Social Network

Marty the Master of Networking

Kaliya Young · October 16, 2005 · Leave a Comment

Marty Kerns gave a great presentation. The take away that was most relevant to the identity world was this.

Simple rules create complex behavior.

Complex rules create simple behavior.

He wowed the audience because he treats presentation as performance art just like R0ml, Doc, Lessig and Dick do. After the NTEN national conference last year on his recommendation I went to see Tufte’s workshop on the visual display of information. It was great. This weekend when I presented twice I incorporated one of his techniques “the black screen”. The audiences loved the talks and it was fun to energize see an energized audience.
Talk began by highlighting that social networks are not new…they are family friends and college room mates. They are increasingly stretched because new communications tools help us stay connected over distance better then ever before (The high-school to College IM phenomena.).
How do you scale when social networks show up to your issue? If 10,000 folks showed up for 10 min what could they do for you?
There were 5 core elements that he invited us to look at
Strong Social Ties – we are overwhelmed by information so the information we are most likely to pay attention to will come through our social network.
Rich Communications Grid – how do you communicate with others.
Common Story – the core 10%t hat share story they do 90% of the work.
Shared Resources – working together these networks are bossless but leader-full.
Clarity of Purpose – this emerges as the above fall into place

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.

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.