Marc's Voice

DiSO Dashboard Outline proposal

I’ve been so immersed in writing up a treatise on how I see the world shaking out, I haven’t had time to get proactive and make specific contributions TO this world.

So here we go.  My birthday present to the world - on my birthday.

The following is the culmination of some ideas I’ve had for a long time on the importance of Dashboards in our distributed world.  I believe that Dashboards are a metaphor that ALL apps, services, blogs and social networks can share.  Certainly  NetVibes, iGoogle and Myyahoo can be considered Dashboards.

And Microsoft has one, and all social networks have them - in fact - I predict that ALL software will provide a ‘dashboard‘ to their users - if for no other reason, to hold their ‘identity’ in.

And when we all have something in common like a Dashboard, we can then have an Outline file (or page tags) which represents what the Dashboard contains - it’s content, your profile info and social graph, what modules and UI elements are INSIDE the Dashboard, what feeds you’ve subscribed to, it’s configuration info - everything.

So here’s the pitch:

The exciting stuff happens when you start to try and figure out how to do distributed friending or other kinds of distributed stuff. Having an outline of everything in the Dashboard will come in pretty handy.

DiSO Activity streams standard

It was quite a scene yesterday at SixApart.

John McCrea and Read/Write have already reported on it - so I’ll add my two cents from my perspective.

1. Chris Messina has been researching the issues and Marty Atkins came up with the first draft spec for this DiSO Activity Feeds standard.

2. We went over the spec and helped define some more verbs which seem to be the standard ones everyone was using.  I pushed for JOIN and FRIEND.

4. There was much discussion over the Atom media extensions, mediaRSS and basic meta-data for media.  Now I hate to say I told you so, but that’s the stuff I was pushing for - like 3-4 years ago.  But alas, we were too early.  So here we are 3-4 years later, still discussing media meta-data in feeds.  Microformats are great for page tags, but we’re talking about feeds here.  But at least we’re getting there now!

5. DiSO Activity feeds are based on Atom, with lots of RSS mixed in.  It all seemed coolio to me - but I’m not geeky enough to argue the fine points.  A key aspect of my ‘open mesh’ treatise is that geeks spend too much time arguing over details.  What I heard was positive vibrations throughout the room.

6. Verbs and Objects is what it’s all about.

7. Facebook was there and talking like they’d be supporting this stuff. I wanted to ask them explicitly about that - but I promised that I’d focus on positive vibes - no negativity - so I kept my mouth shut.

8.  David Recordon ran the meeting like a pro.  The best part was when Simon of SixApart pointed out that it is HE who actually writes the code that David is often talking about.  Gotta love it.

9. Joseph Smarr and John McCrea seem so NOT like COMCAST dudes. I just gotta womder when and if the shoe will drop on them.  It’s as if they’re running on full just trying to get as much done as possible before somebody at COMCAST notices.  I just don’t see COMCAST building this stuff into their Interactive features for their cable customers.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’d LOVE IT if that happened, but the whole thing seems so weird to have two of our best leaders working for COMCAST.  They’re the guys who do theSocialWeb.tv (along with David Recordon and Chris Messina.)

10. Monica Keller (3.0) made her debut - and what a debut it was!  Smart, articulate, well versed and on the money.  We brought up the MySpace Atom feed on screen and it was the best example we could find or what we want to do.  MySpace has a real winner in this leader.

Lots and lots of other peeps there - lost of progress - kudos to everyone.

Me - I was the oldest dude in the room. And felt proud of that fact.

Now if I could only get folks to focus on distributed friending or a dashboard standard.  I guess I’ll have to wait on those ideas.

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?”