Marc's Voice

Dashboards and Distributed Friending

I’m imagining a world where each of us, and all groups, networks, enterprises, institutions, agencies and NGOs have dashboards which are associated with our on-line presence.  Some of these dashboards exist today - in the guise of ‘NetVibes’ startup pages - or as iGoogle and MyYahoo.

Facebook, MySpace and all social networking software are another kind of dashboard.  And all social media services; from Twitter, Friendfeed and Flickr to dopplr, Blurb or NetFlix.  They’re all dashboards, each with it’s own nuance, subtly and approach.

Anytime you see ‘About‘ or ‘Your Account‘ - that’s your dashboard.  So each account you have - everywhere - is another dashboard.

Amazon, Microsoft and even your local government all have dashboards - so I’m betting we can ‘normalize’ on the notion that all software will have a dashboard - whether it’s for the individual, or the group or enterprise.

So now imagine that each dashboard has an ‘outline’ file associated with it - that can be shared with other dashboards.

And this shared outline file will enable us to establish friendships and relationships between systems.  I’m calling this ‘distributed friending‘ and it’s centered around common notions of:

- friends

- subscribing to someone

- following somebody

These three kind of relationships are what I’m trying to facilitate ACROSS systems.

Each of us will have an outline file that is our virtual dashboard. It can travel with us between systems but more than likely will reside at my ‘favorite dashboard’.

The contents of my outline file will hold all the details of my digital lifestyle (more on this - later.)

Today I’m fleshing out how the outlines will facilitate distributed friending.

We’ll use Wordpress as a starting point (cause that’s what this blog is published in) - but we’ll get to other blogging and social networking platforms - pretty quickly.

Here are the three kinds of friending we want to create with a Wordpress plugin:

- a reciprocated “ADD as a Friend” kind of relationship (Blog A in the chart above)

- a “Subscribe to me” kind of one-way relationship, where you can control all the aspects of what’s exposed, who can see what and under what circumstances (Blog B in the chart above)

- a “Follow me on [this] service” kind of relationship, where the user does NOT have control over the exact access privileges, items and elements that are exposed.  This is simply connecting followers to Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. (Blog D in the chart above)

So here are a couple of charts showing this notion of distributed friending.

There’s also a fourth theoretical ‘friending type’ (Blog C in the chart above) - which imagines a giant shared social graph kind of scenario, sort of like what Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon wrote about 1.5 years ago (“Brad’s Thoughts…”) and what my ‘Our data’ server idea is.

But that’s for “future” implementation.

The Wordpress plug-in (we’re starting to build) will utilize our PeopleAggregator platform. We have a full set of APIs to implement the first kind of friending right now via a unique instance of our code; which I’m calling Marc’s Voice 4.0 (you’re currently reading “Marc’s Voice 3.0″
Anyone running Wordpress could take this plug-in and (eventually) implement these three kinds of distributed friending or ’subscribing to’ in their Wordpress blog.

The second type of “controlled subscribing” is only as good as your built up collection of stuff is and since no one has an account on my personal social network - it’ll be useless.  But it’ll make for great demoware!

While this is all going on, the Activity Streams standardization effort will be going on and we’ll hopefully all benefit from these efforts.  I’m hoping that this kind of granularity of control over access privileges (basicially what Facebook Connects ‘dynamic privacy’ does) will get standardized and available for all.  That’s what the second kind of friending is all about.   We’re just implementing the first and third kinds for now.

Our Wordpress plugin will establish relationships with anyone who has written a compatible plugin.  Anyone could run our plugin if they wish, and utilize the Marc’s Voice 4.0 instantiation of PeopleAggregator, but what I ASSUME/HOPE folks will do is write their OWN plugins.

So Chris Messina would create his own plugin with a Ruby-on-Rails framework, while Joseph Smarr would simply extend Plaxo, while Angus Logan and Dare Obasanjo would whip up an Windows Live interface ricocheting off of Live Mesh and David Recordon would get his SixApart dude to write a perl module for Moveable Type.

All we have to do is stuff the outline with the current set of each user’s friends, followers and subscribers.  Obviously the ‘agreed upon’ access privileges will take time, but we can get the first kind of friending working right now.  Each vendor will highlight their own services and tie into their own local ’stores’, but as long as we just agree to the schemas in the outline, we can remotely update each other’s friends tables and settings.

To plug into this ‘distributed friending experiment‘ the heavy lifting still has to be done by some ‘engine’, and that’s where Buddypress comes in for native Wordpress users.

But for the rest of us, there’s no reason why other social networking, aggregation and Live Web platforms can’t all plugin into this ‘distributed mesh’ and implement distributed friending - to connect people together ACROSS systems.

That’s the purpose of the exercise - DISTRIBUTED friending - NOT locked into one system - but ACROSS systems.

Once they hear about - Allen Hurff will ask Max Engel to gateway into this mesh utilizing MySpace ID, Eran Hammer-Lahav will create a mesh gadget for Yahoo Profiles and Kevin Marks - will personally roll up his sleeves and ask Mussie Shore to gateway into our mesh - as well.  It’s a group prototype demonstrating that social graphs, activity feeds and media and content sharing need not be locked up behind a single firewall.

Anyone with BuddyPress, Elgg, Drupal, Boonix or other ‘open social networking’ platforms could join in to this experiment and (I assume) it would be easy to plug into Ning, Times People, the BBC or [oooooooooops] I was gonna write Facebook - and guess what?

I’m not sure if they’d support or even allow this. :-)  Dave?

Well anyway - that’s the top level design and the charts I just created.  Now onto the technical specs.

even more end of January ‘09 blogging

Apologies to Kara Swisher. Poor Mr. Arrington is way off base and not acceptable.  He needs to chill.

You can’t make an announcement of “a new protocol” when you:

- don’t give it a name and allude to “hybrid protocol” (which is an extension to oAuth)

- are be so vague that the article is basically worthless

- and have this post appear right when TechCrunch’s journalistic integrity is being challenged (”AOL sells Bebo $200M for Bebo” - reported as fact)

So tell me - what is this post saying?  I am appealing to Mr. John McCrea on this - hopefully he’ll see this!

I guess I’ll have to go watch episode #26 (of theSocialWeb.tv)  - to find out what is this hybrid OpenID/oAuth UX protocol - or read this Google blog post - or what John has to say about “Two Click Signup” .  But poor Eric Shonfeld.  His post is worthless.

Paolo is in town - here he is with Dave Winer and Kevin Marks last night at the BMUG 25th anniversary meeting

Microsoft is getting ready to unleash the fury. Watch out - here comes another Windows launch.  I wonder if it’ll be different this time?  This is a great opportunity for them - to show that Google has changed them - that they are no longer your father’s Micrsoft.

Grasping at straws in the land of desperate lock-in strategies

Everyblock open sourced

Babble spinoff

It’s official - Chelsea is no longer going out with Harry

Integrated cloud storage is finally here

Buy a social network for $850M, sell it for $200M = brilliant! is there any better way of typifying this industry, AOL or our times?  Or the fact that this story was a complete fabrication?

How pathetic is it that the RNC would appoint a black man as their head. Are we to think that they would have done that if Obama had NOT won?  And how pathetic that this Uncle Tom would let them play him like that?  Apoint an Asian, Indian, Hispanic for Christ sakes.  Appointing a black man - is so unerhanded it just keeps teh RNC exactly where they’ve always been - as slimey liars.

yes Matilda - walled gardens are still here - they still exist

I’m hard at work on draft 4 of my treatise.

The only thing wrong with this article on the 10 things that are gonna happen in 2009 is that making money has to come FIRST!

Open Urban planning from the Limewire guy

Web usage demographics

Oh lordy - now we’re in trouble - Obama is using rdf

JUST KIDDING!  We LOVE rdf and the semantic web!

Peace and chill to Mike

Michael Arrington is going to take some time off from blogging.  He’s not happy and disclosed some disturbing news in his blog announcement.

I’m really happy to hear that Michael is gonna grab some time to chill out, though I’d have preferred it to be under different circumstances.

Life is too short and family and happiness come first.  If you’re not happy with what you’re doing - then change things.

And as far as jealousy, bad mouthing, yellow journalism, face spitting and death threats is concerned, I really gotta quote Rodney King: “Can’t we all live together?” Crazy people need to be insulated and kept away from our rock stars.

It’s symbolic that at the moment I went to go read Michael’s full post, I noticed a Domino’s Pizza Oven baked sandwich ad.  So much for integrity.

One of the things a nuclear winter brings out - is desperation, money clutching, back stabbing, winner takes all capitalistic terror.  So completely reasonable people become vicious competitors.

I’m using this shot of Michael with Kaliya to show him in a light most people don’t see.  Michael spends a LOT of time doing really good stuff - and since he never writes about me - I can’t be kissing his ass.  I really mean it.

Best wishes to Michael.

ComicWorks demo

Here’s an episode of the Computer Chroniocles with Stewart Chiefet and (nobody less than) Gary Kildall where they show output from a product we developed called ‘ComicWorks‘.  Yet another chapter in my history.

ComicWorks was developed along with someone named Mike Saenz - a comicbook artist.  the main programmer on the project was Dan Sadowski.

Al McNeil, Erik Neumann and J.T. Thompson also helped.  It was published by Mindscape.  Its followup was a tool called GraphicWorks - which was basically the same tool, without Mike’s artwork or comic book slant.

This show is from 1986 - before the color Mac - when the ONLY thing the Mac had going - was laser printing.  That’s the main reason we hired John Scull to be our CEO, as he was MR desktop publishing, but that’s another story.

Thanks to Nick Katsivelos for the link.  Brought to us - by the Internet Archive.

end of January ‘08 blogging

Two-way APIs for travel - from TripIt

Unforseen consequences - social is never something that can be controlled and be totally predictable

Is it a coincidence that the only name on this list is Dave Winer who has contributed anything significant to our world?

As the U.S. acclimates ourselves to a new president and gets ready for the SuperBowl - all I can think about is the Hulu ad.

In Cloud we Trust

I love the notion of the GDrive

The web 2.0 is not about you

I actually bought a photo today for my book. Its this image representing “two-way APIs”.  This is a first for me:

Social capitalism, Wordpress-Facebook, GoEverywhere,

Why befriending is yet another trend

I really enjoyed my Burger King Whopper tonight.

Not only was this Burger King promotion another great example of new kinds of marketing and advertising coming out of BK’s ad firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky - but it also was sweet to be able to ride on the backs of all those trolls, instant friends and wannabee friends - who turn this wonderful world of social networking - into some popularity contest.

Not only do I not care about how many friends I get - but I also can remember back (not too long ago) when Joi Ito and myself occupied the top statistical slots established by Orkut - in its first few months.

Here’s a screen grab I took from back in those days, where Joi is #1 and I’m #2 in connectors, I’m #1 and Joi is #5 in celebrities and Joi is #1 and I’m #10 in stars.  Both Joi and I gamed the system once we figured out how the algorithms worked.

Now friending, following and mutual contacts are the trends du jour.  And some of us find ourselves with 1,000s of unknown friends who (quite frankly) don’t give a shit about me.

So recently I’ve been noticing that others are also defriending.  Its the new fad!

1UP.com. aSmallWorld.com, CyworldUS.com, Always-on, Going-on, VisualFX - the list goes on and on of the  various social networks I helped design and launch back in the day.  And now there are all the client networks we build, launch and manage for our customers.

Defriending is the new trend.  Cleaning house and flushing the toilet is also in fad.  Put them both together and you’ve got yourself a real live social phenomena.

Football withdrawal blogging

“I say it - blunt and in your face”

Tee Hee Hee - Facebook may have more traffic - but MySpace makes money, and Facebook doesn’t.

Google Dashboard (concept)

We got our first Macs in Feb ‘84, shipped Musicworks (first Mac music product) - Oct. ‘84, VideoWorks (first animation tool) May ‘85 and we didn’t look back.  We had the first color mac product - VideoWorks II - by summer ‘87.  Oh yah - did I tell you about Maze wars+ = first Maze game = ‘86.  Or ComicWorks or GraphicWorks?

There’s so much more to do with tagging - I really think we’re dropping the ball collectively. We can’t really show benefits to WHY people should tag.

Its about time Twitter adopt oAuth. FactoryJoe weighs in on this important step.

There are no original ideas or songs

Tunnels between Gaza and Egypt

Fuck the cloud

Communicating with code

Top 20 social networks of 2008

New revenue streams. It will take lots of change to buy us out of this situation.

ITHIT, MyFolio, KickFire, new Bit.ly,

Using the economic downturn as a way to clean house

Don’t get all flummoxed about Microsoft laying folks off, or Google either.  When you have been on a hiring spree for 20 years, all companies end up with a lot of deep weight that need’s to get cut.

How can you possibly only hire good people, especially when you’ve been hiring 1,000s a people a year?

Unfortunately work ethic does not stay constant and when projects are completed and teams shift and new managers show up, when acquisitions happen and when personal projects get canceled - well then employee morale changes and workers become less valuable to a company.

Now multiply that by 1,000,000 and that’s the workforce and teh work ethic we have.

The kind of energy that drives a startup and entrepreneurs is long lost at large companies. And truly understanding this energy is something most VCs WISH they could grok.  Instead a new breed of VCs who focus in on younger people (and exploiting them) is the source for cash today.

Finding investors who can appreocaie hardw ork, enterprenurial spirit and innovation is hard, since so many of them ate  stuck in their own models of how they find comapnies, evaluate the opportunity and finally - pick 1-out of-100 investments.

So when a cycle turns and we encounter the kind of tiems we have right now, all sorts of things happen:

1. Companies use the downturn as an opporunity to clean house

2. VCs get to flip the funds and find more money - ooooooooops - there’s no more money to be found, so even KP has to go out - begging.

3.  Its good times for headhunters, Monster.com, Craigslist and LinkedIn - but 20% layoffs is something even they can’t absorb.

This economic downturn gives companies the opportunity to trim the bottom 10% of their workforce and not even notice a difference.

These kind of layoffs are inevitable - and why old farts like me scream so much when VC money is squandered, when stupid decisions are made, when old school nepotism and country club ties are favored over sound investments and strong founders.

Cause you need to be squirelling away your nuts for the inevitable nuclear winter.  All bubbles burst.

Layoffs keep the remaining employees motivated, it saves costs and there’s probably no change in productivity or getting things done.  That’s what’s been going on at other companies - as well.  That’s why markets and economies rise and fall - it’s the natural order.

Downturns also give companies the opportunity to recast stock options, and other fun stuff.

Just as soon as…..

- we finalize Bravo version of ROTCLink.com

- get NVidia’s ClubSLI into testing

- we’re gonna migrate this ot my old blog’s address, flow all the content into this 2.7 version - and THEN start to change the world - pixel by pixel

Photo blogging and then some

Platform as a service vs Utility Computing - “why not both?”  That’s my answer to Dare.  Having a turn-key “just run it” approach is obviously great, but then all that code would not be optimized and so who wants that?  Off the shelf re-usage will always reek of “living in a compatibility box” - and we saw what Apple did with that.  On the other hand, strictly utilizing the cloud as a utility is also attractive, but lots of hard work.  My answer - a hybrid of both!  Insulate through your APIs to YOUR deveopers - and gradually over time - optimize to the cloud.  Maybe even more than ONE cloud.

Congrats to Robert Kaye - on the BBC-MusicBrainz project!

Congrats to Ariel McNichol - close friend and former employee - on getting additional funding for Mego!

And their message is getting out - as well. Not just another pretty avatar - but a central place to store your stuff - as image.  Coolio!

Windows 7 Taskbar better than Mac OS/X Dock. The question is “Will Apple sue?”

Wow - all five best picture nominations are actually good movies. I wonder if the Internet changed the  Academy?

Twitter sex guide

Windows goes modular

Ajax APIs playground

New rackable servers

Whither Yahoo - they need to keep these sort of dudes - around

Twitter friend import into FriendFeed

Linden labs starts to follow the money

Got my Whopper coupon - my apologies to those 10 who I sacrificed for a Whopper on Facebook

Its about time to cut bootup time = to zero

It was 25 years ago today

IMVU is generating $1M a month in revs

Thank you David Galbraith for a pointer to this chart. Watching Babylon Burn has been a really good way to think about all this.  Don’t they all just deserve this?