INTEROPERABILITY FROM MICROSOFT!  Is this a coincidence that this happens the week AFTER Gates officially left?  Nothing like “additional steps” when you need it.

Welcome Soceeo 

WHAT!  You mean BoingBoing has a vendetta?  They aren’t nice?  Oh my.  Right on to Violet Blue - is all I can say!  She must be doing something right.

This is how synergy works. This is what should have happened a AOL T-W.

Facebook really only worth $5B? Maybe only $3B-$4B?

hi5 makes a move

Lilia - what we’re REALLY blogging for - is for our children.

I wonder if they’ll ever be a way to aggregate music taste info from QLoud, iLike, Last.fm, MusicBrainz and Pandora?  Seems like a natural thing to do. Having an API from last.fm is  good start.

Been playing with Summize

Matt has left SVN.

You mean CMS vendors have run out of customers to selll to - so they (like message board vendors) are jumping on the social bandwagon? No!  That’s shocking!

This is something Yahoo should learn from Google.  a) You buy a company, b) you retool and rebrand it, put it into context of your assets and brand and hen c) you ship it.  Why couldn’t Yahoo figure that out?

Dare Obasanjo points out that some folks are leaving Google and going to Microsoft.

Google is sneaking into the living room.

Playstation3 is going social

They’re singing my song - avoid lock-in NO single vendor solutions allowed!

Grou.ps got money - congrats dudes!

Doing little is also good when you’re ex-Google guys

Hacking Facebook for Data Portability

MySurfPad, Whoisi, Blog Networks, MeOwns,

Ping.fm looks totaly coolio. 

What does one have to do to get a Beta code invite?  Blog about it? 

One way that Ping.fm could help us build the Open Mesh would be to save off and load in the list of services/sources one uses and a list of destinations one sends their stuff to.

These two lists of services can then be utilized by other services - enabling the user to keep only ONE set of lists updated.  So when users want to add another communication service, blogging tool, social network, media gallery, news or activity stream reader to your bag of tricks - they only have to go to one place and update the list - once - and all the participating services would get that updated list.

Bam!

My mesh is expanded.

We call the service that reads the list of destinations and places it inside of a blogging tool/editor - OutputThis.   Its been up for a while but nobody else uses it then us.  But it’s GPL 0f if anyone wants a copy.

I just LOVE what ping.fm is doing.  Its very validating to see people launch and run services like that.  I wonder what they think their business model is?

The mashable beta code has run out, so I need a new one.  Please.

The ‘person’ related to MySpace made it very clear that this was just an incremental step, a “dataportability light’ gesture - which of course) is better than nothing and gets MySpace moving towards doing the right thing.

But MySpace has a lot to lose and is scared shitless but is being FORCED to open up.  So they’re taking it slowly and cautiously.

I think we can all applaud MySpace for going halfway (or whatever the percentage is) but not going all the way is just not acceptable.

Clearly if a person wishes to import their profile data into some destination site - they should be allowed to do that - just like Plaxo and Microsoft enable.

But I think we all agree that something is better than nothing.

Congrats to the folks at MySpace for shipping Data Availability

Dare Obasanjo brings up a good point about FriendFeed:  “Why would I want to go to whole new site and create yet another friend list just to share what I’m doing on the Web with my friends? Isn’t that what social networking sites are for?“ Dare is right but this also points to a new distributed world where individual features become platforms, industry standards and market leaders.  Then Facebook goes and copies them.

Lets see Helio gets sold for $39M - they took in what?  $500M - More? Now that’s what I call the opportunity in mobile today.  Even YOU can lose 100’s of millions!

Ever wonder why Slide and Rock You have been able to achieve the heights they have?  By bending and sometimes breaking the rules.  Now Facebook is shutting them down.  Thank you Facebook.

Turns out SIOC is very similar to ThreadsML

Google Media Server

This Life|ware stuff is totally coolio but adsurdly expensive!

You know I hate to say it - by my own experience with Ash Patel aren’t too different from these public rumors.  Yah gotta wonder who was to blame for Yahoo’s demise and why they’re still there?

Rapleaf study of social networks vs age (I wish we had so much extra money we coudl ust piss it away commisioning studies….. ah VCs!)

Not too much controversy last night at the Geek Grrl thingie - I wonder how the alt dinner went?

Minerich,  OleOle, DisneyFamily, Jogli, trendrr, Pique Discovery Ads, eFactor,

Let’s imagine that I wanna be a public figure, keep track of all the conversations, memes and tags I’m accumulating and keep them all in sync with my various social graphs I’m accumulating around the web.

I talked early about the notion of an Our Data server - something that would keep a copy of my public social graph around - so I could use it for inviting (I mean SWARMING) people into a new service, like we say happen with Plurk a couple of weeks ago.

The Our Data idea is baby step implementation of ‘Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph‘ a white paper treatise put up last summer by Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recorodon.   Now that Google is helping us discover our friends and MySpace has just announced the same and Microsoft is providing two-way APIs for us to access Live Contacts and we’re all waiting for the hammer to drop with Facebook and their notions of dynamic privacy - what’s NEXT?

Well let me propose the notion of a Personal Knowledge Base.

Call it a PKB, what have you, the idea here is that the collected set of tags, links, feeds, social graph, on-going and archived conversations, events, reviews, Groups and media and text postings all make up a knowledge base.  And it’s MY knowledge base.

So why not call it a personal knowledge base? [PKB]

We all know the term knowledge base from the world of knowledge management and we all think of knowledge bases as a particular set of info on a particular set of topic(s) or areas of interest.

So wouldn’t an individual have a whole bunch of personal knowledge bases - that (perhaps) are associated with a particular persona of their life.  So (for purposes of trying to keep all these ideas straight ) lets say that:

- each persona gets it’s own personal knowledge base

- and that each personal knowledge base - may in fact - be based on more than one topic, tag or area of interest.  And one persona could have MORE than one personal knowledge base - if you’re all over he map - like I am

Here’s  a map of 4 Marc Canter personae:

Each PKB has it’s own unique set of friends (social graph) media, on-going conversations, events, tags, groups, etc. - and has overlap with other PKBs and links to all sorts of services and accounts around the web.

We can break this all down in the social web and say:

- some people may wanna hear about MY PKBs, their FRIENDS PKBs, aggregate THEIR PKBs with others PKBs and in general keep track of, search and archive PKBs to their heart’s content - until the cows come home.

- shouldn’t I have a publishing platform to publish and archive my PKBs, participate in on-going conversations, aggregate photos and videos - based upon particular tags, associate events to places to particular sets of friends?

- and shouldn’t all these PKBs, storage locations, particular services I use, etc. - be distributed?  (i.e. NOT on one site and NOT locked up inside one database?

- isn’t the essence of ANY PKB to be distributed in today’s open mesh world?

Keeping track of everything on the web, wrapped inside the notion of PKBs may make things simpler.

- we can develop integrated ‘waystations’ , ‘dashboards’ , ‘aggregators’, what have you

- we can keep track of a distributed set of destinations and publishing end-points - all united by a brand= ME

- and we can inter-connect with any of our friends, collegaues, heros, villians, BigCos, powers that be

Just saying - PKBs may be a good way of thinking about things.

Speaking of TechCrunch I’m thinking APIs on CrucnhBase might be appropriate just about - now.

And now that I’ve given TechCrunch two plugs, where’s my ticket to the party?

php4 going away?

Nokia buys Plazes!

Scaling Facebook

Mixx gets Social

Tim O’Reilly taks care of his own?  No!  That’s surprising!

Start watching the goings on in the Russian Internet space.  This little world is getting bigger every day.

See how innovation works?  FriendFed comes up with a coolio idea to enable people to comment on feed streams and then Facebook implements it back. 

Nice to see Loic rcognize his European roots.  Afterall -eet vill be very chard for Loic to geet rid of his accentuo.

Congrats to Paul Trevithick, Kim Cameron and all the rest who have announced the Infocard Foundation.  Drummond Reed is on the board AND on the bnoard of OpenID Foundation. That makes Drummond - the bridge.

Dan Farber’s Fingerprints are starting to show up on CNet

The real 25 top social networks - modeling them correctly

Dead Live Services

This is my kind of network - a singing network

Oh goodey - AT&T is going to give Akamai a run for it’s money. I wonder what will happen with the patents?  I bet AT&T has  couple to fight back with - huh?

Coolio new backup service from Multiply

It doesn’t surprise me at all that Boing Boing is playng power politics.

Yup!  I agree.  Yahoo needs to go private, ignore the private markets and get on with it.

Open  Source Symbian

IMVU = 20M members

10 Internet Easter eggs

Syncplicity,  Sproutcore, FriendRank, PutPlace, Wix, SodaHead, SocialBrowse, Animato, HealthVault, Reeplay.it, InGameNow, Affinity Circles, RocketOn, TripSay,

“You’ve got the best platform we’ve seen, yet most of the white label deployments out there are boring and unsatisfying.  Nobody seems to understand the market as well as you do.”

The answer of course is that companies aren’t trying to stay on the cutting edge, create compelling experiences or do the right thing. They’ve been told they need a social network and so that’s what they’re paying for - a  simple, stripped down ghost town which will probably never succeed.

Risk is something to be avoided. Changing people’s lives is not on their agenda.  Achieving the goals of the entity or brand is.

I used to answer that it’s all about “marketing” and “sales” - but I’m getting tired of being polite.

If the client isn’t smart enough to do the right thing, what can we do?  I try and argue allot, but then I get branded “a whacko” who doesn’t know how to do sales or handle enterprise clients.

I try and soft sell them and once in a while that works, but in general we can only build what our clients and customers pay us to build.

As I always say “you can be the world’s greatest saxophone player, but yet if you’re standing on the street corner it doesn’t matter“.  So getting distribution, being at the right place at the right time and insider connects often means more to closing a sale - then being the best platform around.

We’ve always been a technology driven company.

We stand by our product, it’s features and our ability to give the market what WE think are the best capabilities and we offer growth and innovation where it counts.

But not surprisingly that doesn’t seem to factor in much when bosses consider which vendor to choose.  The smart ones do, but often we’re not talking about the smartest cookies around.

We get a llot of customers coming to us AFTER they’ve been burned by FiveAcross or LiveWorld or others.  There are a LOT of hustlers out there selling snake oil and just ’cause a company gets bought by Cisco does not make their platform good or even stable.

I think this is why VCs don’t like the while labeling business.  After abandoning consumer facing apps in the early part of this decade, VCs discovered Web 2.0 and viral effect.  It meant they no longer had to hire an enterprise sales team, wait out long sales cycle and cater to bosses who often - well lets just say “their criteria for choosing solutions and partners isn’t always based upon “best quality product or service”.

So we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

Should we expend huge costs to develop a sales team, and hire folks who CAN play the six month sales cycle game, suck up to enterprise IT guys and do whatever it takes to close a sale? That’s the land of white labeling we’re in today.

Or do we cater to the fickle tastes of the TechCrunch 50k (which now more like the Techcrunch 750k) and go down the  route of the never ending game of influencing early adopters - on the other side.  And even if you DO launch, create a hit and provide compelling experiences and change the world - what’s the business model?

Banner ads?

Why do you think Marc Andreessen turns down customers and sends them email responses?  They refuse to TOUCH customers.  That’s their whole model - put up templates and let them eat cake.  Ning has no intention of EVER dealing with customers directly.

But it’s the high touch, hand holding and customization work that defines what white labeling is all about. That’s why Ning is NOT a white label service. I call it a ‘meta-network’.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with folks getting templates and paying $20 a month.

But there are a whole lot of other ways to do social networking that Ning.  That’s what we do.

Clearly targeted advertising is coming, I believe folks will PAY for great tools and advanced features and more and more we’ll see affiliate relationships and mutual back scratching come into play - as traffic flow and linkage become the commodity of choice.

But right now - we’re still in this “sure sir how can I help you” mode - and that means we have to give them what THEY think they want.  Not necessarily what is the right thing to do.

Now that we can move user’s profile and social graph between sites - we can offer our customers features that make sense - but I also warn them “it’s a two-way street”.

“Just as easily as these potential customers of yours can leave some other site - or at least take a copy of their info and bring it into your site - they can leave YOUR site and go somewhere else”.  Its the level playing field of the open mesh that we’re moving towards and it’s vendors like Broadband Mechanics that have to educate and navigate this future path - for OUR customers.

And maybe THAT’s what really differentiates Broadband Mechanics and PeopleAggregator.   Our honesty in educating our customers as to “how to do the right thing“.  I think that’s called ‘consulting and marketing services‘.

Recent posts on:

- a reference design for the open mesh - and an idea for an ‘Our Data’ server

- rebirthing ThreadsML

- a new IPTV show called theSocialweb.tv

have kept me busy.  But I just wanna make sure anyone reading this blog has read those posts.   Things are heating up here at Broadband Mechanics, more sites are going live and we’ve realized we’re going to have to  reposition PeopleAggregator - as it’s a LOT MORE than just a white label social network.  Maybe Fred Wilson will like it now. 

Some woman are whores, have been whores or act like whores.  But that doesn’t mean that women CEOs should be treated like sex objects.  IMHO  And any VC who funds this sort of behavior - well I guess they’re acting like VCs.

Best wishes to Ian Rogers on TopSpin Media.

Really nice to see it all in one place.  I bet you could create a list x5 times as long for AOL.  Russell Beattie believes in Yahoo - do you?

Jeff Jarvis is getting high

Doc is getting better

Steve Gillmor is surviving the Net

and Om Malik is in Beta on his version 2.0

Wanna see how the insider’s game works in Silicon Valley?

Hmmm - I wonder if Ash Patel remembers me?

I don’t go to many conferences anymore - unless I’m speaking.  And even then when the lights go off - I still fall asleep.  Getting famous people to sit up on stage and say nothing - does nothing for me - but it DOES load my guns with ammunition for challenging questions - which half the time I don’t get the opportunity to ask.

Could multicore be the NEXT new black?

Initial thoughts on Google’s Friend Connect

EmailToID,  SoundCloud, SocialNotes, Acquia (commercial Drupal), Hakia,

We called it ThreadsML and the web site and archive of the mail list are still around.

I seem to remember that a message board that David Weinberger used throughout the nineties had “gone away” and he was quite pissed about losing all those archived ‘conversations‘.

So I found myself on this list, and we knocked around various principles, requirements, usage scenarios and specifications - which when built - would enable all sorts of new kinds of interaction and ‘fluid conversations‘ via the web.

Well look what happened!

It happened WITHOUT ThreadsML!

But like any good new idea, it’s ownership and control will be tussled and fought over by various early stage vendors who are first to the game.  Sound like Twitter, FriendFeed, CoComment and Disqus to you?

ThreadsML is exactly what is needed now.  And lots of inter-connected servers running ThreadsML, with a DNS-like backbone striping and copying these conversations as they happen in real-time.

But before I get too far - let me stand back and explain what ThreadsML is - in an abstract and get some historical perspective as well.  I’ll start off with some background:

- Way back when conversations would start as mail list threads.  Endless going back and forth with email messages, conversations were difficult to follow - but spirited and lively anyway!  One would create a ‘group’ in Outlook to keep track of all the folks on the thread and we’d ‘manually’ maintain the conversation.

- Then blog comments came along and conversation morphed, just as they were morphing with IM, chat rooms and IRC back channels.  We also got a feature called ‘trackback - and blog search engines could also inform us if anyone had picked up on a ‘meme’ you posted and started an unofficial conversation.  A blog conversation.

- One could also follow a specific meme or keyword or phrase - and watch it birth itself throughout the blogosphere.  Our decentralized world was evolving.

-  Several years passed in this state until Twitter came along and track.  Now we could Twit what we were doing and one could follow specific people’s Twits which naturally led to all sorts of conversations, both long and short.

- FriendFeed put an interesting twist on all this - enabling us to comment on ANY conversation that flowed through FriendFeed.  So we’re now watching Robert Scoble and others perfect this new way of conversing - in a decentralized manner.

- Now the point comes up “who owns these conversations?“  Call them fluid - call them liquid - they’re happening completely free-for-all in the open marketplace - just like standards are SUPPOSED to evolve.

- Steve Gillmor has pointed out that the TinyURL facility has also given us independence of vendors and the ability to cannoize our conversations.  His ecosystem and nervous system metaphors may confuse some - but this is a complex chess game we’re playing here - and one which needs all sorts of ’savants’ preaching to their interested choirs.

- So in that spirit I’d like to add to this discussion the notion that a standard that can represent a conversation - a persistent re-entrant conversation - can help unite all of these memes flying around the decentralized meshed web.  A standard is possible and in fact is staring us in the face.

ThreadsML exists as a web site that David Weinberger has been paying for - for almost 5 years now.  We created a spec for ThreadsML (back then) and we’ve been waiting for this day to arrive - convinced that it’s need would become apparent when - well what is happening today happens.  And it DID happen!

The need for an open standard to unite disparate kinds of conversations, threads, IM sessions, comments, tracks, mail lists, etc.  These conversations get started on all sorts of service, in many different ways.

The following is my interpretation of what ThreadsML is - apologies to anyone if I get it wrong.

Technically a ThreadsML server would be a threaded object store - which would enable anyone to contribute into any thread node and attach media to any node.  A DNS-like sub-system would unite LOTS of these servers together and all sorts of glue code would convert proprietary threaded data structures and protocols into ThreadsML and back.

So ThreadsML is more than just some schema.  Its a system that unites conversations and stores them as ‘memes‘.

David Recordon and the DiSO project seem to be working on something similar to ThreadsML.

The original ideas are still there - waiting for anyone to build them.

We clearly need a neutral place:

- which is owned and controlled by no one party (NEA)

- which can house these conversations

- convert them into other forms

- enable re-entrant contributions - later

- stop spam

- enable one to attach media to any node of the conversation

- and keep it all interactive and two-way!

That’s what the dream of ThreadsML was all about.

Here’s a historical artifact I created - back in 2003 - about ThreadsML:

Little did I realize that ‘near term’ meant “wait five years”.