Marc's Voice

the Open Stack, DiSO and all those closed stacks

Joeseph Smarr has been using the term Open Stack lately which refers to a combination of technologies - which together make up a full solution to end-user open platform requirements. He’s almost got it right.

He’s forgotten user interface guidelines - but that’s OK - cause it’s right on anyway.

DISCLOSURE: Joseph and myself were the original authors of the “Bill of Rights for Users of Social Media.”

In yesterday’s post on OpenID I implied that OpenID could morph from being a single technology to a brand that encompassed a whole BUNCH of technologies that provided a single point-of-contact for end-user’s solutions, education, and branding.

So this is about branding.  “Will OpenID become the brand or will we need to find another brand?”

Open Stack is a little too general. I use the term open mesh - on purpose - cause I don’t WANT it to be specific.  Open Mesh has to represent the combination of a bunch of different stacks; some open, some semi-open, whatever.

But OpenID sure is a great term - and it could certainly be morphed into THE brand.

This is what we need right now - a  single entry point into solving the ID conundrum.  ID is hard and asking end-users to keep track of the  difference between Single Sign-On, authenticaton, reliable parties, claims, trust, security, privacy, data portability and persona - is just not gonna happen.

Ben Werdmuller (CEO of Elgg) left this comment on my post:

For me, it depends what you mean by ‘embrace’. It’d be awesome if OpenID could support the use of those things, and anything new that came along, perhaps even with a best practice list of standards for different markets - but on the other side of the coin, I’d worry about anything that tried to tie down the complementary technologies.

Well hell yes - we have to worry about anything trying to tie anything down.

But once a standard gets set - like OpenID, RSS, oAuth or OpenSocial - the idea is that each has it’s own life and will evolve on it’s own, while an amalgamated OpenID alliance/Open Stack - would ‘aggregate’ these standards together and focus on end-user solutions and education.

That’s what OpenID can become.

And BTW lets not forget DiSO - an effort headed up by Chris Messina and currently being paid for by Vidoop (thanks to Scott Kveton for that!)  Lots of folks have been tracking DiSo - for almost a year now.

DiSO is exactly the kind of bridge/gateway effort that can help glue together many of these standards - and put a user interface on the front of it.  What Chris (FactoryJoe) has been talking about for a while - are user interface guidelines so that importing. inviting, friending, sharing, commenting, etc. are all done - the  same way.

This is a crucial piece of the ‘present a comprehensive solution to end-users‘ puzzle.  Without that - and we’ll be stuck catering to geeks and nerds like us - forever.

Or as Rodney King said so eloquently “why can’t we all work together?”