A reference design for building the Open Mesh
When I was in NYC this week, I gave a presentation outlining specifics as to how to build an open mesh platform that would interoperate with other platforms.
To do that, I filled in the blanks as to what a ’structured content server’ would look like and some other routing ‘glue services‘ which (when supported) would facilitate interoperability between blogging tools and publishing end-points. And since these tools are part of one’s larger ‘digital lifestyle aggregator’ environment, what we’re really talking about is an inter-changeable world of user interfaces, dashboards and platforms.
Stowe Boyd was there and asked “are you saying that these tools could be inter-changeable” - and the answer is a resounding YES.
So for one’s Express tool (which is what I call a blogging tool for longer form pieces) one could use their Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger accounts or even the blogging tool inside of a social network.
And for the Watch tool (which is what I call an interface into the ‘nervous system’ of a network - the so-called ‘activity updates‘) one could use any of the existing ‘reader’ user interfaces - such as an RSS Reader, FriendFeed, Facebook’s NewsFeed, SixApart Activity Streams.
For real-time communication I call it a ‘LiveWeb‘ client, and one should be able to interchangeably use Meebo, or any IM client, or Twitter, or Plurk, Jaiku, etc.
And finally a media Gallery is something we all need, and it shouldn’t matter if you store your photos, audio files or videos in YouTube, Flickr, Picassa or the internal gallery in a social network.
This kind of inter-changeable approach to user interfaces is one principle which will build the open mesh. Having a great way to manage and deal with your friends (one’s social graph) is also something that’s needed for the open mesh, so if you could imagine using Flock’s People Bar - and have it display social graphs from ANY system, you’ll get an idea of what I’m taking about.
If a browser can do it, then so can a dashboard. So think of NetVibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo, etc. as malleable platforms, malleable portal Home pages - customized to YOU or any brand. These dashboard pages need to be containers to hold the tools (I mention above) and other kinds of reusable user interface ‘objects‘.
At the core of any platform is an identity layer and I hope it’s clear to everyone that OpenID, oAuth and OpenSocial will provide us with the basic building blocks to interconnect the members of our platforms together. New efforts are being exerted to facilitate the movement of social graphs between platforms and APIs are opening up giant repositories of Contacts - so creating your own ‘vision‘ of the open mesh is getting easier every day.
But posting and commenting and sending messages and leaving wall testimonials and rating are also key aspects of the open mesh, so I presented two ‘routing’ standards we came up with (a couple of years ago) which have been waiting for the right moment to be relevant and understood.
The first one - which we originally called ‘ReBlogThis’ (until we found out somebody else had the term - so we (Lucas Gonze and BBM) call it ReDirectThis) - facilitates the notion of a ‘Universal BlogThis‘ button. The idea is that folks want to click on an article and route it to their tool of choice. So if you’re in AOL or Yahoo and you see an artcle you wanna blog about, you should be able to click on the ‘BlogThis‘ button and send it to your Wordpress, TypePad orBlogger account, NOT to AOl Journals or Y!360. RedirectThis is a service for routing content INTO your preferred tool of choice.
Then we have the dilemna that some bloggers have (like Robert Scoble, etc.) where they maintain several blogs and places where they want to publish and have presence on the web. For these sorts of folks - who have multiple destinations where they wish to ‘route stuff’ to - we came up with OutputThis. The idea is that one can maintain a list of all their destinations in one place, and tools would get that list and display it right next to the ’submit’ button, making it easy for them to route a particular post to a particular destination. So ecto or Qumana or and SixApart’s BlogIt would use this destination list, orpractically ANY blogging tool or internal social network ‘post’ tool. This should work for media posts as well.
This also could work for keeping track of all the ‘accounts’ you wish to keep track of. So that list of services that FriendFeed accumulates could be listed in OutputThis and used by OTHER similar reader/aggregator tools. Each of these routing services strive to break up a single vendor monopoly for basic open mesh interaction and services.
I hope you see that what I’m trying to get at. By sharing the ‘preferred editor’ between tools or sharing one’s destinations’ between tools, we can faciliate the open mesh.
Finally I announced an idea I have been working on called ‘Our Data Server‘. Its an implementation of “Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph” and it makes it easy for celebs like Robert Scoble, Leo LaPorte, Veronica Belmont to build up a shared social graph account and use that to invite folks into new servcies - that they’re trying out. We saw this phenomena happen last week with Plurk. Its gonna happen again. And Our Data Server is a great example of what I’ve called ’structured content servers’ - which will become anchors and pivot points in the open mesh.
Our Data Server deals with head on the issues of that ‘I have my data’, ‘you have your data’ - and we all have ’shared data’ that has to be dealt with ‘differently’. This is exactly the challenge that Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are attempting to answer. Thanks to Bob Blakely for elucidating this at our recent Data Sharing Summit.
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All of these ideas collectively could help implement an open mesh platform.
But bear in mind that others will do it their own way, so any platform for the open mesh must deal with - head on - the anarchy and chaos which we live in today. Google will continue to one-up Facebook and Microsoft, Yahoo is playing catch-up and MySpace appears to be - following.
Open is the new black and all of a sudden everyone is worried about us sharing our social graphs - you gotta LOVE THAT!
But that’s OK. MySpace has defined a whole new category of monetization and interaction. Thank you for that guys and gals.
What’s fascinating to me is to watch SixApart morph, watch NetVibes grok the idea then stumble, Clearspring jump ahead, watch Twitter deal with their hyper growth and experience Skype completely squander their lead.
This game ain’t over with yet folks - not by a long shot!
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Please treat these ideas as ‘open ideas’. No need to credit me or my company in any way. But you can BET that our PeopleAggregator platform is an implementation of this reference design. That’s one thing Chris Saad wanted to be clear about - I was standing up there (at the Widget Expo), open idea-ing my ideas, giving them away - for the explcit purpose of promoting our platform.
But you don’t have to use our source code, you don’t have to use our specifics, you don’t even need to pay attention to me or these ideas - just realize that this is what’s happening anyway, and if you wanna ‘mesh’ in with others - you’d better at least pay attention.
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