Michael Arrington just accused me of compromising. He said I must be trying to sell my company or suck up to one of the big platforms for a consulting agreement.

I beg to differ.

I pointed Michael to my post on:

“The Religion of Bringing Social to Software”

In this post I analyze a new trend I’m seeing; three announcements that happened within a week of each other: MySpace’s Data Availability, Facebook’s Connect and Google’s Friend Connect - ALL THREE had fundamentally the same strategy!

They’re all keeping their member’s data on their servers, while sending out tentacles to mesh in with as many outside sites as they can. These tentacles may be widgets, apps or iFrames - but its all the same strategy.

I state in that post:

I was going to originally call this post Data Availability = Facebook Connect (both are still lock-in) - but Google made it a three-way game today. Including Microsoft seems apropos because it typifies how important this battle is - and how important it is for us - to continue to demand our rights.

Though I agree with Dare Obasanjo that interoperability is just as important as data portability, these three initiatives prove that Data Portability is a subject we need to keep screaming about.

These three announcements prove that MySpace, Google and Facebook assume that once a user enters into their domain, that they own that user, that they control what happens with that user’s data and that they fully intend on squeezing every last dime out of monetizing that user - until the cow’s come home.

This is essentially the mantra Jonathan Abrams spoke to me about - when I first met him in 2003 - and it’s the mantra of every single large social networking platform since then.

This is why we created the Bill of Rights for Users of Social Media. We had to make it clear what we wanted - and so far - no one has really given that to us.

So I don’t see that as compromise. But I forgive Michael - I know he’s busy and his mailbox is full - I can’t even call him. And I feel confidant I will be vindicated.

Meanwhile Michael asked me to post some images of the mural’s work in progress. Its going to evolve all summer. But here are some works in progress shots - with annotation:

I’ll start at the beginning - which is the ID - me - my social graph and lists of Groups I’m a member of and my various personas. This is what the battles are all about - locking this data in. But it’s just the beginning of the war. Essentially ID has to do with everything.

Then there’s the People’s Marketplace forming around US monetizing our data, not just them. Putting ourselves into Context. Managing them instead of them managing us. VRM

But to pretend like capitalism won’t continue to try and manipulate us and rip us off - would also be foolish. So just cause I’m trying to be pragmatic, does not mean I’m compromising. I’m looking for common ground. As Rodney King said “can’t we all just live together?”

The next big area on this fence is about My Storage and Structured Content. I need to store my stuff in the cloud, and anywhere else I want to. And we need to keep track of my reviews, my events, my media - all properly indexed with tags and meta-data. I don’t have to tell this to Michael - he invested in Omnidrive.

Then there’s the issue of persistent ubiquitous content. The stuff that’s free as well as all the commercial stuff. Having that there - all the time - really changes the game IMHO. It’s UGC, it’s wikipedia, it’s iTunes, it’s the BBC. The Internet Archive. DMOZ.

These are all big issues - where UGC and commercial interests coincide.

And I have this notion of reusable User Interface objects. Here are five.

- A Dashboard to hold everything - and be our start page

- A Gallery for our media, playlists, albums and sharing

- A tool to Express ourselves. Otehrwise known as blogging tools, media upload, podcasting, vlogging, etc.

- A way to Watch what’s going on in our lives and community.

- And a way to ‘chuck’ out our ideas, thoughts, status, IMs, twits, videos - in a real-time manner. It’s what I call Talk.

And new kinds of tools. That’s what I am. A toolsmith. I did it before and we’re doing it again. As Director was to multimedia, so will this mesh stuff be to the open web. But we won’t be the only company doing it. It’s NOT about single vendor lock-in nowadays.

And the Live Web - we can’t live without my Twitter, IM, FriendFeed, VoIP, Second Life, mobile phone and real-time reality! So it’s all coming together in an inter-connected mesh of our digital lifestyles.

And in case you’re wondering what all those blurry spray canned red, orange and purple lines are that are connecting everything together - why that’s RSS, feeds, APIs, real-time presence, states, attention information and good old fashioned interoperability and data portability. That’s me routing content all over the place and configuring MY Open Mesh the way I want it to be.

Routing this data, the infrastructure to make it all happen and the way we work together is as much the mesh - as anything else. And THAT’s why we have to recognize and work with these behemoths and their lock-in strategy.

Suffer the fool who’s idealism sinks everything.

You’ll also notice this underlying ID layer along the bottom and the importance of State, Redundancy and Context. These are models essential to the open mesh. My mural maps out constructs, infrastructure and standards as well..

So I want to officially disagree with Michael Arrington and what he said on the show today - I think I can be idealistic and pragmatic at the same time. Its called “life”.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.