Help Required with Wikipedia: Big Prize!

Friends. Please. I need your help.

I am very lucky to be described in Wikipedia but no one has touched it since my time at Kazaa. It’s completely uncool to update your own page, so can you have a look and add something that you think is important? It can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I’m not looking for a group-hug.

The best contribution can chose any MP3 download on Amazon as a prize! Deadline: Friday, 8th February.

Kevin Kelly’s Rules for Media Companies

Kevin Kelly has just written  some terrific rules for media companies to apply as they evolve their business models to the Internet: Better than Free.

The Internet is a copy machine, founded on principles of super-distribution. As Kelly says:

“Even a dog knows you can’t erase something once its flowed on the internet.”

Building a business model around scarcity and crontrol is plainly not going to work (DRM) in this new market-place. Kelly brings his big-brain, long-thought, impossible-to-express-in-a-twitter process to bear to suggest 8 generatives better than free.

• Immediacy
• Personalization
• Interpretation
• Authenticity
• Accessibility
• Embodiment
• Patronage
• Findability

If you work in media, this is your new framework.
Someone else that profoundly gets it is Gerd Leonhard, who says it’s no longer about ‘control’. Now we must think about ‘attention’.

Do media companies get this yet? What do you think?

Web App Goal #2: Don’t Try to Change the World

If your first goal when building web applications is ‘Change the World’. Stop, take a deep breath and start again. On your blog, wiki or whiteboard, write:

“We are not trying to change the world, we are trying to give users something they need/love/want.”

or

“We are not trying to change the world, we are trying to make more money than we spend.”

Probably most of the products I have worked on have been in the ‘Change the World’ category. They are over burdened with features, confusing to users, really difficult to maintain and often fail to ship at all.

Why do we do this to ourselves when there are plenty of un-built, simple products that can be built and released in a few months and give users exactly what they need/love/want?

Focus on a known use-case, keep it simple and release as soon as possible to test against real people.

Oh, and I also agree with Web App Goal #1 .

The End of Downloadable Applications?

For my last two years at Kazaa I was working on a brand spanking new desktop application. It was completely awesome but the details of that are not for this post.  This post is about what I slowly understood over those two years – that the time of the desktop internet application for consumers is over.

I 2004/5 I watched the emergence of excellent desktop applications like iMeem and Grouper (now Crackle). These had really raised the bar in terms of user experience and quality in media sharing applications. But it wasn’t long until they each started to re-invent themsleves as web applications.

This was during the emerence of the web we know today. The web that we own. The 2-way web. The web we use to connect with our friends. The web that doesn’t have the spyware, the hassle, the need-to-install-on-every-machine-i-want-to-use. The web that does have the capacity for massively viral effects, the web that is an application more powerful than we have ever seen before.

Check out the evolution of iMeem for example.

• 2005: Its all about the download
• 2006: The download is an optional extra
  
• Today: There is no download

They adapted to survive.

This is what I learned on that last project at Kazaa. We needed to connect with the web and, ideally, remove the need for an extra application.

Now it seems that even the biggest of modern desktop apps, Joost,  is in trouble.

Let’s see what happens next.

Dataportability: Defined

Many thanks to Michael Pick & Smashcut Media for a blindingly clear explaination of what data portability is. Awesome work guys. Everyone that’s been asking me for more information… press play, then get active.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.We’re discussing it here.

Your Email Address is My Data

When Scoble tried to export his friend’s email addresses from Facebook  (notice I didn’t say ‘ran a script to scrape other people’s personal data’) wasn’t he just trying to organise his address book? (See here also.)

I acually don’t quite agree with my title here. I just wanted to get your attention. My email address is my data not yours, but… if I approve you to be my friend on Facebook, I am giving you a personal. non-exclusive license to use that email address to contact me. You can move it to your phone, invite me to be your friend on Myspace, add it to your Exchange address book. Yes, you can even export it from Facebook. As part of our un-written, fair use contract you will not abuse that email address by using it as your own, publishing it to the web or otherwise making it available to spammers but non of that happens if you export it from Facebook.

What do you think?

Why Data Portability?

@lachlanhardy has thrown down the gauntlet to us folks involved with data portability and explained that the dataportability.org site is remarkably uninformative and I agree. Here are the problems I see:

• The need for data portability is a user need for geeks to solve. The current site is too geeky and academic. Geeks are motivated by making things people need.
• The data portability mission needs to be about binding a multitude of disparate, technical standards together into a single user proposition – an idea that makes the world better. The current site is still about lots of separate ideas.

Let me have a go at describing why I am talking to everyone about data portability towards finding a call to action for this thing. I’m going to float up to a high level…
I think we need to gather people around a single problem to solve and how the internet, and how we use it, will be better if it is solved.

So, here’s the context as I see it. Increasingly, we store our digital world online instead of locally on our PCs. This is my digital world:

Explicit Data (All the stuff I chose to store)

• Email addresses/contacts: Some in Outlook, some in Facebook, some in LinkedIn, some in Gmail, some in Twitter.
• Relationships: Some in Linkedin, some in Facebook.
• Photos: Some on my hard drive, some on my phone, some on Flickr, some in Picasa web albums.
• Documents: Some on Zoho, some on Box.Net, some in Google Docs, some on my hard drive

I have to remember where everything is. It is very hard to move data between them. If I want to stop using Google for Docs or Flickr for images there is no common way to move things around. The internet companies control my stuff. Regardless of rhetoric from the likes of Google, my stuff is in the hands of others. Facebook owns my address book and the relationships between them (my ‘social graph’). Period.

Implicit Data (The stuff that’s stored whether I chose to or not)

This is where it gets really interesting. What do I like? Where do I go? I’m talking about the data Google uses to show me contextual advertising, that Amazon uses to show me books I might like, that Pandora uses to play me music for my taste. This is ‘data’ as much as my address book is and Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, etc has bucket-loads of it. And I have NO CONTROL WHATSOEVER other than what they say in their privacy statements.

I want to move what these guys have collected about me somewhere else as easily as I move my photos. In fact, I want to be in control of it. I want to delete it if I need to, or remove their access.
The evolving internet is giving us incredible power to do things we were never able to do on our local PCs at a terrific price (usually free). The downside is that we have lost control of our own data – possibly the most valuable thing you own in the modern world. So, there are privacy issues there… And ethical issues… But there are also practical issues.

Here’s some things I want to be able to do.

• Synchronise my photos between Flickr and Picasa
• Copy and paste a document between Zoho and Google Docs
• Import my profile in discreet chunks to a new service that I can’t be bothered retraining to my interests as I’ve done a thousand times already
• Connect automatically to my address book and social graph when I log on to a new site
• Ban a contact across all services
• View my Facebook friends in Skype
• Save a spreadsheet to my choice of provider on the internet from within Excel

There are literally thousands of other examples. What do you want to do today but can’t because some company has your data locked up?

The efforts at dataportability.org are to evangelise different standards as a single open solution that returns the control of a user’s data to the user. We want to tear down the walls that contain our siloed data. Like the anti-DRM movement found it unacceptable that music could only be played on certain devices, we find it unacceptable that address books only ‘play’ on certain sites…

Another outcome from this kind of work is that more sites can natively interconnect without needing to formally support each other’s API. This is when we can truly begin to ‘build the web’ as well as building our own specific apps. Then we all contribute to a web that is greater than the sum of its parts, providing users with incredible power to do things they could not do before.

OK, so its massive and utopian… but that’s the kind of effort I like to be involved with.

Evan Williams & the Universal Law of Simplicity

When designing software, the temptation is to add features. If the users aren’t loving our app as much as we need them to, it must be because we need to add that extra feature. That’ll get them! Rarely does this have the impact we desire, but the cycle continues and we add more and more features in the hope that, one day, we hit the sweet spot.We forget the universal law of simplicity.

One of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams, presenting the powerful idea that less is more at LeWeb3 (LeWeb channel is here). Twitter itself was built around the constraint that the primary communication platform was SMS and that the web was just another interface. Twitter is dead simple to grasp. Tell everyone what you are doing in less than 140 characters of text. People can follow you and you can follow them. Following means you see what they are saying. There’s no video. No audio. No categories. No complex privacy settings. I don’t need to read the help pages because I can look at the home page and get it almost immediately.

There are a couple of powerful dynamics behind this that I want to talk about.

People not Features

Technology is a means to an end and not and end in itself. Users don’t put photos on the web because of the cool new embed feature, or the API that allows them to upload from their mobile phone. They simply and purely want to share their photos with other people. Great technology serves a simple need that people have. Twitter is an inspiration. It asks “What are you doing?” and we answer. In your app, what is the user trying to do?

Creativity: How it Works

Complexity is the enemy of creativity. In a former life I was a theatre director. I ran a course on improvisation at the West Australian Academy or Performing Arts. I began this course with a simple exercise in which I asked the group to form a circle (we do that a lot in theatre) and for a volunteer to step into the circle to do anything they liked. They had a infinite palette of possibility and the result was paralysis. Their eyes filled with fear as they free-falled through their minds trying to think of something interesting to do. Introducing constraints quickly changed the dynamic: “You are very heavy” or “This ball is precious” or “It’s dark”.  Constraints caused wonderful, creative moments to happen.  It’s a lot like “Tell me what you are doing in less than 140 characters”
Seesmic is bringing the universal law of simplicity to video which can be the most paralysing of all web experiences. I find that if I can film anything I like, wherever I like with my camera and then edit it in Adobe Premiere using After Effects to add titles, before uploading to YouTube I usually give up. It’s too much and I lose the most important thing: Something to say. With Seesmic, I press the big red button and do something. Awesome. I can’t wait to see some of the moments that come out of the Seesmic community.

Check out Evan’s presentation for some more great examples of how constraints can make great software.

Oh, and if you want to add me on Twitter, here I am.

Open Social & Facebook are Just Widgets

The Facebook Developer Platform and Google Open social are really just widgets with a social layer. Chris tells me they are even called ‘OpenWidgets’ by some.

Facebook Developers, especially early adopters, were able to get millions of active users very quickly because they could immediately be put themselves into a community of millions of people with some powerful, viral defaults. The value to the developer is the access (albeit limited) to the users.

Google’s Open Social is useless in this context. It is the same as Facebook… but with no users. So why would you?

Facebook allowing others to clone its model extends the existing value by making ‘widgets’ already developed for Facebook available to their users. Now developers can reach even more users. Its like World of Warcraft increasing the level ceiling from 60 to 70 because it provides fuel to keep the engine running. Developers who already have a few million users are incentivised to keep innovating to reach even more. Everyone wins.

But, even so, Facebook and Open Social are promotional tools… widgets by another name. Its a way of getting your app in front of the users of the container social site but you stil can’t inter-connect.

What if you want to make a social application that is more than a wall, a horoscope, a slideshow, a quiz? What if I want to make a TV that knows what my friends recommend? Or an email client that already knows my relationships and how to reach them? [Snip big list]

I’m proud to be working on the dataportability.org initiative because its leading the way to deliver what Google and Facebook should be doing to create a truly open social web powered by open standards.

Twitterers: An introduction to #tags

I felt like I was behind the times yesterday when I noticed this tweet from Chris Messina.

Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining

What’s going on with #food and #dining? The Twitterverse quickly set me straight and now I’ll help you to understand!

A similar thing happened earlier in the year when Twitterers started refering to each other like this:

Hey @philmorle, wanna get some lunch with me and @liubinskas

At first this could be seen as a geeky indulgence but as time went on everyone started to do it because it’s such a simple annotation. Then Twitter adopted the concept and started hyperlinking the names like @philmorle to link back to that user’s timeline and introduced new concepts such as Replys. At this point a very very simple idea becomes a powerful way to organise unstructured data and to make it actionable… I can do things with it.

So, now we are seeing the start of something new that is equally simple and potentialy very powerful. Where the @ prefix identifies a person, the # prefix identified a tag or category. Let’s look at Chris’ tweet again:

Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining

He’s sown a seed that can one day be watered by Twitter or developers using the Twitter API. Then we’ll see:

Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining

The hyperlinked tags link to other tweets that refer to food and dining. Doing this in the context of your own social network is particularly powerful. In my case, all the people I follow in Twitter live in a place I spend lots of time so clicking on #food in my network should suggest some great places to to try.

Here’s some more examples:

To enter Karazhan, you need to do a string of quests to get a working key. Starts with Archmage Alturus (48,76) of Violet Eye just outside Karazhan. #warcrafttips

@loic just told us all about a new time travelling API from Google #leweb3

Now I can find all the tweets about Le Web 3 conference and World of Warcraft cheats with one click.

It just keeps getting more useful. Other applications can use the Twitter API to extract #tags and discover trends, create mashups with other services with tags, and so on.

So if you are wondering what the # marks are in my timeline… now you know.

Thanks @lachlanhardy and @cameronreilly for starting me on the road to understanding.

Geeks that want to dig deeper, check out these links:

• http://microformats.org/wiki/twitter-nanoformats
• http://microformats.org/wiki/picoformats