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Peter Saint-Andre of XMPP on presence as real-time identity

I was pointed to an interview today from the Identity Gang listserv. Peter Saint-Andre was pre-interviewed before his appearance at the upcoming eComm 2008 in March.

A wonderful discussion – technical but listenable. Full interview is 50 minutes.

Peter spoke about how we are moving offline aspects of oneself online and moving online aspects of oneself offline as well as how the Internet has given us the ability to share personal states (such as “mood”) outside of our small home circle.

I liked this assessment:

If I had to conclude my impression of the chat, I’d say that we are heading into an era of super connectedness between people, people and machines, and across the offline and online worlds. Evolved presence and lifestreams will be very much the plumbing to build that highly-wooven fabric.

Yes, we’ll be merging and projecting. And there will be lots of consternation about how to deal with all of it. Good thing we’ve got Peter and quite a few of the rest of the Identity Gang to help us all get there a little smoother.

And Happy New Year – we’re in the future, again!

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2008 01 06 Terrell Russell Comments Off on Peter Saint-Andre of XMPP on presence as real-time identity Permalink

Wikipedia is good enough, good grief

Larry Sanger is beginning to sound more and more desperate. The growing, but largely irrelevant Citizendium project is still too top-heavy with administrative overhead and will continue to be an also-ran to any discussion around human stores of knowledge.

However, this is not stopping the continued declaration of quality-over-quantity.

Some people might be a little puzzled why I am pushing for higher quality in online content, and why I am not content with “good enough.”

I will make the point, again, that “good enough” is strictly subjective and that Larry/Citizendium just has a different definition of what it means to be good enough.

There are tremendous amounts of data online, but the vast quantities make it difficult to find the best: the highest quality data is hidden among mountains of cruft. Most of us specifically want the highest quality data — we want the most authoritative introduction to a topic, the highest quality video, the most recent and accurate statistics, the least biased and best-informed product ratings, etc. And some of us spend huge amounts of time looking for the highest quality data; I often do. Therefore, a website like the Citizendium that aims to aggregate the best information online would — if successful — render that sort of searching unnecessary. Whatever sort of search-for-quality can be aggregated, we’ll aggregate it.

The best? Highest quality? Most authoritative?

These things are completely subjective. Many would say that the highest quality video has nothing to do with what should be made available for distribution. The people largely do not *want* the highest, most, or best – they want good enough. When the spectrum of information is more filled-out, and a variety of qualities are available at their respective price-points in the market – the consumer will seek out the level they are comfortable with and/or the one they can afford. Not unlike cars and houses and everything else in a mature market.

In fact, Dr. Sanger is placing himself squarely outside the mainstream with his definition of what is good enough for his own research purposes. He’s a “premium” consumer of information sources – an academic (I include myself). Most people do not spend huge amounts of time looking for *anything* – they try once or twice, they ask a friend, and if they don’t find the answer that satisfies them, they give up, it was too hard. If the task is somewhat more important to a searcher, then perhaps he’ll spend a little more time/effort/money looking for the answer that is “good enough”. Regardless, it’s the personal threshold that’s important.

I have watched Citizendium for over a year now and was originally going back and forth on how I thought it would fare. I haven’t changed my mind now for quite a few months. I’m fairly certain the project will never gain the type of attention or credibility it needs to remain viable.

Wikipedia changed the game. The Citizendium is trying to build a house atop a foundation made of (purposefully) constantly shifting sands.

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2007 12 22 Terrell Russell Comments (3) Permalink

IIW, OpenLifeBits, and Facebook’s Beacon

So, two weeks on, I write up my thoughts on my trip to IIW2007B at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

As I wrote over at claimID, we had an incredible few days. There was a new energy in the air this time as interoperability was assumed and a focus on services began to take centerstage. There was a lot of talk about Reputation, OpenID 2.0, and OAuth 1.0. We’ve got the pieces now to begin building compelling applications and services. The business models will be appearing in May at the next conference.

We even had an impromptu OAuth party on Tuesday night in honor of the spec being released. Smarr/Recordon/Wachob/Hammer-Lahav/Messina and myself.

I ran a session on Tuesday morning on OpenLifeBits (thanks to John Panzer for the wiki notes) – and had some excellent feedback as well as discussion around what we should be building to house/manage our personal information. How do we define these bits and who owns this content? Is the information we have housed in the corporate silos our own? If someone else is involved in the creation of a particular piece of data – do we both own it? Do we own it jointly with the company as well? A friend request on Facebook – who’s is that to share? Mine? Hers? Facebook’s? Legally, today, it’s Facebook’s.

I’ll take credit here for two quotes captured on the wiki:

“Stalkers were on MySpace, now Facebook _is_ the stalker.”

A little over the top – but definitely something I feel strongly about. We’re seeing individuals post more and more personal information into corporate repositories willingly and without due consideration for where their information is visible and/or to be used under the terms of service.

I see Beacon as part of a greater slippery slope – we’ll all be living, publicly documented, without recourse.

“It’s a good thing that a bad thing became public” — on FB Beacon.

I feel strongly that Beacon is only the first public-facing version of what these large corporations have been doing for years. It is completely naive to think that companies will give away their services for free to the consumer without trying to leverage what they learn through statistics and demographics to make money. They have to have a bottom line, or they go out of business. Free or not, this stuff costs money to run.

When Facebook shows the public what is possible with their data, at first we squirm and yell, then we realize that we like more targeted information – it becomes less about SPAM and more about information we actually wanted.

The tricky part lies in where that fuzzy line of ‘worth it’ is drawn. Is it worth it for me to give my information to a company so I can get a free burger or $5 off my next box of detergent? For most consumers, the answer is clearly yes – or we wouldn’t continue to see these types of offers.

A quote from Alison Black:

Getting inside people’s decision-making, to inject caution before commitment is likely to be extremely difficult (even with well-understood hazards, such as smoking and alcohol, health educators have difficulty getting their message across). But given that there is a likelihood that many people will continue to act humanly and, therefore, incautiously, there is an opportunity for companies to commit openly to respectful data handling. It may cramp their style for trading data in the future, but as more companies commit themselves to rigorous standards, those that don’t will stand out. Maybe this contrast could pique people’s consciousness just enough for them to ask ‘whatever they’re offering, do I want to hand my data over to them?’

When things like Facebook Beacon force us to realize what is happening behind the scenes, we’re more likely to have informed opinions in the future (which is a good thing). That said, I’m not holding my breath for when we’ll see all these companies go with opt-in as their default. In today’s market, it just doesn’t pay nearly as well.

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2007 12 19 Terrell Russell Comments (1) Permalink

OpenLifeBits – For Your Digital Stuff

I have a proposal.

I have been watching and reading about social network portability and data portability and OpenID and facebook beacon and doc searls’ vendor relationship management and Obama’s call for open formats and Google Drive and Jon Udell’s hosted lifebits scenarios (another post just today).

And Chris Messina has been hanging around this space for a while as well and posted two solid write-ups this past week – on data portability and data brokers.

All of these things seem to scream for some integration, for a system that plays by all the rules and ‘just works’ for the simplest of use cases today, and is ready to scale up and handle the use cases of tomorrow.

I’m envisioning a wrapper – a specification that defines how data should be held and managed for an individual. At first, this should be a single human – later, perhaps organizations or groups of people.

It should be the bucket where our digital stuff lives and the vehicle through which we interact with vendors and each other.

I see three parts – at least for now.

1. Data Repository

This is the heart of the matter. A solid datastore on which to build. This can be a collection of approved document formats – ones that are found to be open and/or well understood. Archival quality stuff here. These need to last for a long time and not be rendered incompatible or unreadable in the future. Really, this is nothing more than a well-defined filesystem or collection of files.

I think it’s most useful at this point to consider the different types of data and simply list the types of formats that meet these criteria. If we don’t have such a format at this time, document the gap and hope that the next few years provide standards that match up.

  • ICS/iCal – Calendar/Event Data
  • MPEG – Video Data
  • Ogg – Video and Audio Data
  • TXT – Text, preferably UTF-8
  • PDF – Portable Document Format
  • ODF – Open Document Format (Word Processing, Charts, Spreadsheets, Presentations)
  • vCard – People Listings, AddressBooks
  • JPEG – Photographs / Images
  • SVG – Scalable Vector Graphics / Images
  • PNG – Portable Network Graphics / Images
  • KML – Keyhole Markup Language – Mapping Data
  • FOAF/XFN – Relationships between people
  • OPML – Subscriptions
  • GEDCOM – Geneology Data (has limitations)
  • PHR/EHR – Personal/Electronic Health Record – complicated, lots of standardization attempts
  • APML – Attention / Interest Data
  • Financial Data – records, transactions, balances, gets complicated quickly, OFX, GnuCash

2. Data Channels

This is the second piece – getting data in and out of the repository. Open protocols are the key here and it seems we have quite a number of them already being pushed around the live web. Let’s name some and find some gaps…

  • XMPP – Messaging – does voice, text, images, this is the Jabber protocol
  • HTTP – The web protocol – very handy
  • RSS/Atom – Syndication
  • OAuth – Authentication between applications
  • OpenID – Authentication of Users
  • Yadis – Service Discovery
  • SMTP/IMAP – Mail protocols

3. Data Management

The third part of this specification would be focused on the management of the data that in the repository and keeping things secure and logged. This is the most complicated part and what makes OpenLifeBits the most different from anything we’ve already got today. Encryption should be at the heart of keeping things well secured (having a brokered encryption market (managing access to secret keys) is another task altogether). Additionally, the dataset should have the capability to be split/merged at will. If you don’t want your medical history stored near your financials, so be it.

  • Metadata – describe the data in the repository – using open standard METS
  • Permissions – access control – does an open standard exist, Unix permissions?
  • Encryption – variety of standards, definitely should have good, strong defaults
  • Backup – needs to be atomic, automatic, and recoverable (versioned, even)
  • Logging – a full record of what has happened to the life of the dataset

Interfaces

A fourth piece that is really beyond the scope of the definition of any spec is the interface(s) into this data and how a person actually interacts with the data and the outside world via the dataset. A comprehensive list will not be possible to create today, but a solid look at what is available today should force a flexibility of thinking to allow future innovators to do what they do best.

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • API
  • smartphone
  • star trek communicator

Brokered Digital Identity Management

The entire infrastructure/dataset should be portable. Most people will not want to worry about the intracacies of managing this kind of data. We already do it for banking – we get a broker. We outsource and allow experts to manage our stuff for us. We let them worry about the details and there is a marketplace to encourage them to behave well. If they do not, we can move our stuff. This should be the case with our lifebits as well.

Big Picture

There is a large amount of momentum (and cash) behind today’s corporate model (companies own data about you). Inverting the system to be beholden to me and my permission model is not something that will happen overnight. Additionally, the legal questions around ownership of data and the contractual obligations of those you share your information with remain unanswered questions. I have a hunch though that a lot of these types of questions have precedent – just not with the specifics of personal data archives.

As we move into a more digital existence, we will need tools that begin to manage this type of stuff on the personal level. Do you think we can start small and simple and grow into the more complicated models later? Is anyone going to see any value in this OpenLifeBits model besides the geeks among us?

Next week’s IIW in Mountain View should have quite a few people willing to talk about an OpenLifeBits. Please come and find me if you want to hash some of this out further.

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2007 11 28 Terrell Russell Comments (6) Permalink

Tag Decay Poster from ASIST is online

I met quite a few people at the recent ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Milwaukee and told them I’d be getting my poster online.

The poster is up – Tag Decay: A View Into Aging Folksonomies (PDF 1.7MB)

It was a great problem to have people standing, listening, and asking questions for four hours. I just wish my throat had been warned ahead of time – I didn’t talk much the next day.

Thanks everyone.

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2007 11 07 Terrell Russell Comments (2) Permalink

Timelined Information Retrieval

I was thinking about how I search through my email this morning and worked out that sometimes I know more about *when* an email happened than what it said or who it was from. This is a rare thing, but generalizing, I quickly worked out that this would be a great addition to any/all search interface(s) if done well.

I want to be able to specify where in time I think my known item search should look. I think it could be done fairly simply with a well-designed normal distribution curve.

I want to see a timeline (aka a landscape-oriented rectangle) with a distribution curve that I can drag around. I would be centering the curve on *when* I wanted to focus my search.

The search itself would still do fulltext and weight like before, but now, would scale that prior weighting by how well it fit under my specified curve.

I have not done any due-diligence in looking through the information retrieval literature, but I have not seen this interface before and it seems like it would be very helpful for certain types of known-item, time-based queries.

Things that are not within my “window of interest” would be punished with a reduced relevance score in my overall search results. Things that matched my curve, in time, would receive a boost. Otherwise, the search behaves as it always has. This would simply be an addition parameter that gives more power to the searcher who knows *when* they’re looking for.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Where?

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2007 10 31 Terrell Russell Comments (2) Permalink

“Always Away” for plausible deniability

I’ve noticed this myself over the past few years. As more and more of my friends come online “all the time” and/or have connections at work, they leave their chat clients open and set to “Away”.

It has exactly its intended consequence. I don’t write them unless I have something I need to send them – something that is necessary but not formal enough for an email (strange concept, email being too formal – here I was thinking I was older/wiser now…). The other people (grouped at the top of my list in green) are “Available” and cognitively, to me, much more ready to receive a funny link or interesting news blurb.

Annalee Newitz writes:

More importantly, I can avoid unwanted chatter that interrupts my workflow. I do this by deploying a form of IM etiquette that I call “always away.” IM clients allow you to specify a status that gets displayed to other people using IM, and the defaults are things like “available” or “away.” I always set my status to “away,” sometimes adding a phrase like “working” or “fighting aliens.” Most of my colleagues do the same thing (except for the fighting aliens part). This allows me to have plausible deniability when I need to ignore a purely social message that interrupts my workflow. After all, I might really be gone. But I can respond when a colleague messages me about something important.

On the longer article at AlterNet – she opens with:

My social world is divided into two camps: people who use instant messaging and people who don’t. When I start my workday by booting up my computer, I consider myself to have arrived at the office when my IM program comes to life and is suddenly populated by dozens of tiny names and faces.

I find this interesting because it’s not wrong, but it’s not quite as nuanced as danah boyd’s point from two-and-a-half years ago about the culture divide in instant messaging:

To most of my friends, i appear always-on. If i’m not on the computer, my IMs usually go to my Sidekick. I have a round-the-clock presence on AIM, even if frequently idle. I share this round-the-clockness with some of my buddies – people who always appear to be on, although sometimes idle. There are other buddies who pop up whenever they’re on their computer (often 9-5). Then, there are those who pop up very occasionally.

The thing about members of this latter category is that they *always* want to talk when they come online. This makes sense – they’re appearing online only to talk, not to share presence. They are seeing IM as a communication tool first and foremost.

Interestingly, it is this group that complains the most about how they can never get anything done when IM is on. I try really hard not to respond in a snarky voice that i can never get anything done when they’re on. They get upset when i don’t have time to talk, arguing that i shouldn’t be online if i don’t want to talk.

There is, in fact, a culture divide in instant messaging.

So it seems that there are four groups?

  • Non-On’s,
  • Occasionally-On’s (drive-by IM) (attention snatchers),
  • work-related Usually-On’s (9-5), and
  • Always-On’s (presence broadcasters).

Do you see yourself in any of those four? Is the new medium creating new norms in your workplace? In your home workplace? Are you an attention snatcher and confused/upset when people don’t write you back? These questions are more mainstream than even a couple years ago. When everyone’s mobile phone has wifi – will we be more savvy about this stuff? Do you broadcast your presence at all?

Of course, none of these presence discussions would be complete without a link to this related phenomenon – the buddy pounce. Oh people hate that. :)

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2007 10 16 Terrell Russell Comments (7) Permalink

Chinese social networks require Real Names

In a post on the SIG-III blog, Aaron Bowen writes about his attempt at creating a profile on the Chinese social networking site, Zhanzuo. He was thwarted since he couldn’t type his name in characters that aren’t Chinese. More to the point, he was thwarted because he couldn’t be in compliance with the rule that says he must provide his ‘Real Name’. Tricky, eh?

But before the name verification authorities deleted my profile, I did try to add a little blurb about myself and the SIG-III blog, partly on the off chance that someone would see it before my profile disappeared, and partly just to see if I could do it. What happened was interesting. My attempts to post to the “about me” section were blocked, with (in Google translation) a rather Orwellian message:

your current state is: not yet audited by administrators, unable to use this function.

Block of the network to promote the real-name system, in order to pass audit, you must:

1. Upload your photos as a true portrait

2. Complete the true information (including name, department, etc)

Within 24 hours administrators will examine your images and information vetted through you can freely enjoy the fun of the block!

He was initially pointed to the site by a post by Dan Wei – complete with (translated) mp3 of his interviews with some student “brand ambassadors” of this site. He refers to Zhanzuo.com as “one of several sites contending for the role of ‘China’s Facebook’.”

The real name system in China refers to top down policies of requiring web users to provide their real name and some other personal identifiers to register and use certain sites and services, particularly BBS and blogs. It is generally viewed unfavorably as a big-brotherish crackdown on online free-speech.

Social networking sites, given that their function is to search and connect with friends and contacts, by their very nature require one to register their real name. Chinese netizens nontheless lump this together with the real name system, and all the negative contexts associated with it.

This is especially a challenge for campus SNSs like Zhanzuo, since China’s campuses are likely to be the place where one can find the most resistence to real name systems.

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2007 10 04 Terrell Russell Comments (1) Permalink

PunBB support of MicroID updated to version .3

A MicroID day here today…

Rickard committed my tweak to the PunBB 1.3 codebase to be MicroID compatible with version .3 of the spec.

The changeset is here.

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2007 09 12 Terrell Russell Comments Off on PunBB support of MicroID updated to version .3 Permalink

Drupal module for MicroID updated

I’ve been working with Tane Piper over the last couple days over IRC tweaking his improvements to his Drupal MicroID module (getting it Version .3 compatible).

He has implemented node-level and comment-level MicroIDs that appear both in the meta tags of the page and are then rendered into the node divs and comment divs directly via jQuery.

The jQuery is fired via javascript after the DOM is loaded, so currently, DOM-unaware spiders/parsers will not be able to see the node and comment-level MicroIDs. That said, I’m not aware of any MicroID parsers that aren’t working only at the page level (full URL, not sub-content *on* the page).

Additionally, the Drupal-generated user profile pages have MicroIDs.

His implementation is live on his site – Digital Spaghetti.

His code can be found on the Drupal site – Drupal MicroID module.

Congratulations to Tane – and well done.

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2007 09 12 Terrell Russell Comments (2) Permalink