We’re getting there
I had a great conversation with Dave Winer and Paolo Valdemarin yesterday - talking about how to ‘open up’ social networking. The first challenge we had was to get us all three of us talking about the same thing. Dave had just been hanging out with Doc Searls who has his own unique approach to identity and the future. So our conversation got off to a lively start, and only get more interesting over time!
It became clear that one big thing holding up any coalescing around open standards nowadays is to ask” ” open standards on what? About whom? By when?”
I have recently read three different posts in related areas from Jon Udell, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer and they all point out that there are some fundamental things wrong with the way social networking works today.
Social networking has really gotten beyond the ‘dating’ phase and the ‘VC frenzy phase’ and is now settling down into a maturing ‘platform’ phase. But the problem is I’m not really sure what order these phases come in!
When you start talking about people and software, for every kind of person and interaction, you’re bound to come up with 2 or 3 different ways to do the same thing. And this is the very nature of this beast whether we like it or not. No one standard.
But clearly we need open standards in dealing with all this stuff!
So my bet is tha there will be LOTS of little standards, swirling around the motions of:
- media - video, audio and images
- blogging - and all it’s variations; events, reviews, and with attachments (podcasting, vlogging) and lets nor forget subscription formats (RSS, 6A’s blog archive format)
- communication - and all it’s variants; IM, phone, Twitter, chat
- identity - and lordy lordy whatever the hell that means - profile data, reputation, history of my behavior patterns, the claims I make about myself, my bank account, my taxes, the bills I pay and everything I’ve ever bought (OpenID)
- devices - and managing them, whether they’re mobile, in my living or at work/school
- my start page (dashboard, destination, about me page, profile page) - see NetVibes or Pageflakes (configure doc and feeds list)
- aggregators - for people, media, tags, basically everything (OPML lists of feeds)- storage - everyone is gonna have a lot of stuff and it all has to reside somewhere. And if you ask me where - I’ll answer “Yes!” (file systems)
- ping service, notifiers, presence management, and web services - in general
- TV, Radio and any other new kind of device/channel/experience that currently represents these existing industries and their byproducts (collectively called “media” as well)
You can see that it all has to do with social networking and it all has to do with people and its all stuff we want to work together. I call this DLA (digital lifestyle aggregation) and its vague and not very explicit simply because that’s the world we’re in and trying to force any more specific definition on DLA would lose some vendor or hot new idea or venture.
I agree with Dave and Elliot Noss that identity services are very related to domain services and that infrastructure vendors like TuCows will play an important role in the future of open standards. I proposed the notion of an AggregationCache to Elliot and Ross Rader a while back and that would be one of those ‘open standards’ that we all can agree to use - instead of stashing/caching the same dam stuff over and over again.
One way to understand how broken social networking is - is to realize that it all starts with calling someone ‘a friend’. And that’s where the trouble starts.
Dave posts an image of Esther Dyson in a white lab coat at the top of his post and I bet what Dave means by including this image is different than what I interpret it to be. We all talk about the same thing, but think of it as something different. Identity and relationships is a perfect example of this disconnect.
Robert Scoble wrote about what’s wrong with the binary approach most social networks take to relationships. This problem has been solved (by PeopleAggregator, the GoingOn network and others) by enabling folks to define what ‘level’ of relationship you know them. Facebooks asks you “how do you know this person” - and you could imagine lots of other ways (and criteria for defining a relationship.
Dave is pissed off at Facebook for treating him like a college student. He wants to insert in his OWN way of defining a relationship. To me - that’s just another open standard. Lets ask Facebook for the ability to change that!
The way we do it with the PeopleAggregator is to ask - when establishing a relationship - are they a:
- best friend
- good friend
- friend
- acquaintance
- stranger
Then we allow any network operator to CHANGE those labels, putting in their own relationship titles: homeboy or Esse. But Dave wants to go beyond just labels. He wants to change the very nature of what the relationship stands for, triggers in terms of code and how its stored for posterities sake (remember - the web doesn’t forget!) At least I think that’s what he thinks.
Then the trick here is what do you do WITH this added relationship info? You could display a different set of content to your friends - then to strangers. You could also display messages and special content as well to just your friends or family.
Jon Udell complains about not being able to define a relationship as ‘through the web’. Well then just use a label and change what the relationship is called! Adding ‘through the web’ would take :10 seconds in PeopleAggregator. Yet these are the kind of decisions vendors make, not end-users.
That’s why we need to create systems that are under end-user control, rather than put control of relationship labels exclusively into the hands of vendors. Dave seems to hate the very notion of vendors and think that they all will do the wrong thing. I try to be optimistic and charge vendors for me to tell them to open up.
Its a win-win. I get paid, they get great advise.
Now the challenge is - “will any of them every listen to me?”
PeopleAggregator currently enables vendors to arbitrarily name up to five levels of ‘relationship’. So ‘prospects’, ’suppliers’, ‘employees’ and ‘vendor’ become just as easy to define and use as ‘mom’, ‘teacher’, ‘minister’ or ‘therapist’.
There’s also this by-product after-effect you get when you call someone something specific in a relationship. It’s a very touchy subject.
What if you call someone a friend, but they only call you an acquaintance? So displaying what you call people - should also be under strict ‘privacy’ access control.
This whole Facebook platform thing has changed the paradigm and finally gotten folks like Jon, Robert and Dave to consider this new paradigm - as something essential to what’s going on.
Its hard to look beyond the dating and flirting to see social networking as a paradigm shift, but you’d have to be an Ostrich to ignore the huge ramifications of making friends, having profile pages or forming groups.
The biggest problem (of course) is that in fact the social networks are not used by adults, but kids. Or adults acting like kids.
We’ve had 3 customers try and build social networks for ‘baby boomers’ and each time they’ve been thwarted with the reality that most baby boomers only use computers for email and minimal web browsing. They simply aren’t geeky enough to blog and participate in community activities.
But that doesn’t mean that baby boomers CAN’T participate in social networks!
LinkedIn seems to have ‘hit a chord’ - found resonance with older people.
Why?
Cause its about making money - honey!
Maybe another way to understand what’s going on is think of “what vendors would want to open up?” This is the first question every interviewer asks me. I tell then that Yahoo is using open against Google and that Facebook and redefines open and is a slap in the face of MySpace.
But Dave doesn’t think they’ll go far enough. I’m gonna try like hell to make sure they DO go far enough!
Jon Udell now works for Microsoft, a very large vendor, Robert Scoble works for a struggling vendor and Dave Winer is a vendor of one. Doc Searls - too - is a vendor of one. Elliot Noss runs a successful infrastructure player - Tucows - and we ALL want these open standards to coalesce and succeed.
As Dave says “the ONLY way for that to happen is to use these standards in tools, web services and deployed software experiences - and THEN you can have a standard.” I agree - no one can disagree.
All talk is just talk.
So we’re shipping GT Channel and we did something for Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer - at their ContentNext events. We’ll soon have other deployments out there (some from some big companies), each looking completely different but all sharing in the same APIs and underlying engine.
That means that every deployment we ship includes OpenID and the upcoming attribute exchange in OpenID2 and is a living personification of our interpretation of ‘open social networking’. We’ve got social networking APIs for almost every tasks and data structure, source code is available for the entire system and over 100 different developers are using the code in some way. This all adds up to the beginnings of a solution to solve this problem of ‘opening up social networking‘.
So then Dave accuses me of simply wanting to: “sell my products and services” - but Dave has to realize that our platform PeopleAggregator is an open platform in the sense that ALL the APIs, protocols, standards, formats, solutions, architecture, ideas and implementation is designed to be given away to facilitate inter-connection of social networks.
ALL my ideas are open source as I need to give away DLAs, aggregating aggregators, master profile editors, [insert your name here] shows and other ideas - just to make sure we all can connect together.
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:12 am
Marc -
Excellent post.
I, myself, have been following these trends and agree that there have to be some standards around social (or relationship) networking.
This past month, I wrote about the need to formalize the relationship networking industry in my publication, The National Networker and point to a relatively new group forming, the Relationship Networking Industry Association (RNIA).
The RNIA is working to bring together seven major stakeholder communities to derive a common body of knowledge from which standards (and eventual accreditation) will be formed.
What I like about this group is that they are a non-profit, neutral third-party group.
All my best,
Adam
June 23rd, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] White Label social networks (the master list I started some time ago) will start to offer ability to share data with other networks. Some will never adopt this as their corporate clients want walled gardens around their brand. Additional thoughts by Marc Canter. […]
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Marc,
Thanks for stopping by mycolts.net. As we’ve just opened up our community for Colts fans, and its going well, but I am struck by the challenge / opportunity we have to “create” a culture. We vacilate between myspace and facebook mentalities (are we too open or too closed?) and I wonder why I should look to either for examples. Underneath it all we want an environment that’s fun, safe and attractive for EVERYONE…even though we realize we can’t please all the people all the time. I happen to be reading the book “Change or Die” right now…it stresses the idea that culture is established by the first few people in a community. We’re at this point and already I see the old Colts Forum people setting the tone. Some of that tone is positive and some is petty and negative.
I’d love to chat with you sometime about all of this stuff….perhaps we can have the meeting we never got to have in Hollywood?
June 24th, 2007 at 8:42 am
So why do relationships have to be named at all. What I mean to say is that indeed social networks bastardized the concept of friendship. The fact is that most people we “friend” really are connections of some sort or another w/degrees of connectivity (ie. low connectivity = acquaintance, high connectivity = family, etc…). I’d almost rather see us calling everyone connections where under privacy controls you could enter a number 1 thru 10 for the degree of connectivity (1 = low…,10 = high) a person has to you. Every connection would be defaulted at “5″ unless the person connecting to changed it. Those you connect to wouldn’t know what degree you assigned to them, nor would you know what degree they assigned you. Then you can publish your connections w/o offending any one since they simply appear as connections. On the back-end, specific activities or information can be displayed for connections of certain degrees (ie. only show my party pics to connections w/degrees 7 or higher).
My guess however, is that while Dave wants to define the relationships deeply, most users won’t bother and would simply prefer to move w/defaults. Part of this is the complexity that comes w/such granular classification which can get infinitely complex and becomes nearly useless (ie. friend, business associate, previous business associate, neighbor, former neighbor, classmate, college classmate, high school classmate, step-mother, father-in-law, my wife’s previous mother-in-law, adopted son, etc…). The complexity would make these classifications nearly useless for getting anything meaningful accomplished (ie. let all friends, college classmates, highschool classmates and wife see pics fm New Year’s party…oy-vey). Actually, for every one I’m connected to there are things I might want to share w/them that I wouldn’t share w/any one else. For everything I place on my profile or DLA, would I then need to move through my 50 or 300 contacts and say who can see what? IMHO keeping an abstract term such as “connections” solves the problem of defining the relationship by purposefully not defining it, and degree controls allow users to manage this as they wish, plus having an easy math conventions (ie. , =, between, etc…) for what to display to people.
June 24th, 2007 at 10:55 am
I agree with Pierre - but from an architectural point of view, its crucial to have the option to call relationships anything - if need be.
Come on Pierre, don’ get all intellectual on us.! Dave can do (and will do) whatever he wants to do. So will Auren Hoffman, Reid Hoffman and any other Hoffmans, including Abbey Hoffman. Connections is a good way to think of it, but so are paths, arcs and links.
When it comes to classifying humans, you not only have the top-down versus bottom up taxonomy/folksonomy debate, but you also have a rich ecosystem of entrepreneurs, vendors and users.
Lord knows they ALL think they know what they’re doing and what’s best for them and their constituents. Reminds me of Barak versus Hillary versus John and Michael.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:00 am
OK, so I’m jealous!
You just better invite all of us to a ginourmous fish-fry when you get back….
:)ave
July 10th, 2007 at 3:31 am
[…] When Dave Winer proposed “opening up social networks” I responded with some ideas of my own and a list of pending standards that could help to coalesce our disparate efforts and goals. Others […]