Google you bastards
May|13|2008
Dammit, why does their Toilet Seat look better than my Toilet Seat?
Questions around dataportability
Uno as Identity, Social Networks, Web2.0
Apr|16|2008
I really liked the post on RWW today about dataportablity by Josh Catone. It’s something that I’m struggling to get my head around – who owns that data?
I’m a believer that while you own the data, the activity, i.e. what you did on the site and what you put on there, is partially owned by the site. Just because you uploaded a photo to Flickr, and you used all the cool nifty uploading, tagging, rotating, sorting, organizing tools that Flickr offers, you should now be able to port all of that to Facebook? Same, Facebook has friend tagging as a feature, and it’s a piece of technology that they pioneered, and now you want to take that over to Flickr?
That part doesn’t sit well with me. I feel that the services/sites have invested quite a lot of R&D time into building these features, and for you to now be able to up that data and take it somewhere else…
The example Josh used is quite a good analogy – can I take my data from Store 1 to Store 2?
Store 1 has brilliant data capturing, sorting and customer research. Store 2 is a mom and pop shop, no technology, but they can tailor a lot of niche services to you, if they can get that data. Yes, I would like that data portable, but Store 1 has heavily invested in that data, and it would not have been possible to get to that data without the infrastructure that they built.
Now, with some dataportabilty chucked in, we can quickly take the attention data from Store 1 and plug it into Store 2?
Is that attention data owned by Store 1? Yes, I believe it is. Unless they agree to making that Attention Data public, it would be a breach of service to take that data out. Unless there are laws governing it. Principle Six in New Zealand does exactly that embodies what I want to happen.
(thanks for the link Pete! )
Why do I say “Yes, I would want that”? It means that I don’t need to input that data again, and the new service would just start working automatically.
This is something I’m struggling with so far – I know it’s a good thing. But how do you keep the technologies safe that companies have invested in, and promote more research and innovation? No site would like their users to be able up and off to another site.
Should I be able to select what data I want, send that over to the new service? I believe so. oAuth is going to help me.
Social news sites are more valuable than Facebook.
Uno as Identity, Online, Social Networks
Apr|14|2008
If you take a look at the data that Facebook has on you, and the quality of that data you’d be able to see that they really don’t have that much qualitative data and can only target pretty rudimentary ads.
For making it easier, let’s split it in 2 groups: Profile data and activity data.
Profile data is the data that you fill in - Favourite books, movies, interests, music. Honestly I’ve never filled in this data and I don’t know of someone who has maintained that, it also doesn’t reflect your true preferences (typical case of “you don’t really know what you like”).
Your work details are in there as well - what you are busy doing and more or less in what field of business you are in. People don’t maintain that too well either. Then there’s also your network data - which shows in which area you are, but that you could probably get more accurate data on with IP targeting.
Last but not least - your relationship status, age and sex. Well golly gosh, ain’t that fantastic.
Up to this point, it’s really difficult to target an ad to a person. With this data, for e.g., would you be able to target an Audi ad to me, knowing that I prefer Audi over BMW? I don’t think you can target something specific to person with those details. Would you be able to know that I am looking for a vintage Mercedes Benz SL500 convertible? And be able to serve me ads for that?
I don’t think so.
But luckily, there is the opportunity to expand! We have a whole set of other data: Groups, photos, events, Friends, Pages and applications - which we can lump into activity profile data.
However, none of this data is structured enough to be able to give real value. Does Facebook know that I have an intense dislike for 7de laan if I have joined the following groups:
- 7de Laan sucks donkey balls
- Mense wat 7de laan karakters add as friends is losers
- 7de Laan-WORST soapie EVER!!!!
- Dezi van 7de Laan is die grootste SLET ooit.
I struggle to think that they would.
(as a side note - there isn’t a Fan Page for 7de Laan…)
Similarly, the events that I attend are only tagged on a very rudimentary level, Facebook does not know that some of the music I listen to is nu-electro-afro-coochie-pop, but that I also like DJ Krush and really want him to come to Cape Town. Does it take into the account the nature of post-modern, ironic party organisers who label their Electro dress-ups a “Party - Barbecue”?
The photo’s we have of all our events and so are also not really semantic in any way - does Facebook know that I am wearing Diesel (and not Nike) sunglasses, or drinking Amstel (and not Windhoek) beer? Nope. Fan pages are a cool addition and it does allow me to specify the relationship between a product/person/music (i.e. “I like this”), but it’s still a very rudimentary system. Does it know that I like a genre of music (which I haven’t specified on my profile)?
My friends list isn’t too great either - I can’t get any more data out of there than I can from my own profile.
Applications has the best repository of info, but it’s in a data silo. Your last.fm application can’t talk too well with you Facebook profile and make you stop seeing “Beat Bladder Infection” ads along the side, and rather “Watch the new Justic video”. This data still sits in a silo and I’m thinking it sits more with the 3rd party app than it does with Facebook.
Still, at the end of the day I don’t believe Facebook could target me an ad for a vintage SL500 Merc.
Enter social news
Now, on the other hand, DIGG, or any social news site, has much more data on me. While they don’t have my profile data (like age and sex) they can find out what I like and don’t like much better. I click on links and submit articles, all these are in semantic form. If I’ve submitted articles on vintage cars, rated anything up or down, Digg would be able to better target an ad tailored to me. It’s because of that that I feel Digg (or any social news site) should have a higher per-user valuation than Facebook. That data is more valuable and deeper than Facebook could ever have.
Socialthing: winning
Uno as Identity, Online, Products, Web2.0
Mar|11|2008
I’m trying out Socialthing and I’m really impressed with the “adding your services” task. It’s pretty quick and easy and uses a really cool interface.
One of the most interesting pieces is that they grab your Facebook news Feed, or a part of it. You’ll see that you Socialthing stream is different from your Facebook stream (the FB part). I’m also quite interested in how they do this - there is not API hook for your newsfeed (remember, it’s the juice that keeps you on FB) and it’s against the Facebook ToC’s. So Socialthing, how are you doing it?
All this got me thinking: The best Authentication pattern for me was the Flickr one - Their OAuth pattern is the way all services should work. Why does Flickr support OAuth, as well as FireEagle, but not Delicious? Hrm…
Regarding FriendFeed - I was expecting SocialThing to work in a similar way. While I might not be friends with people like Chris Messina, Brian Oberkirch or Chris Saad, I still want to follow what they are doing - which is why I use FriendFeed. I thought Socialthing would do this, but at the moment there isn’t the ability to add “people who aren’t really my friends”. I like being able to do that. While I think there are similarities between Socialthing and Friendfeed as both are Lifestreaming apps, they serve different purposes. So there might be a little bit of a gap in there, somewhere that both these apps are missing?
Socialthing also has grouping (for e.g. Twitter Messages) - something that FriendFeed guys put out as a major thang - I think that’s like… Basics. Otherwise you can use RSS, no?
Either way, a cool service. Check out some of the design patterns here below.
Gmail OAuth
Mar|10|2008
This entire fiasco with Gmail is going to do wonders for OAuth. There’s no publicity like bad publicity. I claimed it a while back and I still firmly believe that if the services make your data portable through proper authenication standards, you wouldn’t need to screenscrape it with a user/pass.
W00t oAuth.
Ego vs Object centered social networks
Uno as Identity, Social Networks, Web2.0
Dec|4|2007
Two brilliant posts I discovered yesterday, one at Unit Structures and the other at Bamboo Project blog.
Both deal with the difference between object and egocentric networks.
Object centered networks
Networks are object centred if they have a social object around which users can activate. This is typically an element like a video (youtube), news (digg), photo’s (Flickr). If you take the social objects (photo’s, videos, etc) out the network would fall flat. If you took the profile data out of Digg all the news would still be there, it just wouldn’t have an anchor
Ego Centered
Networks where people are the social object and you connect around each other. If you take the people (profile data) out the network would fall flat
Typically, Object centered networks have started to move into becoming more Ego centered - like when Digg launched enhanced profile pages and friending. If you take a look at Youtube, it’s really not a social network, yet people love to call it that. It’s not. It’s a videosharing site with comments on the videos. How many casual users add friends and actively participate in the community? I don’t think it truely classifies as a social network, it’s a social site with networking features.
Now, here at 24.com we’ve had a few distinctions for a while. Elan Lohmann has been using the distinction between Content centric and Community centric networks for his presentations for ages - I first saw the difference in one of his slides. I would put them up here but they’re still intellectual property. These sites sit on a spectrum, with Content on the one side and Community on the other. It’s a very similar concept to the Ego/Object centered networks.
Now, a lot of this kind of thinking went through our thoughts with Utterbuzz. When I joined 24 it was to take a youth social network to market, but the product wasn’t near ready. In the time leading up further development, Facebook simply shot up in traffic and penetration. This shows what a ridiculous amount of traction Facebook has in the market. Our initial research showed that there were few 17-year old’s on Facebook - little enough for us to be able to go ahead and offer a competing product.
But this changed quickly. Within 2 months penetration rates amongst highschool kids shot up, so much so that we decided we had to change our strategy. We couldn’t offer a duplicate of Facebook - kids just won’t be interested. We’ve changed tack now, but not entirely.
What we realised is that Facebook is the ego-centric network of choice, and we shouldn’t try to compete with them head-on. It’s going to be a futile exercise. What we need to be focusing on is creating an object-orientated approach, offer something that kids can do on the site and interact with. We don’t want them to replace Facebook usage with Utterbuzz usage, we see this as more of concurrent usage. We’ve now changed tack to allow you to login to Utterbuzz with you Facebook account and take all your friends with you - in other words your friends discovery is still happening with Facebook, but your content discovery happens in Utterbuzz.
It’s an important distinction we believe will ensure our success. We are much less focused on people discovery (”Hey! All of my class is on Utterbuzz now I can message them!) - that happens in Facebook. People get really despondent if they have to fill in new friends on each single network they want to join. We want people to be able to say, “I’ve done all my friending, now I want to interact around content with them.”
Do you think this is a good approach?
User Centric design and identity with Beacon
Uno as Identity, Online, Social Networks
Nov|30|2007
Facebook Beacon has brought up a lot of issues - almost all bad of course.
What’s been happening with Identity 2.0 will hopefully solve this issue, and it also relates to personal information that other companies have. Jason from Bokardo started me on a thought process.
Personally, I have no problem with companies knowing my spending habits, but I want to know what spending habits they know. I want that to be transparent, and also changeable at any point. I want to have access to my user profile on Blockbuster (US example) and I want to know what data they are capturing. And this is for two reasons: I want to be able to see what dirt they have on me, and then I also want to be able to change that data so that Blockbuster can provide me with a better experience. In the case of movies, sometimes I rent only comedy’s, but I’m also actually interested in documentaries, specifically documentaries on street art and modern urban architecture and how public space facilitates discourse and society. But they don’t know that because they don’t stock it, and I’ve never browsed/searched for it because I know they don’t stock it. If I can tell them this somehow (I can mail them, but who does that? For all my services?) then perhaps they would start stocking these movies.
Back to user centric design
This is perfectly solvable with APML. What does APML do?
It’s great. Here’s what it does:
APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.
That is exciting. APML is nothing else than your own piece of market research, but the great part is that it sits with YOU. Not Truworths, Stuttafords, NIKE or Facebook. These services inevitably only have a limited view on your attention - they only track your interactions with their own products. NIKE has an APML file for you, but it’s only for you using their products. Facebook Beacon was an attempt to aggregate all of this, and they are in a very good position to do this - they already have a very good profile of you, and now they’re starting to gather market intel on you.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has a pretty good argument behind how Google botched this up with their new Feed Recommendations. Why do I think? Because I didn’t have access to that Attention Profile that they have on me. I’m sure they have VERY good algorithms etc, but at the end of the day, me reading icanhascheezburger.com daily, every single update, doesn’t really mean that lolcats are high on my attention list - it’s only that one blog. And I think only I can tell you that.
It’s got 1565 of my RSS subscriptions, thousands of Gmail messages (32k unread ones, in fact), several Google Custom Search Engines, my GCal life history, search history and more I’m sure - all tied to my Google Account and all it can give me is 20 new sources?
Basically, I want to be able to control that data and construct my OWN profile, and know which sites know what from me. At the moment these attention silos are not being centered around the user, they are being centered around services that a user uses. Woolworths has a different profile of me than NIKE does, which is sometimes good, but they aren’t cross selling properly.
Back to OpenID and OAuth
Principles behind OpenID and OAuth aim to solve this. OpenID allows me to login to all these sites using a single sign on (in a strict sense of the word). OAuth allows me to tell these sites what I want them to know about me. So, I sign in to Flickr and it asks a bunch of details from me. I have already filled in all these details on my OpenID server, http://unodewaal.identitu.de. I then point Flickr to my OpenID server, telling it, get the details there. I then get asked on my OpenID server: Hey, Flickr is asking for a whole bunch of data of yours, what do you want to tell it? Name, Surname, Email, Country, Time Zone (cos that’s always a hack), etc etc.
All this data is transferred with a click of a button. But not only that, I can then manage what info Flickr has of me, from my OpenID server (not sure if Identitu.de can do this yet).
We’re trying to do this with Utterbuzz. You will have multiple profiles, on multiple sites, all managed from a single interface. So, you join a network for online dating, that has a specific profile that you play up (you’re taller, healthier, leaner, increased your salary by 10x and your breast by 3x), but you don’t want any of that data to cross over to the school network that you’ve joined. But it’s still managed in a central profile. Ning has done a similar thing with their profile management - it’s basic (you can set different profile pics for different networks), but it’s an idea.
OAuth is the technology behind all of this for standardizing the authentication process. Listen to this podcast on Oauth with Larry Halff, Eran Hammer-Lahav and Chris Messina for more:
Three of the minds behind the Oauth initiative join us to tell us about this emerging “open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”
Back to Facebook Beacon
I believe the Beacon experiment shows that users want this kind of transparency. They feel pissed off to know that Blockbuster and Starbucks might be sharing data via Facebook. But, if you knew what data they had, and you could control that data, would it be different? I believe it would. Every time I access Amazon, it asks me: “Hey Uno, I have no idea what books you like. Do you want to give me access to your APML data?” I say yes, and I flag my APML manager to “Always allow Amazon Access” so that I don’t have to do this all the time. I also say, “Only give Amazon access to this data, not the other. They don’t need to know that.”
When I browse Amazon they create a profile set for me, kept on their servers. I want that kept on my server, or at least have access to that file, because when I go over to Blockbuster, I can say: “Hey Blockbuster, I’ve been looking at these books, do you have any similar movies?” And Blockbuster spits them out. I then flag Blockbuster as: “No, I don’t want to give Blockbuster permanent access or allow them to keep my data” because I’ve heard that they resell data to spammers. Also, I don’t want to let all my friends now about the products I’ve bought, that option should sit with me.
At the end of the day Dave Winer says it best:
Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!
If Facebook Beacon went the way that OpenID is going then we would have better Attention Data and we would all be better off.