The Rise of Open Social Networks

The
open,
social
Chris Messina

web
Twiiste.be
May 15, 2009
Leuven, Belgium

Friday, May 15, 2009

45 minutes


now, i have 45 minutes to talk to you today. and there are a couple subjects that i hope to
cover with, ideally a bit of time left over for questions at the end.

I struggled with how to put this talk together, as it’s a totally new format for me. But there
are a couple metaphors that I’m going to introduce, and then use to describe a concept or
idea or tell a story. This could go short, or go long. I don’t know which. But let’s see how it
goes.

Web 2.0


The ﬁrst topic is Web 2.0.

“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected
devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the
intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a
continually-updated service that gets better the more people
use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources,
including individual users, while providing their own data and
services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating
network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and
going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user
experiences.”

— Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0: Compact Deﬁnition?

Photo credit: Adam Tinworth


“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices;
Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that
platform:
delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it,
consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while
providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others,
creating network eects through an “architecture of participation,”
and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry
caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an
attempt to understand the rules for success on that new
platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications
that harness network effects to get better the more people
use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called ‘harnessing
collective intelligence.’)”

— Tim O’Reilly

Photo credit: Adam Tinworth


Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the
internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new
platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network eects to
get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing
collective intelligence.”)

Five rules
• The perpetual beta becomes a process for engaging
customers.

• Share and share-alike data, reusing others’ and
providing APIs to your own.

• Ignore the distinction between client and server.

• On the net, open APIs and standard protocols win.

• Lock-in comes from data accrual, owning a
namespace or non-standard formats.


Tim also laid out ﬁve rules that accompanied his deﬁnition from back in Dec 2006.

The perpetual beta becomes a process for engaging customers.
Share and share-alike data, reusing others’ and providing APIs to your own.
Ignore the distinction between client and server.
On the net, open APIs and standard protocols win.
Lock-in comes from data accrual, owning a namespace or non-standard formats.

and this was all aimed at speaking to open source developers who saw the world through the
lense of Linux and hardware — and weren’t yet taking the network as a platform seriously.

Open source


and so if we consider the last 10 years of open source, it’s really been about a slow, grudging
migration from a hardware-based perspective to the cloud.


most people know of open source because of the public battle between mozilla’s ﬁrefox and
internet explorer.

sure, maybe some people have heard of linux, but few people actually use it in day-to-day
computing.


but there has also been something of a religious fervor in the open source community,
rejecting all that which is not 100% open and free.

however, gone is the time when open source software ALONE is enough to have freedom.

richard stallman has been a staunch advocate of open source, outlining the contours of ONE
vision of “open”, but I believe that the in the era of the social web, we need a new narrative...

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
—Thomas Jefferson


we can learn from stallman’s example,

AND we must not forget that the “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.


and so when we see things like this, where camel is using the open brand to advertise their
cigarettes, we must call them out.

this is not “open” as we think of it.

this is an example of what i call “open washing”. it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

What does open mean?


but i think that camel’s use of the term “open” shows how little “open” really means to
people.

it’s a catch all phrase that’s simply less nerdy than “web 2.0”.

so for ourselves, we must deﬁne what open really means.

Competition
freedom of choice


for me, openness is about competition and freedom of choice

Social networks monopolies

• data portability lowering switching costs
• multi-homing increasing reliability
• roaming incurring off-network costs
• disaggregation service substitutibility


Bertil Hatt in Paris, working on his Ph D in economics... talked to me about social network
monopolies.

gave some good ways to think about this.

data portabilility - lowering switching costs.
multi-homing - increasing reliability of service by parallelizing access
roaming - the ability to access your service from someone else’s network
disaggregation - the ability to substitute services

Photo by Mary Beth Griffo Rigby

phone number portability — concept of being able to switch providers without incurring a
switching fee. we don’t have the concept of social network switching.

furthermore, when the industry was left to its own means, it didn’t make this possible for
free... and so governments had to step in a regulate the industry to ensure this kind of
freedom.


multi-homing... parallelizing our networks to improve robustness.

this is a service called ping.fm — it lets you publish to many networks all at once

making sure that people have access to your data. it might not be ideal, but it’s a good
example of parallelizing access.


here’s an example of roaming.

att sent me a text message telling me that they wanted to charge me $20 a megabyte to
access their service because i was on someone else’s network.

it’s expensive; carriers don’t like it. they don’t want to deal with someone else’s customers.

and so this is one of OpenID’s challenges: we have lots of providers, but few relying parties.

Picnik

disaggregation: the ability to choose the service that I want to use without having to import
EVERYTHING AND without having to even create an account.

this is in contrast, for example, to being forced to use a default service, like Photos on
Facebook or how Apple refuses to let apps that compete with their own apps enter the
AppStore.

cloud computing


what does open mean in the era of cloud computing? (CLICK)

c:

icon by Seedling Design

we’re going from owning our own hard drives with our data... (CLICK)

http://

icon by Seedling Design

to relying on someone else to host our data for us.

having the ability to move data from place to another — while retaining metadata will be
essential.

Open
cloud computing?


and so the question here is:

can we prevent cloud monopolies by applying the principles of open source?

Social web


where this all will make the most dierence is in the social web.

it’s one thing if you want to move your application from one company’s cloud instance to
another.

what happens when you want to move your identity and friends?

WWW


the reality is, the web was built for sharing documents... (CLICK)

WWW


not for connecting people — at least like people connect today.

?
? ?
WWW ?
?
?
? ?


not for connecting people — at least like people connect today.


I think we can start to see where this is going — in a very basic way — by studying
FriendFeed. Already they’re doing a lot of work to minimize the emphasis on services and are
instead focused on two things: People and what they’re sharing. (next: feed formats)


But they’re ending up spending all kinds of resources just getting the basics working, since
our feed formats like ATOM and RSS were designed with blog posts in mind, but people are
doing a lot more on the web today, beyond blogging.


this is really the premise behind the Diso Project:

to make it make it easier to build social experiences on the web

by deriving standards and formats from popular trends.

Diso Components*

1. identity profile
2. discovery access control
3. contacts friends
4. activity streams
5. messaging
6. groupings shared spaces

*subject to change

(DON’T CLICK)

identity proﬁle

discovery access control

contacts friends

activity streams

messaging

groupings shared spaces

A standard in practice is worth
more than a standard in theory


but adoption of these technologies is key.

Ubiquity of a standard allows an
industry to move the level of
competition to a new layer

Photo by grendelkhan

why take the approach of creating standards when we could instead be building sweet apps?

because we don’t want to compete on the level of social apps that exist today.

we want to move up to a higher level of competition by commoditizing aspects of the
social web that are hard today, but are also basic or fundamental.

creating new opportunities for
innovation on user experience

Photo by Chris Metcalf

in so doing, we create new opportunities to compete on the basis of oering better service
and experience without relying on user lock-in.

Identity


but all of this is predicated on developing a means for estabishing durable, cross-site identity
on the web.


the individual is basic atomic unit of society.

You can’t have “social”
without “society”


and you can’t get to social without having a society.


and since change happens at the level of the individual

a building block technology like openid is critical.

the architecture of the social web must have the individual as its cornerstone.

Real identity


it’s interesting to look at a current trend

people are starting to use their real identity online.


No where is this more obvious than on Facebook.

Here is a list of three people that Facebook has recommended to me.

The second one was suggested because we went to the same high school. Kind of a stretch,
right? I mean, what is that in the photo? A pillow? I have no idea WHO SHE IS


So let’s say I actually dive in and ask Facebook to list ALL the people it thinks I might know...
this is where it gets interesting.

(click)

Now, here I see someone I know. I’ve met Eric in person; I could probably add him as a
friend... but is it really him? It’s not like I have some shared secret with him to verify that this
is actually an online representation of his...


so I decide to do a search — and lo, out of 444 results, he comes up ﬁrst. Sure, but this is the
same guy from the previous page.

(click)

If we have 63 mutual friends, well, that’s starting make this more plausible...


Ok, now I’m feeling pretty conﬁdent. In lieu of a shared secret between us, a familiar social
graph is a reasonable substitute. Get that: by revealing one’s social connections I get closer
to someone’s real identity.


your social graph is essentially a kind of identity ﬁngerprint for people who know you and
know who you know.

but this is really only possible because my mutual friends shared their identities ﬁrst.

@factoryjoe


so some of you might know that I use “factoryjoe” as my username on the web.

But, no one in the real world has any frigging clue who “factoryjoe” is, especially without
context.

And so people have come up to me and called me “Joe” without even thinking about it.

This online identity was becoming better known than me!

@factoryjoe
@chrismessina


So I killed it. At least on Twitter. And now I’m just @chrismessina.

Like I was before, and always have been.

But I’ve seen other people do the same thing since I made this change.

And it looks like it’s only becoming more common.


Let’s take a look at another example.

Compare the chat list on the left with the one on the right.

With AIM, you’ve got all these foreign-looking usernames... whereas on the right you have
real names.

CLICK - focus on pirillo

[talk about Facebook’s early decision to swear o usernames]

“l0ckergn0me”
vs.

Chris Pirillo


understand that this DESIGN decision was as important as Flickr’s public-by-default decision.

Heck, I don’t even know what a “locker gnome” is. But here’s the change.


We’re moving from these weird (CLICK) computer-driven identities...


...to using our real names (CLICK) across the web.

Eventbox

and you can see this in software like eventbox

Eventbox

why does this option even exist?

This to me proves that we are in a transitional period, from assumed aliases to one of real,
public, transparent identities.

morality,
creativity,
spontaneity,
problem solving,
lack of prejudice,
acceptance of facts
Self-actualization
self-esteem, confidence,
achievement, respect of others,
respect by others
Esteem

friendship, family, sexual intimacy
Love/belonging
security of: body, employment, resources,
morality, the family, health, property
Safety

breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion
Physiological

Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs

now, I think this what this means is that we’re seeing a shift to using real identity because the
social web is becoming a increasingly important piece of many people “self-actualization”.

self-actualization is from mazlow’s hierarchy of needs and is at the top of the pyramid here.

• facebook.com/chrismessina

• friendfeed.com/chrismessina

• google.com/proﬁles/chrismessina

• twitter.com/chrismessina


You can see this people try to “claim” their identity across the web (CLICK)

• facebook.com/chrismessina

• friendfeed.com/chrismessina

• google.com/proﬁles/chrismessina

• twitter.com/chrismessina


and course, companies are jumping over each other to be namespace for people on the web.

Five rules
customers.






remember Tim O’Reilly’s rules? Yeah, this one.

Five rules
customers.






remember Tim O’Reilly’s rules? Yeah, this one.

let’s look at what these namespaces look like on the web today.


this is how facebook presents me to the world.

note that i can’t change this.

sure i can change my photo... but i can’t alter what’s presented here. this is all left up to
facebook’s discretion.


friendfeed present an activity-centric view of me.

i can’t change how this looks, but at least it represents parts of what i’m actually doing


Google now lets me have quite a bit of control over my proﬁle, but it makes me look like a
google employee.

oh, and everyone looks the same.


Meanwhile, Twitter at least lets me customize the colors and background image... but
otherwise, that’s about it.

and without context, it can be a bit jarring.


So what if I wanted to just do something like this? I’m not saying this is the best webpage
evar, but the point is, when I host my own identity, it’s up to ME how I present my identity to
the world.

And I believe that it’s at the level of the individual that all change and innovation begins and
so the web’s architecture should reﬂect that.


and so this is why i use factoryjoe.com as my OpenID. It means that I, as an individual, am in
charge of, and own my own identity.

and what we need to develop, over time, is a way for people who own their own identities —
regardless of whether they delegate to a service or not — to connect to the people and
services that matter to them. (next: asshole)

*

now, do you know what this is?

it’s the asshole of the universe.

* Connect


and like assholes, it seems that everyone wants to have a connect API these days.

Photo by Timothy Vogel

the result is what we call the “OpenID NASCAR” where everyone wants their brand shown on
login forms.... (CLICK)


...like this.


when people really just want this.

their goal is to get access to their account

To be fair, this is merely an uncomfortable transitional step along a much longer path
towards open identity on the web. it is a means to an end, but not the end that we seek.

• What’s your address?


Eventually, I think people will know their OpenID, just like their address, phone number,
screennames, email, and so on... until we get to their OpenID.

And just to be clear, an OpenID shouldn’t have to look like a URL. We’re working to ﬁx that
actually.

But the primary thing you should take away from this point is that we’re creating a standard
to make it possible to have durable, lasting identity on the web.


• What’s your phone number?



actually.




• What’s your AOL screenname?



actually.





• What’s your email address?



actually.






• What’s your MySpace?



actually.







• Twitter?



actually.







• Twitter?

• Are you on Facebook?



actually.







• Twitter?

• Are you on Facebook?

• What’s your OpenID?



actually.


Why standards?


The open, social web will be built on standards that are free
to implement and that encourage competition at the layer of
service and user experience.



so, one example of this is email standards like SMTP and IMAP. These protocols are
dinosaurs... (CLICK)


but have allowed services like Gmail to be started relatively recently and widespread adoption
by creating the incentive to innovate on top of a basic set of features.


where they’ve created this amazing experience in the iphone version of Gmail. Largely
because of standards.


similarly, Twitter has grown in large part because of its use of SMS, a standard feature of
phones that has been around for ages — that few had previously taken advantage of.

Ironically, you could argue that RSS on Blogger was what lead Ev Williams to his original
success. So, he just seems to be at the right moment leveraging standards as they become
ubiquitous in the marketplace.




of course, one of the best examples of my point is Apple.


I’ve shown applications and uses of the iPhone, but it itself is the benefactor of years of open
standards development.

IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) vCal
International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000)

Bluetooth

Short Message Service (SMS)

JPEG
MPEG-4 Part 14,
ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003 (MP4)

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3)
SQLite, TXT

vCard, etc

HTTP, CSS, JS, etc
SMTP, IMAP


I’ve shown applications and uses of the iPhone, but it itself is the benefactor of years of open
standards development.


Furthermore, WebKit is the rendering engine that powers the Safari browser.

this is an open source project


webkit is also the rendering engine that powers Google’s Chromium/Chrome open source
browser project.


the Palm Pre’s applications are also all webkit apps.

see how important standards are here?


So, just as WebKit is becoming the new operating level,

the underpinings of Mac OS X itself is UNIX, which is open source.

Apple leverages open source and community-based peer-production and ostensibly sells an
experience on top of it.

The value is not in the software, per se, but in the designed experience and vision
carried through Apple products.

The open, social web


and so, hopefully I’ve given you a clear picture of why OPEN standards are critical to
innovation on the SOCIAL web —

that really the aim of the Diso Project and similar initiatives are to move the realm of
competition to a higher level so that we can actually begin to

build social experiences at the level that Apple builds hardware experiences today.

SO WHY THE OPEN SOCIAL WEB?

Our challenge is to build technologies that enhance the
network and serve people so that they in turn can build
better and richer societies.


BECAUSE

Our fundamental challenge is to build technologies that enhance the network and serve
people so that they in turn can build better and richer societies.

The way internet is supposed to

be


which, if we’re successful, brings us full circle back to what we’ve been talking about today:

the way the internet is supposed to be.

ﬁn.

chris@citizenagency.com • @chrismessina • factoryjoe.com
Color palette: oddend by martin Typeface: FTF Flama™ by Mario Feliciano


so that’s it. questions?

The Rise of Open Social Networks

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