Group items tagged

A lot of you emailed me asking where to find more videos, so I'm delivering the goods. I've expanded the previous list from a paltry 17 to a remarkable 302, and I've included podcasts this time! There were so many videos I had to break them up into different categories for easier skimming. There are no duplicates, however I did place some videos into more than one category when I felt it was appropriate. This list is monstrous, enjoy.

This paper sets out to describe a version of infrastructure or foundation for VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) based on an alternative view on sharing information online between individuals and of online identity. It sets out to explain the strategy and tactics for design, development and adoption of tools - the Mine! and FeedMe (see glossary) - and creation of an infrastructure for other solutions - VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more. The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Early adopters of the Web rolled up their sleeves to demonstrate what was possible on their own sites (even before animated gifs came along), so perhaps advocates of things like the Web of Data, opening the social graph and DataPortability should begin at home too…

How do you explain to an end-user what DataPortability is, why they might want it, and where they might get it?

How do you explain to a developer what DataPortability is, why they might want it, and how they might achieve it?

Developers learn most effectively by developing something. Users learn most effectively by using something.

My last column discussed the brand utility supported entertainment model in which content providers and marketers work upstream to create customized complimentary experiences. One option would be to align this model with the open standard objectives of DataPortability.org. Their mission: to gather "existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable Web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go."

For brands and content creators, that means conversation would truly have to be initiated by the user. The user would own the data, and the brand content offering would have to be valuable enough to warrant an exchange. In essence, brand content would be bought with "data currency."

There are brand enthusiasts who participate in campaigns on an ongoing basis. Yet each time they return, these fans must register and sign-up for the full experience. If the brand were to embrace technologies such as OpenID, not only would it provide their fans access to cross-promotional properties around that campaign, it would also provide easy access to all future campaigns. And with future potential of data portability, people could take those experiences with them, introducing content to friends and hopefully igniting passionate new fans.

Who really owns your address book? Many Internet companies - like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) - say unequivocally that you do. If you sign up for free e-mail accounts on their services, you're free to take your friends with you and export your contact lists to any service that you like.

But Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), while publicly embracing the idea of openness, has been saying something different behind the scenes. Since last summer, lawyers representing the company have been sending cease-and-desist letters to startups that offer new users the ability to import their Microsoft Hotmail contacts. In a move that Valley guys are deriding as ham-handed, Microsoft is offering a quid pro quo: Third-party sites can access Hotmail contacts if they make Microsoft's instant-messaging client available to their users - for 25 cents per user per year. Then the company says it will waive the fee if the sites make Messenger the exclusive in-network messaging client. Such a deal.

There is a better way, of course - though it remains to be seen whether it will work. A group of companies, aligned under the banner of the DataPortability Workgroup, is trying to craft standards that would make it easy for the data we collect online to move as freely and securely from one website to another as we do. As long as two sites abide by the DataPortability rules, they can effortlessly send anything back and forth between them - data, photos, address books. "It's safe, secure, painless," says Chris Saad, the Aussie who co-founded and chairs the DPW. Hundreds of individuals and several leading companies - including Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft - have signed on to the workgroup, and Saad says he's optimistic that we'll see a system in place later this year.

Despite the valid concerns that some have with Google’s Social Graph API, I thought I would talk about the technical possibilities. My social graph may be of particular interest becuase I had used my Wordpress blog’s XFN feature to mark up the blogs I read as “muse” and my profile on at least 10 social networks as “me.” Using the Google’s Social Graph API demo you can see my extensive list of FOAF and XFN URLs. There is also a machine readable format that could be fed into a new social network to find friends on that network. (click for a larger version)

The world has changed. At least the marketing world. The era of mass marketing and advertisment as we knew it for many years has passed. Of course TV is not dead but it’s more and more superceded by the internet with all it’s channels for niche entertainment and self expression. Banner blindness and shrinking advertisement effectiveness have added their part. And so companies look out for other ways to reach potential and existing customers.

Add to that the success of the DataPortability Working Group which set policies and technical guidelines in how to create a World Wide Web in which data is more freely flowing around than ever before bringing us closer and closer to seamless networking experience and a semantic web.

This of course is only a glimpse of what might be necessary tomorrow. And the question is of course how far this tomorrow is away. Several things are of course available already or being worked on. The Google Social Graph API is there, blogging and commenting in Plone is worked on, Multimedia support is available, OpenID is as well (but maybe could be enhanced).Creating a social networking layer using e.g. plone.relations and membrane is not too complicated to implement and marking things up with microformats is also no magic.

For website owners it only makes sense to support any kind of ” [Facebook/ Google/ Open] Connect” solution, if the majority of their user-base also maintains their social graph at one of those “Social Graph/Identity” providers. Speaking for Germany: that is neither for Facebooks Connect nor Googles Friend Connect (also with the Plaxo combo) the case yet!

We build a solution upon the OpenStack, because than it will work with much more websites, who support the OpenStack as well as a consumer

If you look at the rest of the world - outside of “Facebook-Land” - you also realize and understand much better, why it is so important to find an holistic solution approach - build on open standards - to solve the issue FB Connect addresses: we live in a very diversified world and if everybody comes up with a proprietary solution, it will be just a big mess in the end.

The news is sure to be welcomed by Facebook's 120 million users and its potential partners, but it presents a new challenge to proponents of the so-called "open stack" for ID management -- OpenID, OAuth and the related technologies that allow users to share data across multiple websites.

It's also good for everyone's business. By being able to use a Facebook ID to log in to Digg, the user's barrier of entry is lowered significantly and Digg gets more traffic

But where Facebook Connect is heading towards mass adoption on mainstream sites like Digg, OpenID is currently bogged down by several issues, the largest of which is poor usability.