How to build the Open Mesh
I have created a series of blog posts which attempts to map out many of the issues, constructs, technologies and standards required to build out the open mesh.
Each post has a chart showing how the particular area I’m focusing on - looks vis a vis one’s ID and profile record. Then I started to imagine what these charts would look like - overlaid on top of each other.
Each one of the posts maps out who the major players are, who are the dudes and dudesses down in the trenches doing the work and how do I see all these areas meshing together.
So here is the Table of Content on the series. Please send me any input, feedback, corrections, additional names and players and lets all build the open mesh - together
[1] - ID, Personas, Social Graphs and Groups
[2] - Persistent Ubiquitous Content
[3] - Structured Content (and shared servers filled with that stuff)
I’m working on a mural that visualizes many of these issues - in one place. I’ll be hosting parties throughout the summer (and pool weather) to get folks to come on out to Walnut Creek and interact.
Creating these series of blog posts and the mural has forced me to directly map out and triangulate between all these different areas of the open mesh.
So the very notion of “building out” the open mesh, what it’s infrastructure is and what the ramifications are of having ubiquitous content or a Live Web component intimately coupled to the open mesh - is what I’ve been thinking allot about.
Coming out of all this is an awareness of a new kind of infrastructure - which simulates the blood veins, nervous systems, skeletons, fire hose and neural networks of the open mesh. Its about RSS, Friendfeeds, XMPP, attention, two-way APIs, OpenID, DNS-like backbones and an international approach.
Its also about redundancy and NOT relying upon a single party for anything (witness recent Twitter outages.) And it’s about accepting and living with competition (we certainly have - given how many white label social networking platforms and frameworks there are out there now!)
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
Publish an ebook, Marc. this is genius shit. the posts are great and seminal, but this deserves semi-permanence. I know that the information is fast moving….but…
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Would you take several fairly close photos of the mural (that overlap a bit) and post on Flicker using good resolution
so we can blow up the size and read your mural.
I agree on teh eBook idea. If you need help making that happen let’s talk
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I’ve read all your posts and they’ve been great. But I wonder: Why the term “Mesh”? A more tightly joined Web?
I prefer the term “Graph”, in the mathematical sense. A directed graph where the node represents a person, place, or thing. And to find other people, places, or things, you orderly follow a path based on well thought open standards.
You can get caught in the Net. You can get tangled in the Web. But you can only get orderly placed in the Graph.
May 4th, 2008 at 5:46 am
I replied:
thanks for the feedback
I’m falling back to a term used by others - especially MS
mesh is one of those words that can be both a noun and verb
one would ‘mesh’ into the mesh
connect to ‘the mesh’
etc
May 4th, 2008 at 10:08 am
[…] friend Marc Canter has written a series of blog posts outlining the issues, constructs, technologies and standards required to build out an “open […]
May 4th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
[…] trying to say. The open mesh is not Microsoft’s mesh - it’s ours. Please go and read my series of 10 blog posts and stay tuned for the evolution of my mural. Like I said I’ll be throwing a party a month […]
May 5th, 2008 at 7:57 am
My client, Ultimate Mobile Device, Ltd., will using a “mesh” as part of its system to deliver the output of applications from a PC to a mobile device for the person at the mobile device to interact with.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:41 am
pretty. naive.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Interesting maps!