Marc's Voice » James Joyce

“Open is the new Black” continues to spread

NOTE: This is a post I did awhile ago (but had to push to the back burner - as we’re shipping a large site right now.)

It was created when I was editing the video of a speech UI gave in Rotterdam in Sept. The cameraman was pointed at me the entire time and missed the slides, so I then edited the presentation video and laid the .ppt slides on top of it - and came up with this video - which is yet another version of my treatise “How to build the Open Mesh”. Anyway - in this speech I mention that if you type “Open is the new Black” into Google - I come up. Here’s what I say about it - in the speech:

“That’s our SEO - come up with a good idea, and Google will remember it. That’s the ultimate SEO = quality of the idea.”

There’s plenty of evidence out there that freeing users from lock-in and opening up the data of a system - is a good thing. Providing APIs to that data is enabling what Fred Wilson calls ‘Content APIs‘ and that’s also a good thing. I have a chapter in my book about “persistent ubqiutous content” on just this very subject.

So we’re seeing open permeate throughout our world and raising it’s head in lots of interesting ways.

My friends David Recordon and the Plaxo dudes (Joseph and John) along with Chris Messina have a IPTV show called “theSocialWeb.tv” and it’s probably the best thing out there to highlight the status, trends and memes of this world and which dives deeply into the geeky issues surrounding “open social networking”.

But in fact - it goes beyond just social networking. Social features will soon be built into all software. That’s something else Fred Wilson is figuring out. So we’re seeing him (and his VC cohorts) start to invest in all sorts of open platforms and products, but they’re missing a crucial element to the game - contributing back to teh community. So that’s why I created the post “Taking advantage of open for proprietary reasons“.

Yahoo has finally launched their underlying ID layer - almost four years after I first asked Jerry Yang and Dan Rosensweig for that. Over the subsequent 3.5 years I was told “it was coming”, “yah yah - we’re gonna do that“, “yah sure - we’ll have APIs for MyYahoo” - but yet as of this writing we still don’t have two-way APIs into MyYahoo.

The BBC seems to be getting their open act together - and building their own underlying ID layer under the leadership of Eric Huggers. They’d better - they promised us Open BBC almost four years ago.

Microsoft has launched their Open Live Mesh Cloud thingie - Azure. And Facebook and MySpace (though clerarly closed meshes) are opening up - in their own way.

iGoogle appears to be positioning itself as a key aspect of Google’s “digital lifestyle aggregaton” strategy. With clean integration with OpenSocial, Reader, Gmail and (one would assume) ALL the suite of Google apps - iGoogle will soon be the state-of-the-art dashboard which I talk about in Chapter 6 - “UI Objects” - in my book.

But that doesn’t mean that NetVibes is going away - they’re starting to white label.

And lord knows what’s gonna happen once Clearspring and Gigya start running ads in their widgets. That is one of the key milestones of our monetizable distributed business model. And heaven help us once Twitter declares their business model next year. Or FriendFeed starts to ‘experiment’ with ads. Watch for stampedes of new proportions.

Some call it the open stack. Others are bent on user identity oriented focus or an enterprise approach. It really doesn’t matter. Open will come in a myriad of sizes, shapes and packages.

Yes indeed - Open is the new Black. Everyone is doing it, in their own way - which is EXACTLY how it’s supposed to happen - to build an open mesh - where others can come in and participate.

Key milestones coming up:

- a panel we’re doing at Digital Hollywood on Oct. 28th in LaLa - which rocked

- Internet identity Workshop - Nov. 10-12 in Mountain View, CA

- a panel we’re doing at LeWeb8 in Paris on Dec. 9th.

Until then - stay tuned and just keep chanting this:

“Open is the new Black” - on the BART

“Open is the new Black” - on University Ave. Palo Alto

“Open is the new Black” - on St. Marks in the Lower East side.

“Open is the new Black” - at Canter’s deli on Fairfax.

“Open is the new Black” - aht the public gahdens in Bahstun, on the Swan boat.

“Open is the new Black” - at the So. Kensington tube stop.

“Open is the new Black” - at the Janpath market in Delhi.