Marc talks about the Scoble-Facebook debacle in Marc%u2019s Voice » Blog Archive » Opt-in controls for allowing your info to be Exported :

I find this interesting in the context of LinkedIn and Webmail services like GMail. And particularly interesting because Plaxo is involved. We would be horrified if Mail *didn’t* allow us access to the email addresses of our friends. So it’s common to have CSV export and an API for getting them. This in turn leads to libraries like Octazen that enable the “find my friends on this service” function in every new YASN. LinkedIn sit in the middle of the spectrum. They’ve had a CSV export of email addresses for a long time. Nobody bat’s an eye at this despite the fact that there’s no opt in. Meanwhile Plaxo have built a business on syncing all this data between your different data stores of emails. And yet, they don’t have a formal API for querying the data, perhaps because their business is built on selling you the tools. Which leads to Octazen being unable to get *your* contact data out of Plaxo. This wasn’t a problem until Plaxo started being a YASN as well. By the time we cross the spectrum into MyOrkutFace territory we’re seriously into (Bat Country!) VC funded member growth at all costs. Now it’s not in their interests to allow any export ever. The only thing that matters is viral growth[1], stickiness and page impressions.

Over on my tiny site, Ecademy, we took the decision a long time ago to provide as many APIs as we could and to expose any data that was available as HTML in machine readable formats. If you choose to show your email address on your profile, you must expect it to be available in FOAF, VCard, CSV and whatever else I can support. So the opt in is “Am I visible” and “which of my contact details are visible”. Once that’s done, the rest follows.

[1]I’m afraid I now hate Facebook. Every function in there is a poor copy of better functions provided by single purpose applications elsewhere. eg Twitter, Upcoming, phpBB, Flickr, Wordpress, etc etc. The one and only thing it’s good at is being viral. The one thing going for it is that there’s lots of people there. The real trick in 2008 is going to be interop between all the special purpose sites so we don’t have to do the “Am I Your Friend? Y/N” dance on each shiny new Social Site we sign up to.

A year in the life of Apple

Jan: Apple announces that the SDK and toolchain for the iPhone and iTouch are free and available to everyone. Skype announce Skype4iPhone

Feb: Apple announces MacTablet, an eeePC competitor with a rotatable tablet style screen for $499.

Mar: iTMS music goes DRM free. All tracks available at 192kbps with zero DRM for $0.89 iTMS goes worldwide so anyone from anywhere can buy the same tracks at the same dollar price. Amazon announce the exact same thing but tracks are priced at $0.79

Apr: iTouch 160 announced. An iTouch with a 160Gb hard disk, a microphone and Bluetooth. Skype announce Skype4iTouch

May: iTMS offer FLAC Lossless music at $0.99. Amazon reacts by offering the same thing for $0.89 dropping MP3s to $0.49

Jun: 1000th iPhone/iTouch application announced on Mashable

Jul: iPhone Plus announced with 3G and built in GPS. First Android goes on sale. Slashdot announce hacked port of iPhone-OSX to Android

Aug: Commentators predict that Apple's new open-ness will fail and APPL will hit $200 by year end.

Sep: Apple offers official SIM-Free iPhone in all countries. Sales of high end Nokia and Blackberry go through the floor.

Oct: New MacBook Pro announced. The old MacBook Pro becomes the Macbook at $599. MacTablet Pro appears with 160Gb hard disk. MacTablet dropped to $399

Nov: In the iTMS-Amazon price war, music tracks are now down to $0.24 each. Wired announces "The End of P2P" as file sharing drops away and both iTMS and Amazon are selling record numbers of tracks. MPAA sees this and allows iTMS to go zero-DRM on video and drop video prices.

Dec: APPL hits $600

The 5 most annoying programs on your PC - Download Squad

I wonder how many geeks had to help friends who had a new iPod for Xmas and cursed iTunes on Windows. Strongly recommend Sharepod as an alternative to move tracks on and off an iPod.

Outlook is a difficult one. Many business people use it as an all purpose information manager as well as for Email. And Thunderbird isn't yet at the stage where it's a replacement. It's just a shame that it leads to so many bad email habits.

Battelle%u2019s 2008: No Time For Hippie Advertisers : in which Battelle talks about the state of advertising.

Something that always seems to be forgotten with AdSense/AdWords is that Google is it's own main inventory. They play both Agency and Publisher in the three cornered advertising game of Advertiser-Agency-Publisher. This almost inevitably means that while it's great for advertisers, it's not good for small to medium sized Publishers. It is possible to make good money from AdSense but only really by using dodgy SEO.

ISTM that there's still a big gap in the market for an advertising system aimed as a revenue generator for Small to Medium publishers. The sort of sites that are getting 1M impressions a month but are too small to work with the big brand agencies. I thought Adify were going this way but I've ended up being disappointed.

This also reflects a one-sided-ness in conversations around advertising. Every one wants to talk about Advertisers and Agencies need and want. Nobody wants to talk about Publishers.

Some of you may have noticed that the Skype icons on Ecademy have changed and a lot of them now show a gray question mark. We made a change to the way Skype presence was displayed and these icons are now served direct by Skype's servers. This means that display of whether you're online should be more or less instant rather than delayed by an hour or not at all.

If you want your presence and status to be displayed, then you need to enable it in Skype. Within the Skype program the switch can be found in Tools, Options, Privacy, Privacy settings, and then check the box "Allow my status to be shown on the web". If you can't see the checkbox, click on "Advanced". The default is off, so if your Skype icon shows the gray question mark. you need to change it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Freecom 160Gb USB Portable hard drive for sale.

I had a cunning plan. I'd buy a 160Gb 2.5" USB hard drive. Take the drive out and put it in my portable audio player, put its 80Gb into the hard drive case and have more room for music. So I bought a Freecom for UKP69.99. Got it home, took it apart and found that it's a SATA disk and not IDE.

So does anyone want it for UKP60? email julian_bond at voidstar.com

Dear Google,

Could you build me a very tightly targeted feed of adverts that I really want to see? Can I help you build one by providing simple "Love, skip, ban" feedback on how well you're doing?

Online networking mostly consists of:-

1) Meet: Find interesting people. Collect names.
2) Message: Talk direct to them, One to One.
3) Discuss: Form affinity groups and discuss stuff among the people in the group. Few to Few
4) Publish: Post short or long form content to the web. One to Many.

I'm discovering that I'm really only interested in 3) Discuss. I'm uncomfortable and quickly bored with talking one to one. I'm only interested in 1) Meet and 4) Publish in so much as it attracts people to the party.

So I find myself posting more in clubs, discussion forums, Skype chats and Blog comments and less and less here. My best thinking is being done while talking off the top of my head to groups of other people and summarising it here is becoming a chore. I find I'm using Twitter as well as a way of throwing out mind bombs in the hope of sparking a reaction.

From the "You gotta larf" desk. http://apps.facebook.com/opensocket/ An OpenSocial container that runs inside Facebook as a Facebook app. It's a proof of concept and won't be able to deal with Facebook giving us the finger when we ask for our copy of our social graph.

I've just spent a day yak shaving which is maybe behind me now. In the gaps while waiting for php, mysql, pear and a bunch of other stuff, I've been thinking again about this whole YASN thing. This was partly prompted by looking at Plaxo's profile pages, streams and OpenSocial experiments and Facebook's new Pages. Then today I noticed in my Facebook stream a whole bunch of people who's status began "is twittering" Which means that they use Twitter, have the Twitter app installed in Facebook, are my friends on Facebook, but I'm not following them on Twitter. One last thing of note. Somebody sent me an Ecademy support request into my Facebook Inbox. Arrrg!

What I come back to is why we use these social networks at all. I think it boils down to four areas. Meet, message, discuss, publish. So that's:-
1) Meet: Find interesting people. Make connections.
2) Message: Talk direct to them, One to One.
3) Discuss: Form affinity groups and discuss stuff among the people in the group. Few to Few
4) Publish: Post short or long form content to the web. One to Many.
Maybe there's some other forms of communication, but these seem to be the most important.

So what is going on with all the cross pollination? Things like Plaxo, and to some extent Facebook don't seem to add a whole lot of value when what they're doing is to just collect together value that is created elsewhere on the web. What's the point of reading Twitter via Facebook, when I can go direct. But what this does do is to facilitate that first function of Meet, Find, Make connections. What's frustrating is that these systems tend to be fairly hopeless for 2, 3 and 4. I have this throw away comment at the moment that the *only thing* Facebook is any good at is being viral. But of course, there is huge value in that.

So then we get to OpenSocial and start thinking about OS and FB Apps. Some of FB's Apps are getting quite big now, and some of their own internal function (Like Groups) are written as Apps. So what if Twitter or phpBB weren't written as stand alone websites with their own account management and friending controls but were written as parasitic/symbiotic Apps to be run inside OS or FB and used the parent container's account management. This is not exactly easy at the moment but it feels like where we're going. It seem to me that this will lead to a reduction in the number of YASN Containers as the ones with all the names win, but a simultaneous explosion of numbers of Apps. With one huge caveat. There's no obvious way for the Apps to make money.

So perhaps it doesn't matter that the YASNs aren't great at Message, Discuss, Publish if they're good at Meet. The question for me now is whether Facebook hiding everything behind the login wall ultimately reduces their attraction to App developers. If the content created in your app is not visible to the world and is not indexed by Google, will you see that as an unacceptable downside? I think it is. In which case the YASN that will win will be the one that:-
- Has all the names
- Is open and visible
- Doesn't get too much in the way with all it's own dross.

I think OpenSocial has 3 main parts.

1) Write-Once, Run-Many gadgets. Instead of just coding your gadget to Facebook, you can have it run in 10, 100, maybe more places.

2) Rich Profile pages. Instead of having to reverse engineer Facebook, lots of site that couldn't afford to do that can now have profile pages as rich as Facebook's

3) Application and Mashup ecosystem. Like the Twitter ecosystem but times 10. Having the same APIs available at lots of sites opens up new possibilities for combining and adding value to the data.

There's a 4th side effect which is to make OpenID, oAuth and possibly AuthSub very common. It should give a big kick to adoption.

And now for the speculation.

If you want to get really radical, think of a site like Flickr or Twitter. I can just about imagine Flickr written with no account support at all and as an embeddable OpenSocial gadget. That feels like it has lots of implications. Almost all the gadgets so far have been small utilities. But try and imagine a rich application with multiple pages running inside the OpenSocial framework. It wouldn't need any login or account or profile management. It can get that parasitically from it's host container. It might well have a secondary website that aggregated all the activity from all the containers. This has many implications. Here's a couple:-
- How the hell do you monetise it?
- This might well allow Containers to promote best of breed in certain application areas instead of building a poor copy themselves. Think Discussion groups or Event management.

I spent a bit of yesterday implementing the OpenSocial People Data API on Ecademy. You can now get at Profile data and Contacts data using the API.

You can see my feeds at

http://www.ecademy.com/feeds/people/1
http://www.ecademy.com/feeds/people/1/friends

I'd be grateful for any comments or criticisms.

If anyone is working on consumers for the people Data API I'd be really interested in some joint effort.

There's no authentication, but I'm taking the same approach as we did for FOAF. If it's available as public HTML, I'm showing it in the XML. At some time in the future I hope to extend this with oAuth or AuthSub so that the owner of the data can get more data out.

One of the (many) things that is missing here is a GUID for people. The People Data API and the examples seem to show something like
<id>http://www.ecademy.com/feeds/people/1<id>. As long as the trailing ID number is unique
for the domain this ends up being a globally unique GUID.

What this doesn't do is to match http://www.ecademy.com/feeds/people/1 with
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=11056323781708313949 who is actually the
same person.

What the foaf people did was to use sha1(mailto:emailAddress@domain.com) and named it mbox_sha1sum. It's assumed that any one email address (used for identification) and hence it's hash, maps to only one person. And the Hash obfuscates the email address just enough to get over email privacy issues. And further that someone's primary email address will turn up somewhere on their profile on every social network they belong to.

The other big problem I'm grappling with is that the Google spec and definition of a person is really trivial and doesn't go nearly far enough. And we really need people to extend the spec in standardised ways that developers working on Apps that consume this data can make sense of it.

Gabe Wachob: Google's Open Social: The missing pieces? :

I see OpenSocial as being 3 pieces.

1) Gadget Writers can write gadgets for Orkut and they'll run on any social network that supports the openSocial specs. Hi5, Plaxo, Ning are already close. However, each SN Container will make it's own rules about what gadgets can run.

2) Social Networks that support the specs don't have to reinvent Facebook's API in order to deliver similar functionality. They can build a relatively rich profile page, relatively quickly and take advantage of a large ecosystem of gadgets by being a Container.

3) Social Networks and other websites can support the Data APIs. This should encourage the sort of ecosystem of Applications (web and desktop) and Mashups that has grown up around Twitter. But instead of being restricted to supporting one site, they should be able to work with any ste that implements the data APIs.

The problem today (7-Nov-07) is that:-
- The Orkut Sandbox is the only testing environment and it's flaky
- There are no examples of the data APIs anywhere.
- The specs for the data APIs are minimal and have some serious holes.
- The specs for the Container side haven't been released. And work on this is currently restricted to Google's NDA partners.

It seems that way too much of the early analysis has focussed on data portability between Social Networks. This is something that is only hinted at by the Data APIs. And at least for a while, the write-once, run-anywhere gadgets will be what is actually built. Except that they will actually be write-once, run-on-Orkut until there are other reliable Containers out there.

Imagine for a moment that Twitter implemented the OpenSocial Data APIs to sit alongside their own API. We'd have:-

- AuthSub instead of HTTP AUTH
- Atom instead of RSS
- GData People API instead of the Friends calls
- AtomPub instead of the calls for posting status

Pewrhaps then there was a concerted push by all the Twitter client apps to work with the new API.

Now imagine that Jaiku, Pownce, MySpace and anything else that has a Twitter-like status function did exactly the same thing. Those new client apps could then offer a simple UI choice to the user. Which Status service do you want to work with? Or perhaps you'd like to work with all of them? And we'd see all those huge numbers of Twitter Apps and Mashups work quickly with all the Status type services.

There's something huge here, isn't there?

But then you get into the horrible sticky details.
- There is no example of the Data APIs yet and the specs are in flux.
- Orkut has no Status field so there's no incentive for Google to add this area into the specs
- Which means each OpenSocial Service that does have a status field potentially ends up implementing it in their own way.
- And unless we impose standards on endpoint URLs, we'll need auto-discovery standards as well. eg. is your profile always at /feeds/people/me on every site?

Lots of the SNs out there now are using Octazen's technology or similar to provide a function that says "Find my friends and create invites from my webmail contact list." This is a first step to porting your social graph from one SN to another. Quite a lot of us have taken to using GMail as the master contact list, simply because it has the widest support for this function.

Now imagine two extensions to this. SN owners (and Octazen) add two more possibilities to the user interface
1) Give me the URI of your FOAF file.
2) Tick the boxes or give me the URI for networks that support the OpenSocial Data APIs.

There's some fine detail in here to make this common:-

- We need a common identifier as well as Email Address. If we used foaf:mbox_sha1sum we get past some of the privacy issues around publishing email addresses.

- Which means that SNs should index their membership on foaf:mbox_sha1sum

- We should try and get foaf:mbox_sha1sum added to the OpenSocial GData people definition. Or we should establish a convention that the foaf namespace is added to GData output by supporting SNs and
foaf:mbox_sha1sum is filled wherever possible.

- SNs should support AuthSub as well as OpenID and whatever other single signon standards they support.

Do you see what Google have done here?

Quite apart from SN graph portability, if lots of sites support the OpenSocial data APIs, what new Apps and Mashups does this enable? Is there a chance that we'll see the same explosion of helper apps and
mashups that grew up round Twitter?

Here's another take on Google's OpenSocial.

Orkut, LinkedIn, Ecademy, and all the rest simply couldn't compete with Facebook's API technology. There's just no way we could reverse engineer it and rebuild it. Even MySpace would find it very hard.

But Google already had Google Gadgets and lots of other similar technology. They've also got lots of very clever programmers who know how to build things like the Maps API and hook it all together. They had all the pieces to copy Facebook inside Orkut. But nobody cares about Orkut outside Brazil.

So they've played the political game to leverage the technology and help everyone else take Facebook down a notch. Because Facebook is a pinprick in their side. They didn't get the FB advertising contract and they can't see the FB data. And after all, their mission is to index all the data and serve ads next to it.

Now I'm really in awe of the Political-PR, snow job they've done on us all, from the name, to the leaked releases, to the behind the scenes deals. Google have done an absolutely masterful job of blind siding the whole industry. It's way better than anything I've ever seen from Microsoft. They're doing exactly what MS did. Embrace and Extend, leading to Control. But they're not evil, right? And they've got us all eating out of their hand. What they want is for the whole world to use the Google standards. Atom, not RSS. AuthSub, not OpenID/oAuth. gData, not FOAF. The spec is "what Orkut does". They've managed to enlist the whole industry outside MS and Yahoo into trying to use and implement those standards. And we (the other social networks and gadget writers) will do our bit to help them because we can't afford not to.

As a geek it pisses me off because there's absolutely no accountability or transparency in how those standards are developed. It's every bit as bad as MS trying to force the Word XML standard through the standards bodies. Google is something of a black box. There's no way to influence them. Stuff appears out of the black box fully formed.

Orkut is just not very good, or very complete. And the data available to gadget writers is also not very good or very complete. But when all the SNs implement the Orkut interface as a lowest common denominator, that's all the gadget writer can depend on. Individual Social Networks that want to be Containers will have to extend the standards in non-standard ways and we'll be back where we started. To make that clearer, I expect people to add namespaces to the People data like FOAF and VCARD. Gadget writers will have to try and second guess which new namespaces might appear. And to make that even more concrete, most SNs have a Skype ID field. But Orkut and GData don't, so a Gadget that shows your Skype ID and it's presence won't know exactly how that will be presented in the data.

Then there's the name. If it had been called GoogleGadgets instead of OpenSocial people would have found it much easier to understand what it was all about. But OpenSocial was much better as a PR tool because it hides what's really going on.

But after all that I don't feel that angry. Google have given the industry a kick up the backside. And I don't think there's anything malicious about it. It's just clever people being clever about leveraging their position.

I've got to go now. Because I've got a whole new set of APIs to implement.

That is indeed the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the end to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous over-indulgence
Or to take arms against a sea of wrinkles, grey hair and flab,
And by opposing end them? To almost die of shame on national TV:
But then, by using every trick in the book, to end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To nearly die of shame but then be reborn;
More attractive than we'd ever dared to dream: ay, there's the rub;

(c) Paul Blezard with a nod to Bill

I do believe Twype is done. It seems to be stable, it does what I want it to. Get it here.
http://tinyurl.com/37xkxb which is http://www.voidstar.com/downloads/twype.exe
Current release is 0.2.0.20

It copies your latest Twitter to your skype mood. If you use Winamp it can copy the track you're currently listening to, to your Skype Mood. And it can ping Moodgeist with mood changes; both yours and your contacts.

With a nod to Rudy Rucker. How to survive Malls, Hotels, Airports and places like the Adam Street club that are completely underground. Imagine you're 2 miles below the surface of the Moon. The food is all grown in a vat of algae and most of the other people are cyborgs who have had half their brain eaten by stainless steel rats.

It would probably work for London as a whole but it takes a bit more imagination. That greyness above you is actually painted on the inside of a plexiglass dome.

I've been playing around with posting Twitter Tweets to my Skype Mood. The alpha is just finished and you can download it from here.
http://www.voidstar.com/downloads/twype.exe

It's a small Windows tray program.
- Once every 5 minutes it checks your Twitter account and grabs the latest tweet. This gets posted to your Skype Mood.
- If you use Winamp it optionally checks what's playing and posts that to the Mood instead. This overrides the Twitter post but when you pause Winamp it reverts to the Twitter post. Winamp is checked every 5 seconds and when the playing state changes or track changes so it's more or less instantaneous.

Installation just consists of copying the .exe somewhere and running it. The first time you run it, it will popup the dialog so you can put in your Twitter ID. Once that's done it will start in the tray so you can add it to your Start menu and forget about it.

I'm open to suggestions for improvements. In particular it needs a better icon if anyone wants to help. I'll be posting the source code in a couple of days. I can't guarantee to maintain it, but I use it myself so it'll probably get some changes and improvements anyway. The next thing is probably to find some libraries for iTunes and WMP.

Oh, and it's Windows only.