People, Services and Content - the 3 HiWays
As I continue to strip down my concepts and hone in on how we can all work together in a level playing field of the future - it all comes down to establishing 3 common constructs around People, Services and Content. The 3 HiWays.
RSS has been an amazing commonality for Content, and now we’re looking to OpenID, OAuth and Portable Contacts to provide us commonality for People.
WSDL was an aborted attempt at services interchange - and OpenSocial is a nice attempt at standardizing how to do a ‘Facebook App’.
But notice how powerful the Apple store is and how all the other ‘platforms’ wish they had a ’store’ of their own?
So what we need is a commonality for Services in general - a one way of browsing, trying out and purchasing software. A standard for marketplaces.
Now think of a bus, a backbone, a common layer or strata for these common constructs.
Ideally all platforms would ‘jack into’ or ‘mesh with’ these common constructs to not only attain interop and dataportability with other platforms, but also to attain a distributed architecture which benefits end-users, leaves room for smaller players and establishes a level playing field for all.
Two-way APIs will be the glue that ties this distributed architecture together. But at the core of this commonality are these 3 common constructs:
- People
- Services
- Content
These are the constructs we’ll be using to build our software. It’s already happening and it’ll continue til we’re there.
I’m excited what OpenSocial2 or OpenSocial3 will be. OpenSocial is (IMHO) one of the paths we’ll get to the 3 HiWays. It won’t be the only way, but that’s what the Open Mesh is all about - lots of different techniques and solutions working together - for the betterment of end-users! An eco-system for ALL!
Once we have APIs into:
- what my friends are searching for
- where my friends are (geo location) right now? where do they live?
- what are my friends reading (RSS, Activity streams)?
- what restaurants do my friends recommend?
Then we’ll be able to address, interact with and attain ‘compatibility’ with other platforms, over our common ‘bus’.
Once we can agree to standards revolving around People, Services and Content - we can facilitate a truly level playing field which leaves room for all to prosper.
UPDATE: Jared Hanson has a wonderful way of putting it:
The standards are all coming together. In my mind, the flow looks something like this:
1. People become directly addressable (i.e. through email addresses).
2. Programs dereference the email address and get an XRD document, which identifies associated services. [THIS is the dashboard outline (Marc's addition)]
3. Programs interact with the discovered services to publish and subscribe to content.
You’ve got the XMPP logo along the services line in your picture. I think XRD(S) would be more appropriate. XMPP is important, but it is analogous to HTTP, which just acts as a carrier for a higher-level protocol.
The standards are all coming together. In my mind, the flow looks something like this:
1. People become directly addressable (i.e. through email addresses).
2. Programs dereference the email address and get an XRD document, which identifies associated services.
3. Programs interact with the discovered services to publish and subscribe to content.