Why is it called Data Availability rather than DataPortability? What about OpenSocial? And why isn’t Yahoo leading this announcement? Hmmmmm - Yes - very hmmmmmm

Frengo is doing some totally coolio inter-connection between social networks! To quote their CEO (Mahi de Silva): “What we do may not appear to be aligned with the business goals of social networks.” But I really think this DOES increase value - for all parties!

Facebook is announcing all sorts of onerous “keep this place clean” efforts. Though I certainly support these efforts and I’m sorry for the extra costs they’ll incur I also think this will slow down the ‘opening up of user’s data’.

Murdoch’s opportunity to sell off MySpace high - has passed. And usage on Facebook has slowed. So the migratory humans continue their journey.

Revisiting Cluetrain looks like it’ll be a great event.

There’s no need of a Facebook India - there’s iTimes.com

Dan Farber reports on the unfortunate demise of free refills.

Ted Leung reports on CommunityOne

Even though its funny to joke about ’some’ friends bering worthless - this calls to a head the very issue I hate most about social networking. That from a business POV its all about monetizing people. If (God Forbid) folks would change this attitude and see relationships (in every shape and size) as opportunities to connect people together to facilitate and enable all sorts of great new activities - then the monetization happens with those activities. NOT in the people’s eyeballs and page counting. That is so conflicting with the very nature of ‘relationships‘.

Sun has hooked up with Amazon and will ‘resell’ their grid web services. This seems like a final admission of defeat by Sun. Shouldn’t they have their OWN grid and web services on-demand. Kind of pathetic really. So Sun goes from “building the network” and inventing Java to - what? Yet another system integrator and channel presence? But at least they can get Neil Young to play along.

Congrats to the folks at Slideshare. I really like this approach. Macromedia has a slide show thingie - that they charged $10k for. This is what they should have been doing. Another example of how clueless Macromedia has been. But meanwhile kickass technologies and companies continue to thrive off their missed opportunities.

Google translate rising. I’ve been a loyal Babelfish customer, but now……

Ma.tt on infrastructure

New version of Orb a software Sling Box

Conversation threading

More details on how badly Verisign wants to get rid of Kontiki

The rise of video comments and Seesmic. Looks like Loic is getting work done.

Piet, xrdstype.net, OpenDD, Dragonfly, Lycos Cinema, Enomaly, Connectbeam, SearchMonkey, Tributes, Mosso, Bizzlr, Piwik, SitePoint, Lefora, Coolspotters, Yoono,

Ben Werdmuller and his colleague Marcus Povey of Curverider

Its a schema and an approach to representing all the disparate kinds of data that a social network stores - so that this stuff can be successfully exchanged, synchronized and subscribed to between different social network and social media systems.

One of the battlefields that have been fought over the years - are schemas. These data structures are the lists of the exact fields and structures that make up a particular set of ‘information’. Of course - everybody thinks that THEIR schema is the best - and I’ve participated in these relatively academic debates.

But the coolio thing about what Ben and his folks at Curverider have done - is that OpenDD not only covers all the schema stuff and what’s needed to facilitate data inter-change but its also grounded in a pragmatic approach to updating and synchronizing disparate system’s data structs together which are often dynamic and which are thought of completely differently by each system.

This is crucial because as the battles of the behemoths continue, we need to find common ground for open standards.

Since one man’s Group is - is another man’s Network - we’d better have a way of synchronizing the two together.

And since what a playlist, album or collection are is different in each system - there had better be a way for me to move my playlists from Ning to hi5 or Bebo.

How one keeps track of lists of contacts, friends, etc., is different. So any traditional schema approach just ain’t gonna cut it. We need something that is designed to deal with dynamic data, that is changing as fast as you follow some other Twitter twit - or add a name to your FriendFeed.

So OpenDD is a solution for inter-change, streaming, subscribing to and getting feeds from and synchronization. This is what Atom is all about - so I’m hoping to see OpenDD wrapped inside of Atom.

And this is what the OpenID2 attribute exchange was designed to handle - so utilizing the OpenDD approach with OpenID2 should all go smoothly. Watch for first implementations in June.

Like any good open standard, OpenDD is based upon UUIDs (universal unique identifiers) so it should be able to work with anything and anybody.

Curverider - like Broadband Mechanics has a real need to inter-connect their various networks together (their platform is called Elgg - and it’s positioned to work with (what we call) “inside the Firewall solutions.” Our platform (PeopleAggregator) is positioned to consumer facing solutions.

But we both wish to inter-connect our networks together.

NOTE: Right now we’re just talking about dataportability. Interoperability will come next.

And needless to say - this is exactly what the DataPortability.org effort has been hoping for and is supporting. They’ll be a presentation on OpenDD at the upcoming Data Sharing Summit next week.

So congrats to Ben and Marcus and the team on a job well done. Ben and company are looking for feedback - so please join the list and let’s get this puppy rolling! I’ve already seen postings on the Ning API on the list and now I wonder if Ning will expose anything more than just profile info - in their CVS.

Here’s Ben in front of a piece of my mural on the open mesh. We added some key stuff to it - once we reviewed everything. State, Redundancy and Context.

Now whenever I run into these dudes at public events I can ask Zuckerberg when he’ll release the enslaved personal data of his users - and I can ask Andreessen when he’ll publicly disclose what’s really going on inside of Ning. And they’ll probably be hanging out with each other allot now.

Cause afterall - anyone who can scam private equity firms for $100M in cash and never make a profit is the kind of guy Facebook wants on their board - right?

I know that Kara sees my blog and writing this post may get noticed by others as well. What better way to get your message out and questions answered than to call people on their bullshit and take it to their face?

Apparently when I unjustly attack somebody I get noticed - so I just thought I’d explain myself here to those who care. I’m not attacking unjustly because I think my attack is unjust. Quite the opposite. I attack and critique and call people on what I consider to be the bullshit that keeps this industry back.

I call people on what I consider to be the unjust decrepit disease of greed and insider gamesmanship that keeps the rich rich and the entrepreneurs who work their asses off - poor.

When VCs purposefully lead their young founders on and then kick them out - this is what’s wrong with our world. I don’t use theFunded to complain - I use my blog to attack.

My company doesn’t have a $15B valuation or even a $500M valuation. We don’t need valuation at all. We have a platform we license and offer as SaaS and I have ideas and questions. I use my blog to create change.

So when I read about Fred Wilson’s arbitraging - I write about it. And when I get responses that support Fred - I appreciate the love he gets.

And if I ask a question to an AT&T VP about why they won’t turn on some of their dark fiber - and the conference moderator lets him walk off the stage without answering the question - that pisses me off.

When I see trends like OpenSocial and I figure out what Google is really doing - I blog about it. And I let it be known that we’re “bringing social to software”. And that we can all work together.

When my gut tells me there’s something wrong with Twitter - I complain about it early and often.

And when I earlier created an Open Letter to Marc and Gina - I don’t complain - but I remember.

And when Wikipedia then says that I often criticize people - I take them at their word - afterall Wikipedia is authoritative - right?

And when I go on panels at conferences I say what I think, not what will play well to the press or get me VC investment.

And when I’m NOT invited to speak at conferences - I get up in the audience and ask hard questions. Sometimes my questions are completely ignored, sometimes they’re dodged - like some vicous bullet trying to extract the truth.

Or when I blog about what I see is Lock-in - and others support it - I criticize then too - cause they’re adding to the problem.

So in general I try to ask the right questions at the right time.

But at the end of the day - my words are my swords. We don’t have big bags of capital - so that we never have to make a profit. I believe companies should make money and VC deficit funding is a big problem in this industry.

The insider games that happen (and why Loic Lemeur moved here) is also a problem. I’m not saying Loic isn’t a great guy and that Seesmic doesn’t rock - but the truth is that Loic moved here so that he could be close to the games.

Facebook has said it won’t make any money and will budget to break even next year. COOLIO - cause at least they innovate. But Ning doesn’t really innovate and I’m afraid that with Andreessen joining the Facebook board - that only means that Facebook will NEVER make a profit.

But if they get bought by Microsoft - with some of that leftover Yahoo money - who cares. Right?

His Quibblo poll (which asked what price would Yahoo’s stock price would close at today) - was picked up by 24 blogs (including his own.) It collected almost 2,200 votes within a day.

But did Fred do this out of some interest in Yahoo or because he actually cared about all those poor Yahoo shareholders? No - he did it so he could put in some buy prices at the low price and make some money off of somebody else’s misery.

Ah Wall St. Gotta love it - huh?

And capitalism - what a great system.

This arbitraging behavior has been around for a while.

But what does it have to do with making things?

Or bettering the world?

Michael Arrington has a surpringly nascent post on what he sees as a solution. Though Michael is surprised at my cognitive state, I was happy to see a typo in his post. This means Michael is still a human (despite his godfatherly posture) . My bet is that by the time you get to read his post “complaint” - will get fixed to “compliant”.

Meanwhile - back at the scaling conversation, Arrington lays out how microblogging tools can simply use XMPP to route messages to Twitter and each other via XMPP, while not relying upon the existing way its done now. Clients like ‘Alert Thingy’ can easily add this - so now we will see what happens.

Genius’ at work - like Dave Winer and Bill LeFebvre - will figure it out.

If we could create a giant list of ‘microbloggers’ - somehow federated together - that would be a good thing - too. Maybe this is where the ’shared social graph’ comes in? How ’bout using OpenID?

I have nothing more to add to this - YES - please do it.

Now - back to my regularly scheduled work day.

UPDATE: Typo fixed!

Happy Birthday to BigDave Jacobs

Dan Farber groks what I’m trying to say. The open mesh is not Microsoft’s mesh - it’s ours. Please go and read my series of 10 blog posts and stay tuned for the evolution of my mural. Like I said I’ll be throwing a party a month this summer - to collect folks thoughts and evolve the mural - organically.

Now lets see what Yahoo will do. I certainly think that the Y! OS initiative is correct. But now they gotta execute! That’s been their problem - execution .

Dave Winer responded to my post on Decentralized Twitter. Thanks Dave. I can’t wait til some solution is found to this lock-in situation.

This Intel-NVidia screamer sounds outrageous

Doc Searls has another way of looking at these behemoths colliding, merging and gossiping.

Thanks Om! I’m gonna buy me a X300

And meanwhile now we can all speculate on whether Apple will buy Adobe

Orson Scott Card Rips Apart JK Rowling For The Lexicon Lawsuit

Verisign takes a bath on Kontiki.  The company has raised $42M in VC had been sold to Verisign for $62M - and lord knows what it went for now.  This is a classic Silicon Valley story.  This shitty ass technology had too much money put into it - so it keeps bouncing from company to company. I wonder why?

This is exactly why I resisted to signing up to Twitter in the first place and why I’ve continued to complain about relying upon a centralized service at all. [1], [2], [3], [4]

That’s why God (or whomever) invented DNS.  If we are to rely upon Twitter as infrastructure - it better sure as hell be decentralized!

Now how do you do that - and let other vendors in on it?

I’m sure that’s the last thing Evan Williams and Fred Wilson wanna see happen - but their lack of understanding the nuances and issues here - kind of are forcing the point.

Look - it’s not that Twitter is totally coolio.  But we need 100 Twitters.  That’s what I said before and why I’ll keep saying it.

Distributed decentralized Twitter = YES

Each post has a chart showing how the particular area I’m focusing on - looks vis a vis one’s ID and profile record. Then I started to imagine what these charts would look like - overlaid on top of each other.

Each one of the posts maps out who the major players are, who are the dudes and dudesses down in the trenches doing the work and how do I see all these areas meshing together.

So here is the Table of Content on the series. Please send me any input, feedback, corrections, additional names and players and lets all build the open mesh - together

[1] - ID, Personas, Social Graphs and Groups

[2] - Persistent Ubiquitous Content

[3] - Structured Content (and shared servers filled with that stuff)

[4] - the Live Web

[5] - Tools

[6] - UI Objects

[7] - Infrastructure

[8] - Constructs

[9] - People’s Marketplace

[10] - Standards

I’m working on a mural that visualizes many of these issues - in one place. I’ll be hosting parties throughout the summer (and pool weather) to get folks to come on out to Walnut Creek and interact.

Creating these series of blog posts and the mural has forced me to directly map out and triangulate between all these different areas of the open mesh.

So the very notion of “building out” the open mesh, what it’s infrastructure is and what the ramifications are of having ubiquitous content or a Live Web component intimately coupled to the open mesh - is what I’ve been thinking allot about.

Coming out of all this is an awareness of a new kind of infrastructure - which simulates the blood veins, nervous systems, skeletons, fire hose and neural networks of the open mesh. Its about RSS, Friendfeeds, XMPP, attention, two-way APIs, OpenID, DNS-like backbones and an international approach.

Its also about redundancy and NOT relying upon a single party for anything (witness recent Twitter outages.) And it’s about accepting and living with competition (we certainly have - given how many white label social networking platforms and frameworks there are out there now!)

No one wants to give up control of their technology - so (by definition) the open mesh must be made up of a combination of open, free protocols and technologies with proprietary APIs and technologies.

That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to develop compelling open platforms and experiences for end-users - it just means to be pragmatic you have to work with Facebook, MySpace and Google’s APIs - regardless of whether their technologies are truly open or not.

So when sitting back and thinking about the importance of open standards in the open mesh, one has to draw the conclusion that in fact it’s not about OPEN standards - but standards and redundancy. Its OK to have a hybrid combination of proprietary standards and open standards - just as long as we have choice.

Afterall - that’s what the Architect told Neo right “humans are about choice” (I’m paraphrasing here.)

So by having redundant infrastructure and choice over standards - we can achieve a harmonious open mesh.

IMHO

Now onto the summary post - which pulls it all together.

“It’s all about money, ain’t a dam thing funny, you got to have a JOB in this land of milk and honey.” - Grandmaster Flash

We saw it before and we’re about to see it again.

The nuclear winter is approaching. Ning has stashed away $100M in cash and others are doing the same. Soon the layoffs will start and even Google and Facebook will stop hiring.

And coming out of this dot bomb 2.0 will be a stronger, more robust internationally oriented open mesh which will rely upon inter-connected People’s Marketplaces to pay the rent and stay alive.

When I say marketplace I don’t mean literally competing with Craigslist, Amazon or eBay - though it could.

I mean a way for people to make money off of using the web to market themselves, share assets and reusable code with peers and in general, cocoon ourselves to the un-due influence of venture capital and BigCos.

This is where the politics of the open mesh collide with capitalism, Silicon Valley and Republicans. Cause on one side - we can all talk about sharing and RSS feeds and open APIs all we want - yet we’re spending ourselves into a recession because of the most unpopular president in our history (and here I’m talking about U.S. politics - but surprise surprise things aren’t going so well around the world - either!)

So what do politics and the Iraq War have to do with the open mesh and the inherent conflict of being a Republican and supporting the open mesh?

Well the War has certainly helped Exxon’s profits. And Oil prices have increased the price of food and everything else. And crooked and stupid investment bankers have tubed the international banking and credit industry - yet they make sure to take care of themselves as their companies go down hard.

The open mesh is based upon a spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

The open mesh is about becoming self sustaining so we AREN’T effected by wars, stupid execs or crooked politicians.

The open mesh will inter-connect a myriad of cultures, platforms and technologies in a way which will fulfill the original promise of the web.

To do that - we need to live with these Republicans. They’ll be followers, but they’ll eventually understand that open is the new black and that if they DON’T open up - they’ll end up like Word Perfect or Netscape.

The People’s Marketplace will bring cute little Avatars into our cell phones and have them carry around or ‘digital lifestyles’ in their backpacks.

The People’s Marketplace will enable me to sell all these 3D models and drum beats that I’ve got stored up on my hard drive.

The People’s Marketplace will enable end-users to monetize their ‘attention’ and auction it off to the highest bidder.

The People’s marketplace will harness a community of peers and get answers to your questions in a timely manner.

The Open Mesh will provide all sorts of People’s Marketplaces that understand who you are, what you want and where you are. Sure they’ll be plenty of BigCos - all migrating towards the open mesh - on their own trajectory each path.

Educational objects are also a way for intelligent folks to make money. Imagine encapsulating some course, tutorial, advice, guidelines, how-to-guide in an object which can get you PAID for your work and intellectual property! Educational objects would fit seamlessly into the open mesh and be compatible with many DIFFERENT People’s Marketplaces.

Health is also a big bugaboo and should offer lots of opportunities for the open mesh.

There are lots of lots of people out there - each with their own shingle hanging out there - looking for customers. The open mesh will bring them their customers and build a community around their products or services.

The best part about blogging as white paper as you’re writing it - is the feedback and editing you get from your readers. So please everyone - help me out in identifying players, key issues, additional constructs anything else I’ve left out of these blog posts.

Now onto the summary page.