I just love this title.

I just love the idea of using the web as a real-time distribution and communication platform. A Live Web - alive with our thoughts, dreams, business hustles, flirts, updates and expression.

All sorts of players, variations, monopolies, platforms and solutions are emerging in this burgeoning area - unfortunately most of them with no business model except: “maybe we’ll get lots of page hits” or “we’ll know who these people are - so we can exploit that fact - and put targeted ads in front of them.”

The current discussion over Twitter, Friendfeed and other new forms of communication is to be expected as with each new generation of technology, comes a new cadre of startups, brands and acquisitions. Meebo is out hustling itself and Skype is available for purchase. Wherever there is money to be made - somebody will figure out how to exploit and monetize it.

The Live Web presents a particularly interesting financial upside - as VoIP and video conferencing stumble directly into the Telco domain and mobile devices used for IM, Twittering and photo uploading grow bigger and bigger everyday.

So there’s plenty of interest, investment cash and innovative startup energy to inspire a 100 different platforms and services - all involving real-time video and presence, some variation on VOIP, 3D and video conferencing and of course - every possible permutation on IM, chat, text or what’s been known in the industry as ‘Twittering’.

Jabber created a wonderful standard called XMPP - which is being adopted by many Live Web vendors - but not all. And I’ve always thought that they’d be some sort of ‘open Twitter’ - eventually. Routing, ricocheting, dispatching, proxying and pinging are back in rage now and Dave Winer has merged his Twittergram technology in with a routing/switching technology that promises to route any kind of web service to any recipient.

The world of 3D gaming is generating the kind of revenues that would make even Microsoft blush.

So we know people love this stuff, they want more of it - and it probably has to do with special hardware like mobile and wireless devices, game consoles, headsets, sensor devices, flat panels and kiosks. The Live Web will be everywhere from your car, boat or the woods to the walk path between the parking garage and your office/school or home.

Then once you’re in your home, cell repeaters or wifi will get you downstairs, in the bathroom, out in back and in an elevator at work. Then once you’re sitting in front of your laptop - you’ll seamlessly transition over to another ‘version’ of the Live Web on the screen of your machine(s.)

Anything that is alive will be with you - all the time - unless you turn it off.

One thing we have to remember is that these technologies not only make money for the founders, but also change people’s lives. And there are entrepreneurs in Singapore, Dubai, Berlin and Rio who are doing the same tech for THEIR customers. So we all need to think about level playing fields, accessibility around the world - and a truly worldwide mesh - in languages other than just English.

What this blog series if trying to focus on are the issues that are greater than one platform winning or somebody selling out. I’ve been trying to piece together an overview of all the ways that the Mesh will form - and outline what standards and best practices are needed, along with advocacy groups, major players and any outstanding issues to discuss.

I started with the #1 ID - one’s personal profile, set of Personas and the Groups that they’re a member of and their Social Graph. We now have OpenID and oAuth and lots of interest in uer centric ID issues nowadays - and I place this area in the center of every other area in the series.

I then covered #2 Persistent Ubiquitous Content - which includes eveything from the free BBC archives and Archive.org’s massive on-line digital media libraries to Wikipedia, iTunes and every other kind of on-line digital content - that’s there all the time. Knowledge bases, YouTube and Flickr also fit into this area. Imagine if all that stuff was available to you - all the time via two-way APIs. These repositories don’t have to be READ only, we can store all our UGC stuff there as well!

And recently I did #3 in the series - which covered one my favorite pet peeves - structured content - and the idea of shared servers of this stuff - with APIs and feeds coming in and out of it. Content as infrastructure. Tags and bookmarks as anchors and nodes for the mesh. Ricochet end-points of the starfish.

Now in this post - #4 - I will try to make sense how the Live Web and all this real-time communication, updating, presence management, feeds and APIs - can create a multiplier effect with one’s ID by putting it into context with all this persistent online content and all sorts of anchor points and structured content culminating in new ways for different platforms to interact in what we call ‘the mesh’.

Not Microsoft’s mesh - our mesh (though they’re certainly free to mesh their mesh into our mesh.)

The Live Web is a commodity. Everybody is gonna have it - so there won’t be any huge tollgates or lock-ins into one particular technology or vendor. Even Skype is finding that out today. By utilizing tcp/ip and http the Live Web benefits from having an infrastructure in place to build on. But the Live Web can only be practical if it’s ALSO connected to the world of POTS and mobile devices.

GSM (the standard for cell phones) is pretty ubiquitous, but there are other forms of cell phone technology out there (CDMA) but nobody seems to worry about that. The different speeds for uploading and moving data (none of which are interoperable) have fragmented the so-called 3G world. But its the handset manufacturers and carrier platform vendors who have hopelessly fragmented the world of cell phones - to the point where there are over 10-15 different development platforms to worry about to ship ‘mobile’ compatible software.

This just makes it that more challenging in connecting the Live Web into the mesh - and enabling any kind of vendor to mesh into that same opportunity - as the Big Boys enjoy today. But it can be done!

The incredible real-time communication vehicle which we call IM, chat or Twittering provides a base platform from which 100’s if not 1,000s of unique solutions and innovative use case scenarios are being born - as we speak.

But the Live Web is more than just communicating.

It is about presence and just knowing if someone if there or not. And the world of 3D immersive virtual reality. Its about a swarm grid of tiny sensors monitoring the status of some factory or city streets and reporting back 20 times a second. Harnessing technology to improve our lives and make a buck - is what its all about.

We all have benefited from this ‘live web’ - and we could give credit to IRC or to AOL - but at the end of the day IM is a complete commodity - especially since its now in Facebook, MySpace, etc.

At no time did advertising ever get in the way of IM (though the current AIM bots are a bit cumbersome to ignore.) I always assumed that one day we’d wake up and all these banner ads, surveys and flash thingies would have taken over our AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messengers. But that day never happened.

Its too bad that the IM platforms never united together - but that gave birth to Meebo and god bless them for that. For those of you who don’t know what Meebo is - its a platform that gateways and connects together ALL of the major IM platforms. And they use Jabber’s XMPP protocol as well!

Efforts have begun to unite the greater ‘Live Web’ in some meaningful way - perhaps around XMPP or some other kind of ‘open standards’. At least some vendors are talking about standards. That would be coolio.

Twitter is now a platform for Live Web apps (with video copycat Seesmic right behind) - just like Facebook is a platform (and OpenSocial) for social apps.

To me it’s really obvious how this all meshes together with one’s ID, persistent content and structured content. But maybe its not that obvious to all of you - so let me just stop here and say “Live Web functionality will be an intrinsic part of our digital lives and thus - the mesh in general.”

Every ‘digital lifestyle aggregator, social network, blogging tool, productivity app, legacy system and Intranet apps - will all come with built-in Live Web functionality. It’ll be as common as “Open as….” and email.

And there will be all SORTS of permutations, variants and unique Live Web solutions which will enable all sorts of new startups and entrepreneurs. Around the world.

Action Items in this area include:

- uniting IM protocols together utilizing XMPP - Meebo for everyone

- supporting standards for access and privileges controls - so one’s access controls are respected and interpreted correctly by other networks

- opt in controls - so the end-user can control whether or not their email and other info can be moved elsewhere if it’s in someone else’s Contacts list

- the pervasive notion of ‘multiple personas’ - so that one can maintain multiple sets of friends, content, etc. all within the ‘umbrella’ of a single Live Web account

- DNS-like infrastructure - so that multiple copies of the same service (eg. Twitter) - can share member databases

- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users on the importance of their control over their own data

Action Items in general include:

- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created

- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won’t ever happen if things break or don’t work.

- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won’t have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment

- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they’d like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.

Summary of open standards we have already:

XMPP

Some leading proprietary APIs:

AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Skype, Twitter, Pownce, Jive, Seesmic,

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

Meebo peeps, Evan Williams, Leah Culver, Phil Rosedale, Jaron Lanier, Dave Sifry, Jeremie Miller, Blaine Cook,

Ralph Meijer, Peter Saint-Andre, Robert Gaal, Kellan Elliot-McCrea, Matt Tucker, Mickaël Rémond, Harper Reed, Anders Conbere,

Major organizations, events and advocacy groups:

Jabber, Jive, Twitter, Seesmic, Process One, Jaiku,
Final NOTE: OK 4 down, 6 to go. #5 = Tools will be about the new kinds of tools I see appearing now that two-way APIs + community + content = tools. #6 = UI Objects will be all about the standard kinds of ‘client side‘ user interface objects which will soon just be commodities we choose and assemble together.

#7 = Infrastructure - when I start to weave the quilt of the mesh with common threads, #8 Constructs which is a rather conceptual area, based upon the premise that if we write our code similarly, it’ll be that much easier to map our data structures and APIs to each other. #9 = Marketplace is there cause we all gotta make a living - and I call the final area - #10 Standards - which is clearly the belly of the beast.

UPDATE: Blaine Cook emailed me to clue me into some of other players down in the trenches.  Doing the work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 9:29 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.