Web 2.0

Demand for Web 2.0 suicides increasing

Kaliya Young · December 18, 2009 · 1 Comment

I went to the suidicemachine and got this message

We apologize to all our users for the breakdown of our service! Within the last hours the huge demand for 2.0 suicides completely overblew our bandwidth resources!

We are currently considering relocating to another serverfarm. Please consider suicide at a later moment and accept our apologies!

You can still try to catch a free slot, but chances are quiet low at the moment!

More from their site….

Faster, Safer, Smarter, Better Tired of your Social Network?

Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our services currently runs with facebook.com, myspace.com and LinkedIn.com! Commit NOW!

You can even see video’s about what happens as one uses the machine.

ok the FAQ’s get eve better…..

I always get the message “Sorry, Machine is currently busy with killing someone else?”. What does this mean?
Our server can only handle a certain amount of suicide scripts running at the same time. Please consider your suicide attempt at a later moment! We are very sorry for the inconvenience and working on expanding our resources.

If I kill my online friends, does it mean they’re also dead in real life?
No!

What do I need to commit suicide with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine?
A standard webbrowser with Adobe flashplugin and javascript enabled. So, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac with most of browsers available.

I can’t see my friends being killed, what happened?
Probably your flash-plugin is older than version 10? But yikes – you cannot stop the process anymore! Once you entered the login details, the machine is running the suicide script.

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process?
No!

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process?
No!

What shall I do after I’ve killed myself with the web2.0 suicide machine?
Try calling some friends, talk a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their life has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

Do you store any data on your webserver, like password of the user?
We don’t store your password on our server! Seriously, it goes directly into /dev/null, which is equal to nirvana! We only save your profile picture, your name and your last words! Will the 2.0 suicide machine be available for other networks such as twitter and plaxo? We are currently working on improving our products!. Currently we are working on Flickr and Hyves, but of course we are eagerly thinking of ways to get rid of our “Google Lifes”.

How does it work technically?
The machine consists of a tweaked Linux server running apache2 with python module. Selenium RC Control is used to automatically launch and kill browser sessions. This all driven by a single python/cgi script with some additional self-written libraries. ?Each user can watch her suicide action in real-time via a VNC remote desktop session, displayed on our website via an flash applet rendered live into the client’s webbrowser. We are also running some customized bash scripts plus MySQL in the background for logging and debugging, jquery for the website and a modified version of the great FlashlightVNC application built in Flex. Web2.0 Suicide Machine consists of roughly 1800 lines of self-written code.

Why do we think the web2.0 suicide machine is not unethical?
Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified life by the help of automatized machines. Facebook and Co. are going to hold all your informations and pictures on their servers forever! We still hope that by removing your contact details and friend connections your data is being cached out from their servers. This can happen after days, weeks, months or even years. Just deactivating the account is thus not enough! [emphasis mine]

How much does it cost to kill myself?
Usage of Web 2.0 Suicide machine is for free.

Can I build my own suicide machine?
Theoretically yes! You’ll need a Linux WebServer (apache2) with perl and python modules (php should be installed as well). Further, you’ll need VNC-server and Java packages by Sun to launch selenium-remote applets. If you feel like contributing or setting up your own machine, please get in contact with us via email.

At the Ideas Project apparently women don't have any ideas.

Kaliya Young · July 29, 2009 · 5 Comments

As some of you may or may not know, I founded a women’s-only technology conference, She’s Geeky. There has been a bunch of conversation in this past week about the lack of women speakers at tech events (in fields like web 2.0, social media, government where there is significant female participation).

It got started with this top 10 list put out by the Speakers Group that included NO women. Then O’Reilly published its first round of speakers for Web 2.0 Summit that was only 20% women. Allyson Kapin called him out, started a petition, and a whole discussion got going in Twitter. It continued with the inc500 conference.

This morning via a link I ended up on this website: The IDEAS Project. This is a site talking about the big ideas of the social web and the future of identity, collaboration, standards development, and norms on the digital web. The pictures speak for themselves.

For those of you counting:

5 women out of 50
racial diversity by my observation 2 asian people and 2 black people
No one under the age of 30 and not that many under the age of 40.

Monitor Talent is behind the site and it is sponsored by Nokia and powered by Xigi.

Many of the men here have written books or have academic credentials.

Of course it is a social media site, so any one can contribute. I just don’t want to contribute to a place that is so skewed in one direction in terms of the starting point. This is not a hard core IT subject, this is social media and use of the web and the network in a forward looking way. Looking along the side, all the contributed ideas so far come from handles with male names.

It all makes me wonder:

Who is a real “authority” on a subject?
If you have a title and a position at an institution this means you must know, right?
If you have written a book you must have it right?

Some friends are in this “talent pool” like Jerry Michalski, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, Laura Fitton, Christine Heron, Esther Dyson, Bob Fankston, David Hornick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Werbach, Andreas Weigend, Ross Mayfield, Charlene Li, Jeff Clavier.

I am curious if they asked about the gender balance reflected in this project up front?

Have they worked to recommend that Monitor Talent pick up more women talent? or even proactively suggested monitor seek to develop women talent?

The web offers a huge opportunity to change who is seen and referenced as having authority and we need to take advantage of this change the web offers.

I know this… I I have never had a formal position at any company, yet IdM leaders at major companies like Microsoft, SUN, Novell, Burton Group, PayPal, Google, Yahoo!, etc. point at my blog, and I have, at least within that world, a lot of authority as a community leader – I have led 15+ events on the topic of user-centric identity in the past 5 years and and spoken about 3 times a year at other events. I am very very comfortable talking about the topics in my industry, this is what I DO – I am an evangelist, a communicator, but this alone didn’t translate into being able to speak without training, practice or support. (I currently don’t proactively seek to speak because I had a bad experience and it rattled me.)

I think we need to work on moving beyond just taking at face value “old” positional authority like having a title at a university and proclaiming expertise – it doesn’t mean those people participate in the communities that are actually driving the innovation they speak about.

There is a systemic issue here. I hope that it can be addressed by the whole community.

Here are some talented women in identity if you ware wondering who they are.

The spiritual nature of web 2.0

Kaliya Young · May 4, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I was reviewing the blogosphere for peoples thoughts on the workshop. Anne 2.0 read through some of Christine.net’s post on the workshop. But this followed and made me smile...

Web 2.0is itself Buddhist in its approach to categorizing information and knowledge. Tags are the ultimate in tentative, nonfrozen categories. If categories are fundamentalist, tags are Buddhist.

Web 2.0 is it Monopoly Capitalism?

Kaliya Young · January 26, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Norman Lewis from Fance Telecome just presented made a bold statment that ‘the web 2.0 business model’ as monopoly capitalism. Getting investments and then being bought by the big guys.

Web 2.0 and Tufte to the rescue

Kaliya Young · November 22, 2005 · Leave a Comment

So on this snark blog – Go Flock Yourself that my buddy Jon Garfunkel sent along has this interesting post asserting that Web 2.0 retards need to read more Tufte. in reference to this picture with notes on flickr. The good news is that is coming to San Jose and San Francisco this month Dec 5-8. About 8 months ago after NTEN I went to Boston just for the workshop because Marty recommended it. Well worth it – you get all of his books and a day long course – Presenting Data and Information.

Web 2.0 Design Patterns

Kaliya Young · October 3, 2005 · Leave a Comment

Buried on last page of Tim O’Reilly’s article is this great list of design patterns for Web 2.0. I thought it was worth posting them here so the Identity community can reflect on how Identity enhances these patterns and perhaps what other patterns we might add like – User Centric Identity.

In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”
1. The Long Tailâ€¨Small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet’s the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
2. Data is the Next Intel Insideâ€¨Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
3. Users Add Valueâ€¨The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don’t restrict your “architecture of participation” to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
4. Network Effects by Defaultâ€¨Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.
5. Some Rights Reserved.
Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for “hackability” and “remixability.”
6. The Perpetual Betaâ€¨When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don’t package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features.
7. Cooperate, Don’t Controlâ€¨Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems.
8. Software Above the Level of a Single Deviceâ€¨The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application from the get-go to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers.

O'Reilly's thoughts on Identity in the context of Web 2.0

Kaliya Young · October 3, 2005 · Leave a Comment

I just read through Tim’s five pager on Web 2.0 and found the highlights that relate to Identity.

Meanwhile, startups like Sxip are exploring the potential of federated identity, in quest of a kind of “distributed 1-click” that will provide a seamless Web 2.0 identity subsystem…While the jury’s still out on the success of any particular startup or approach, it’s clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the “internet operating system”, will enable the next generation of applications.
A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.
Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

I hope that Identity Common’s who’s founding principles assert this Freedom loud and clear can lead the way on this.

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
Lightweight Programming Models
There are several significant lessons here:
Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle.
It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you’ve explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn’t found in the local cache.

DIDW at Web 2.0

Kaliya Young · October 3, 2005 · Leave a Comment

We will here a lot about this this week: What is Web 2.0?
Eric Norlan summarizes it this way.

“Web 2.0” is the idea that the web is now the platform. In the development of computing we always think in “platforms”
You’ll find is a bunch of companies that are building applications (and sub-platforms) on the Web 2.0 meme — and they *all* are either touching digital identity or going to need digital identity.
I’m pleased to report that a truly significant thing is occurring — the identity architects in the enterprise are beginning to mingle with the identity folks out in end-user land.
I believe the technology stars are beginning to align; that the marketplace is beginning (beginning, I say) to catch up with the conversation; that maybe – just maybe…

This is great news. Sounds like we should have a BOF or some other identity gang/workshop related gathering. I went to look for the listing of BOFs and or the event wiki – couldn’t find it. I wonder what kind of Web 2.0 event is this with no wiki? Hopefully all will become clear on Wednesday :).

Web 1.0 and 2.0 this week

Kaliya Young · September 30, 2005 · Leave a Comment

So I have been off and about the world for a few weeks. I am finally back in the bay area and trying to recover from the nasty cold that I caught while at Accelerating Change. I had a great week at Web of Change except I was fighting the cold. I had more great meetings about the forthcoming global launch of i-names services this week in Palo Alto.
Next week will be a big week. I am going to be at Web 2.0 and just found out about the ‘alternative summit’ Web 1.0 happening simultaneously.

On Wednesday at the House of Shields and sponsored by 43 Folders and the year 1998, with generous contributions from Adaptive Path, Mule Design, WordPress, Blogger, and Flickr.
We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.
There will be beer.
Let’s make this summit more successful than the last one, please.

This is an interesting trend the creation of grass roots summits occurring as a counter point (FOO and BAR Camp) and open source alternative to giant corporate walled gardens talking about the future.

Web 2.O comodification – great post

Kaliya Young · July 11, 2005 · Leave a Comment

This post on the comodifiication of Web 2.0. It is worth reading to begin to understand microforamts and why identity is important to make them even cooler.