Tag: decentralized social web
Decentralized comments and the IndieWeb
I just stumbled on this old thread by Marc Canter and Stephen Downes (emphasis mine): The primary use of OpenID should not simply be identification, but also, to tell remote sites where to direct our actions. So – in a sense – I carry all my own home website tools with me when I travel around the web. This is, in part, what the IndieWeb is all about - and it works today. I recorded a video demo of how these features work in idno last week: (Reading this in an RSS reader? Here's a direct link.
The Progressive (Profitable) Web
Ryan Holiday laments the loss of Google Reader and RSS in general in Our Regressive Web, arguing that if someone came up with them today, we'd think they were brilliant ideas: We’re just regressing. [...] RSS is impervious to blogging’s worst, but most profitable traits. [...] No wonder nobody ever pushed for widespread adoption. Of course it died a slow death—along with Google Alerts and Delicious. Their mission is antithetical to the ethos of our new media age. Where noise, chatter and pushi
Facebook Graph Search is super-powerful - if all your friends obsessively post to Facebook
Facebook's new Graph Search is an exceptionally powerful idea. Here are some searches I'm looking forward to running: * Bars my friends like in San Francisco * My friends who like Doctor Who and live near me and like pizza * Friends that know [insert investor or entrepreneur name here] Make no mistake: this is a new kind of search that shows the way for more advanced social software, everywhere. There's no doubting that it's an impressive achievement, that has the potential to change the wa
Imagine this: identity computing
I originally wrote this over on Google+. I'm sat at my laptop, which has a monitor attached via a digital connection. On the other side of my desk is my phone, and a tablet. That's the setup I actually have right now, as I'm writing this. But all these devices (monitor aside) are connected to the Internet, rather than each other. And they're mostly incompatible. What if they all knew about each other in relation to each other's position? And what if they were part of one big, decentralized, i
Making billions of dollars from the federated social web
Diaspora was pretty exciting. A Kickstarter campaign that promised it all: a platform created "for everyone to have full control over their data and to empower people in to become responsible, secure, and social Internet dwellers". They raised over $200,000, which at the time was the largest Kickstarter funding round ever. Neat! Yesterday, Diaspora announced that they were becoming a community project. That means that the wider open source community will be responsible for its direction; the or
Off the hooks: user-centered development in a mobile-first world
The following post contains my notes for a talk I gave at Over the Air 2012 at Bletchley Park on June 2nd, 2012. They build on my notes for a previous talk, Building the user-centered web. Desktop isn't enough. For the last few years, I've been working on latakoo, a service that lets you share video fast using any Internet connection. Video is, traditionally, a pain to upload, due to very large file sizes, combined with the limited upload bandwidth inherent to most commercial connections. We s
Here's what Google+ could have been
Confession: I want to like Google+. I think competition is a great thing, and Google is in a unique position to do something fascinating with social platforms. It's also significant that a lot of really brilliant people from the decentralized web community - Chris Messina, Will Norris and Stephen Paul Weber, for example - now work at Google. (Not to mention Elgg's Evan Winslow.) I have nothing but respect for those guys. And, hey, I'll admit that I'm a little envious that they get to work on it.
Identity is the operating system
I've got a phone number: +1 (312) 488-9373. Feel free to call or text it. If I'm walking around, you'll get me on my Samsung Galaxy S II. If I'm in transit (but not driving), you'll probably get me on my iPad. If I'm at my desk, I'll answer and take the whole call through my laptop. For you, the experience of contacting me will be exactly the same (give or take some background noise). For me, the experience fits my context: I can make and receive calls and texts on any of my devices. The same i
Occupy Facebook: innovation in the era of social protest
Wired reports that a group involved in the Occupy movement is working on its own decentralized social networking platform: “I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest. Dave Winer notes that it probably won't succeed: Internet In principle, I agree with Dave. It's a fundamental mistake that a lot of people
Decentralized social networking using web intents
I believe that web intents are the last missing piece for decentralized social networking. (Previously I've talked about creating a social web architecture using Activity Streams and OAuth; this builds on that idea.) Picture this chain of events: 1. I visit your website, and see that you have a "connect to me" button[1]. 2. I click the button, launching the "social-connect" web intent. 3. If I have web intents, my browser "logs me in" to your website via OpenID, silently passing the URL of
Patronism and monetizing the social web
This post is adapted from something I wrote on Google+. There are more comments over there; also see Evan Promodou's riff on the same idea. Google+'s combination of streams and circles works. So here's something I've been mulling over for a while: I really like Patronism's central idea. Rather than buying an album, you subscribe to an artist's feed, and get access to songs, photos etc as they're produced. That makes a lot more sense to me as a 21st century model for music. I also follow a lot
httpID: adding identity to standard HTTP requests
This is a more technical post than I've been writing lately. I'm considering splitting out into two blog channels; let me know if you'd prefer this. This is a request for comments and ideas. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks! One of the advantages of the decentralized social web, as opposed to a social network (federated or otherwise), is that identity can, theoretically, be shared with any web page, anywhere. That page doesn't have to be running any particular software
Keeping the web decentralized
Tim Berners-Lee has an article in December’s Scientific American about the future of the web. It serves, in many ways, as a list of baselines - things that should be obvious to anyone who’s worked with the web for any real length of time. He argues for net neutrality, for open standards, and for the decentralization of web-based functionality; all things that I agree must be fundamental to the platform if it is to have a healthy future. It’s required reading, and worth sending to all your non-te
Chrome OS and the web as applications
It's not a Google strategy, but they've chosen to embrace and extend it: the web is turning into an application platform. Google announced Chrome OS today - an operating system for netbooks, designed to boot up in seconds directly to a browser. Applications run using HTML 5 standards, which include support for offline applications and advanced interface capabilities. More than that, it's an attack - not just on Microsoft, but on the old model for operating systems and home computing. The web a
Adapting to the real world
I’ve spent the last week in a series of very interesting mind-sharing meetings. First, the American Association of Colleges & Universities flew me into Washington DC to discuss the future of assessment in higher education with education professionals as well as new techsphere friends like Silona Bonewald and Amber Case. Second, Michael Byrne from Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations invited me to speak there about the open, social web, the notes for which I’ll write up