One Topic: three approaches to getting it done
One Topic: how much effort should be put into promoting open social networking issues at conferences?
That was the issue that sent me off on a tirade back when I wrote an Open letter to Dave McClure. Since then I have been approached by numerous people willing to help out in our efforts to promote the notion of user’s rights, open social graphs and dataportability.
A bunch of BigCos have joined the OpenID foundation, there’s now a Japanese effort behind OpenID and there was an infamous, private FooBarCamp dedicated to the subject. Companies like Microsoft are starting to adapt to the principles of dataportability and it seems that “open is the new black“. So clearly somebody out there wishes to talk about these issues.
I know that Kaliya Hamlin is working on a new DataSharingSummit and there’s interest around the world to have these sort of get togethers in London, Italy, Amsterdam and Tokyo.
To give you all an idea of what’s going on - let me typify three different approaches in helping to achieve these goals in our industry today.
1. Let me start with me - my favorite subject. My company makes a white label social networking platform (available in source code form - BTW) - and we wish to include any standard in our platform that will facilitate the movement or control of one’s data between disparate networks and platforms. We figure the best way to get these ideals accomplished is to get the features into folks’ hands, so I spend allot of my time raising interest, putting people on the spot and in general - acting like a nuisance - all in the spirit of promoting an open web with open social graphs and open APIs.
I asked both Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Chris DeWolfe (MySpace) the same question at Web 2.0 “when are you gonna open up - dudes?” Well it looks like DeWolfe did it, while Zuckerberg is still hiding behind the shroud of privacy.
Meanwhile allot of people are trying to thwart my efforts and purposefully don’t invite me to private shindigs, ignore our issues at their conferences and in general - hold our efforts back. That’s why I called McClure on his bullshit.
My intentions and agenda are clear - I believe my platform will sell more if we support open standards and I won’t stop until the whole world is open. So folks like Jonathan Abrams, who bragged about locking up users and exploiting them in Friendster - are the enemy.
So my approach is - make a name for myself by yelling allot about these standards and issues. Is that clear?
2. The second set of folks I’d like to highlight are Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon. The two of them co-authored the famous manifesto “Brad’s thoughts on the Social Graph” and they then traded jobs - with David going to SixApart while Brad left SixApart to go to Google. The both of them are tried and true hackers who have taken it upon themselves to make their own contributions to the word of open standards and working code that implements those ideals.
Brad originally wrote OpenID while David them picked it up while working at Verisign and did much to evolve OpenID into what it is - today. David id now the co-chair of the OpenID foundation and quite an articulate public speaker.
Brad seems to be much more shy but since he’s gone to Google, he’s launched what they call the Social Graphs APIs - which very much puts the money where his mouth was in his manifesto.
This kind of personal - solve the problem or shut up - kind of guys you gotta love. And neither of them are over 25.
So their answer to the problem is to write some code, get the word out there and work from within to achieve change.
3. And then there’s Tim Berners-Lee - who’s recently awoken to the importance of data portability and of course, from him vantage point - its all abut the semantic web. Of course he’s right - except it’s not necessarily gonna be done with triples (i.e. rdf)
You see Tim (after inventing the web) got on a high horse about what he calls the ’semantic web’ - a web that has meta-data associated with every page. A web where intelligent interaction between humans, bots and ’smart pages’ will facilitate - well lets just say it’ll be Web 3.0.
But Tim found the semantic web a little harder to promote or achieve than Web 1.0. So he’s been out recently making sure folks know he’s still alive and promoting some of my favorite subjects. Which is coolio by me!
Perhaps Tim - from his vantage point at M.I.T. and being one of the most famous dudes around - can convince folks that opening up - is a good thing.
With all the hype and impression of failure surrounding the semantic web - I bet Tim is working on achieving a few wins - associating openness and open portability and open standards - with the semantic web.
All this is coolio by me - I just hope Tim doesn’t want us all to be open - in triples. 
Its all good by me - at least we’re all doing something to open up the world, as opposed to the gatekeepers at conferences like eTech, Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW, SuperNova and TED. To them - I bet they just can’t figure out how ot make money off of open.
Oh well - they’ll come along - eventually.