventually) be able to bulk import and export your data from sudoSocial, so this might be a good net to start fishing for your lifestream with.
Why not?
Each of these 4 applications are a massive pile of work. To deliver a polished and usable product they are millions of person hours to build from scratch.
I’ve asked myself… What is a reasonably sized community project that could create a tool that doesn’t already exist?
We’ve got some amazing Free/Open Source web applications. I think a missing piece is a mainstream publishing platform for streams, which allow you to curate content from across the web. It’s a tool that would compliment a webstack built out of Wordpress + Disqus + Plone, etc.
I’ve been working on a web application for hosting your profile page/homepage. You put RSS or Atom feed links in and it will pull together the content into a stream.
You can easily customize the CSS or JavaScript in the page. I also include Processing.js to help make the homepage hackable and easy to pimp out.
The name of the project is sudoSocial. It’s a play on two words:
This is the very first release, so it’s buggy and incomplete. The ultimate goal is to build a stream editing and publishing tool.
Let’s Do This
I’d love your help and feedback!
I’m ozten on Twitter and Identi.ca so message me there.
How can I play?
Designers – The Design Tab of the editor lets you change the CSS url. Copy the default style and start tweaking. Upload your designs to your personal website and then plug them in. Artists – Their is a Process.js textarea. Paste your Processing code into the box. JavaScript hackers – The Design Tab also lets you change the JS url. Application hackersThe code uses the standard Mozilla tri-license.
If you want to hack on the project without setting up the environment, I’ve created a VirtualBox Appliance which is up and running the code. Download via Torrent (1Gb) and run it inside of VirtualBox.
Another highlight was the Mozilla Party. Unlike your typical cave dwelling hacker… I actually like some marketing activities and had a blast meeting people and handing out Rock Your Firefox t-shirts. The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge was judged and it was great to meet the hackers. Brian and I finally met face to face and battled for our surname.
Speaking of hackability…
Webhooks / View Source Has A Posse
Jeff Lindsay gave a great talk about how and why you should integrate Webhooks into your web applications. This talk, in true SaturdayHouse fashion, was a jam session that covered all sorts of crazy topics. Some of the best ideas involved enabling the next gen programmers. Where will the BASIC of our next gen be?
It could be the web, because View Source Has A Posse. This was a great discussion on how 90% of internet programmers learned by tinkering. Copy and paste, although a crude first step, is a massively enabling technology. Focusing on performance and programming in the large really threatens the View Source culture. View Source tools need to catch up to deployment tools or we’ll end up with:
It’s like you open the hood of your car and there is another hood under there to open.
The talk was lubricated by Tequila. If any panel members agreed, they had to drink!
Networking while Rome is burning
Okay, I’m a big nerd and went to almost every 9:30am session and consumed talks through 5pm. I talked to dozens and dozens of people who caught one or two sessions a day. Hmm. Weird. I’d skips sessions for BOF and open space style sessions, but 1 or 2 session? I think I’m doing it wrong or SXSW is mostly about getting hammered. I’d rather go to a resort town for that kind of flow. Why be surrounded by marketers and 20k other people in Downtown Austin?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no tea-tottler and had plenty of Shiner Bock, Austin Amber, and Karaoke till 3am Saturday night… I just still got my learn on most of the week.
This partying is a metaphor for our lack of focusing on what really matters.
Bruce Sterling had a great quote for SXSW. While there is global warming, a financial crisis, and other serious problems to tackle… we’re all walking around with iPhones and networking while Rome burns. A great and classic talk by Sterling, very witty and insightful.
Shiny, Shiny Add Privacy and Security Later
Sterling warned us of the future… where we live in the future we’ve built. ouch. The youth aren’t makers and don’t know what it was like, before we tore down the walls of the old world. They will whine, they will tear us down, and we’ll have to help them move forward without being bitter and grumpy. Ugh, sounds like fun.
He cautions that a world build out of small pieces loosely join will have plenty of rattling bones and bugs.
This was a minor but important theme through my SXSW. Jaron Lanier is both one of us (contemporary technologist) and one of these future whipper snappers, due to accidents of history. He gave a great talk explaining his ideas behind You Are Not a Gadget. The talk was good, because it wasn’t easy to listen to. I got really angry a couple of times and thought… my god this guy doesn’t understand anything about computers. Sadly he knows more than I ever will, but he’s also able to step outside of our status quo and try to keep pushing the ideals of Ted Nelson and to make sure Artists are getting paid and have a place in society. Extremely tough questions and problems.
Something that resonated in Lanier’s talk was that our software isn’t very social and that it’s incredible hard to be a teen in the Facebook world. There’s no space to reinvent yourself while you already crystallized into a profile page and defending your position in the pecking order.
Which leads into another challenger to blind technologists… Dana Boyd’s keynote was excellent. She talked about real world privacy gaffes and the underlying theory of why this happens. She pointed out that when implementing software, privacy isn’t a set it and forget it feature. We have to constantly pay attention to social norms, the interaction of all software features, and the nuances of the data we are exposing. A great example – making something that is public more public can be a violation of privacy was such a powerful reality check for me.
SXSW, and our larger tech world, is technologists running as fast as they can after the new shiny. That is what we do. We’ll add the privacy and security features on later… along with the business model. Gowalla and Four Square were buzzed to be the most important ideas at SXSW. Let’s chase the geolocation shiny…
Why are we letting 3rd parties collect this data? What is the long term value? For whom? Who do they share it with? For how long?
Context, Filtering and Search
I’m starting to get older. Doh. Now I see the patterns. Chasing the shiny leads to market leaders who flip their startups for big cash. Then these market leaders product will eventually get commoditized or won’t exist because they were built on short term value and there is no reason for them to exist. If we don’t focus on building real services with real long term value. So how could these location check-in’s be of short term value? Advertising, Johnson, Advertising.
Companies are sharing these datasets as Recommendation engines become SaaS
Every search you make on Google is targeted via 200 axis so the ads will be relevant to you. Turns out geo data is much richer than cookies and HTTP referrers.
Also Sam Altman from the The Life Graph session stated that given 2 or 3 days of Four Square check-ins, you can identify someone with 90% accuracy, because the fingerprint of where people live and work is pretty unique.
I used Gowalla all week and am no Luddite. But we should pause and reflect… We’re building some amazing shiny tools, but to what end?
Synthesis
Lots of other sessions worth mentioning, but I’ll leave off with some ideas.
DEVO’s session was Ironic and revealing. They are devolved genius, so I’d expect no less. They are using all of these advanced marketing technologies to create their next album.
Lots of Open Web sessions. The open web is winning. We web developers missed the boat on the iPhone (before the native SDK) and we better get ready to throw down some View Source on the iPad. We’ve got to keep pushing for better tools and keep choosing open platforms over sterile ones. Why doesn’t the next Adobe Flash CS target HTML5? I meet a lot of potential customers.
Social Networks without SocialObjects are missing the point. Our SocialGraphs are an artifact, not the means to an end. We need to pay attention during every step of building something. We should be mining Sociology to build better social software instead of mining machine learning to build better advertising machines. To end with another Sterling quote: You should’ve open sourced food and shelter first!
We were able to attend the Greenwood Community Council (GCC) meeting last night. About 30 people attended and Trevor Stanley was the only Council member on the hot seat. He did a great job of facilitating considering the position that the GCC and/or Greater Greenwood Design & Development Advocacy Group (GGDDAG) got itself into.
Many of us came because we were upset that we found out about a rezone of our neighborhood after it was underway and going to be discussed with the Seattle City Council’s land use committee today.
Most of us only brought pitchforks, but Rob Fellows was thoughtful enough to bring two motions to the meeting. Formally, Motion #2 was voted in unanimously by the citizens last night:
The Greenwood Community Council believes the City Council should set a high burden of proof on proponents of current or future legislative zoning changes to demonstrate community support for their proposal, and the notify those impacted by the change. Since those conditions have not been met for current comprehensive plan and zoning changes on the south side of N 87th St., the north side of N 87th St. and the est side of 3rd Ave. NW in Greenwood, we oppose city council action to adopt changes to the future land use map in the comprehensive plan, as well as any proposed changes in the zoning code for those areas at this time.
Other highlights:
Trevor is a member of GGDDAG and president of the GCC
Gary Brunt was present (represents Fred Meyer’s land owner)
GCC stated that rezone was in good faith and had nothing to do with Fred Meyer project
Bob Morenzy(?) talked about property tax concerns, stating that a $124k lot could get a tax bill for $500k in a short timeframe
Barbara L Shale from local government brought some tax info and stated it would take years for property values to rise. She stated a bunch of other stuff that board me to tears, because I don’t understand taxes
Generally there was no support for a Single Family to L3 rezone
The GCC needs more members and board members
The second item on the Agenda was to discuss a new Greenwood Park. This will be discussed at the next meeting.
These GCC meetings are every third Tuesday of the month at the Greenwood Library. It’s important that we start attending these meetings and I’m going to make an effort to go to them as well as notify people that they are happening. Heck, we can get a beer at Naked City Taphouse afterwords… Civic duty has its rewards.
Working on a web badge which should have a small footprint… messing with closure-compiler. Whipped up a dead simple PHP command line app (as I’m too lazy to setup the java toolchain and run closure compiler locally).
Many people who are members of the Mozilla community, don’t give themselves permission to affiliate or consider themselves Mozillians. There was a lot of good conversations around Membership at the Mozilla Summit.
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