Planet SheepTalk

Incredible!

Yesterday I was hacking trying to hack away some code in Java when I realized there was something wrong…

Something was trying to stop me from being productive!

In one case I wrote some code which turned red on me the moment I stopped typing it… The reason was obvious: the exceptions! We can’t have those exceptions running around! So… ok IDE! Go ahead and add the try/catch for me. Errors: gone.
Then after a bit I rewrote the code and removed the Exception-throwing part. To my surprised: errors! Wtf?

Unreachable catch exception for WtfException. This exception is never thrown from the try statement body.

Cool… so that means I have some junk code lying around. Fine by me!

Not so fine by java… I had to fix the “error” before continuing, which took away the remaining hacking flow I had. What was I really doing before my IDE decided to interrupted me? Beats me…

A while ago I read that after a distraction a person needs 8 minutos to concentrate again. If that is so then it’s possible that Java and other compiled languages might be working against programmers. They might help you write more thorough code. But that will be at the expense of loosing the big picture. While you hack away you are constantly brought down to the “current-error” in front of you level.

In the last few weeks I’ve been working more intensely with php and I’ve come to love it’s hackability (or could it be… its documentation?). For instance, I knew nothing about php’s XPath support but php was fine with that. It would let me write shitty code anyway until I got to where I wanted. I could experiment for hours without having a single negative feedback other that my own reprimands for not getting it right! Yesterday’s attempt was a completely different story. For the first time in that project’s lifespan I “felt bad” while working in it. Yuck!

And now for something (not) completely different!

I don’t know if you’ve read “7 Thinking Hats” - you should by the way - but I couldn’t help but connecting yesterday’s experience to being in the same room with someone wearing a black hat, someone who kept interrupting any green or yellow ideas you might had.

What about your favourite language? Does it have “nag the developer whenever we does something wrong” in it’s feature list?

Just dumping some news I consider relevant.

These are glued together by “Information Overload”:

• Google Maps Now Editable by Anyone
  Too much data, too little context to allow for a sensible control over the editing process.
• Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload
  The article describes ways to deal with information overload. Nice, but drives attention away from the real problem: the limitations of email.
• The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere
  Indeed, indeed. The world is moving online and the available technology isn’t coping well with it. Lifestreaming services are a good step forward but still… we might want to look back into what people are putting online (as well as why and where) before “mending” the problem by aggregating information (doing so strips information from its original context and assumes the public and universal sharing of information between people - profiling heaven ahead)
• AllPeers Closes - What Happened to the Glorious Future of P2P?
  Every day we see a new startup popping up, another feature or site update. All craving our attention, our presence in their space.
  The article mentions marketing problems and I reckon that its all about reaching people, about giving them the experience that makes them include your product into their daily life. If you cross that threshold “you’re in” and then you have access to the “social threshold” - the sense that something is so cool that “I have to share it with someone else”.
  Most startups start working on this later barrier before even considering the former. Until now, social recommendations were an important part of human’s information gathering toolkit. But with the comercial exploitation of the social graph how long is it until our minds start to kick back and worn off the high preference attributed to data collected from our peers? What might the alternatives be? Food for the mind…

These are “Semantic”:

• Zemanta Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog
  One of SeedCamp’s startups
• Semantify - Automate Your Semantic Web SEO in Five Minutes
  Gotta love the guys from dapper!
• And Nerds Became Kings: Yahoo! to Announce Semantic Web Support
  And Yahoo!

Others:

• WordPress Social Networks - I’ll Take a Distributed One, Please
  Chris Messina’s interview with… himself is worth seeing. He’s on the right path with DiSo, I’m considering dropping in the mailing list.
• Google Releases AJAX Language API
  This is way cool!
• Google Releases Contacts API
  But this is cooler!
• Shindig - an Apache incubator project for OpenSocial and gadgets
  And this is even cooler!
• SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals
  An interesting read.
• Goodbye, P2P! P4P is Coming
  Curious mode: on.
• UN Data: the Ultimate Research Tool
  Trust in information source mode: on.
• LiveJournal Says Goodbye to Unique Account Structure, Against Wishes of Advisors
  Ridiculous mode: on.

Sleep mode: on.

Dear Web,

I’m sorry to report that I’m leaving you.  I’ll be googling and taking away all you might know about me. And the things I can’t take with me… Well, I’ll mess those just to make sure you won’t share them with anyone else, ever.

I could say “it’s not you, it’s me” but I’d be lying. The fact is that IT IS YOU. I’m sick of having you go out and share our stuff with one billion people. Why couldn’t you just keep things quiet? “This is a local shop for local people” comes to mind.

I’m sorry but you’re just a wreck and I don’t want to hear from you until you get your shit together.

Your’s trully,

<Messed up signature>

Just went over the contents of my Bloglines “Identity” folder and I have to say that Microsoft’s move to acquire Credentica’s U-Prove technology and expertise got my full attention!

U-What?

Brands is the inventor of private credentials technology which allows a user to prove something about their identity without disclosing more information than is absolutely necessary. For example, a voter can prove unequivocally that they have the right to vote in the state of California, without having to disclose their name or other personal information.

Description shamelessly taken from here.

Kim Cameron did a good job of following the ripples caused by the news:

• Microsoft to adopt Stefan Brands’ Technology
• Reactions to Credentica acquisition
• Ralf Bendrath on the Credentica acquisition
• Microsoft says, “U-Prove it”

Summing it up: a great technology just got a huge boost and might just find it’s way to our lifes a little bit earlier than I expected.

And in case you didn’t realize: these are really important news!! Just checkout this nifty video to “get it”.

Great interview with Mark Zuckerberg over at GigaOM (I like their coverage on events).

Here’s what the interview would have looked like if I was there:

Stacey: Let’s talk about monetization. You said yesterday that you envision the social advertising landscape evolving over the next 10…15…20 years. How will those ads evolve and when will we start seeing aspects of them on Facebook? And where does Beacon, which you said wasn’t an ad effort, fall into this?

Mark: Beacon was a part of the platform. It was part of this while effort to blur the boundaries between what’s inside Facebook and what’s outside Facebook. Beacon was our first cut at a protocol to do that.

When it comes to social ads we really want to line up what people are trying to do on Facebook and the utility it offers with monetization. If you look at what people are trying to do on the site, it’s communicating and connecting with each other and sharing information, so the business model should be around people sharing information and staying connected.

Davide: Fair enough.
Mark: In banner advertising, people who have developed a trust with the audience run a banner ad and the trust bleeds over to the ad so people pay attention to it.

Stacey: (making a skeptical face.)

Davide: (also making a skeptical face.) Mark… Is it ok if I call you Mark? Are you high on something? “people who have developed a trust with the audience”… wtf? So in Facebook’s eyes companies are “people” and the real people like me are just “audience”?

Mark: What? You look like something’s wrong? People go to a content site to see a specific kind of content and will trust those ads relate somehow to it. On Facebook, people aren’t coming to see content from Facebook; they’re coming to see what other people are sharing, so the most natural analog would be having the ads be information shared among the people. Because so much of our society has some commercial component it seems like there will be a way to both share information and line that up with what advertisers want.

Davide: (Ohhh… “it seems” does it?)

Mark: Some amount is happening as advertisers pay to accelerate that distribution of information. The amount they’d be willing to pay is proportional to how much it is accelerated.

Davide: That’s some fucked up shit man!

I’d like to thank Mark and “Me” for making this interview possible.

And off the record…

Davide: What is the Facebook “audience” saying about the constant attempts at lining up “what they are doing on the site” with “what advertisers want”?

Mark: Dude! The interview’s over!

Davide: Oh… sorry! I already know the answer to this one: they just want to be left alone “sharing information and staying connected”. But wait a second… that doesn’t seem like the kind of things “audiences” do.

Stacey: I think you have a point there. Facebook users aren’t a quiet bunch. Comparing them to an “audience” is looking at Facebook as a tool for “advertisers”, not one for people.

Mark: Humm… Good point!

lol…

The Internet In 1993 - Watch more free videos

Warning: geek post about version control systems. But still… if you work with a computer and manage multiple versions of your stuff (renaming files and folder with numbers or dates) you’ll learn something useful in this post!

Today I read about Bazaar in a Free Software Magazine article and decided to take a look. Now… I’m simply hooked!

Ok, so what’s Bazaar after all? Bazaar is a Distributed Version Control System which… is NICE! I mean, really DAMN NICE! It simply works!

I’ve used CVS and Subversion while attending my CS degree but never have I or my close colleagues got to apply good version control practices. Branching? Tags? What are those?

Well, now I know it wasn’t all my fault! The tools didn’t help.

So… back to Bazaar! This tool is dead easy to work with and it’s online User Guide will get you going in no time!

The part I’m more excited about is that Bazaar supports lots of usage workflows! You can start off by managing your files locally, shift to peer-to-peer work and then to centralized development. You can mix these usage patterns at any point always using the same tool! So yeah… FANBOY!

Here’s a quickstart for those who are familiar with cvs/svn:

• Setting up a [shared] repository: bzr init-repo repository
• Create a project: bzr init project
• Add files and folders: bzr add
• Commit changes [locally]: bzr commit -m “commit message”
• Create a branch: bzr branch parent_branch new_branch
• Merge changes from parent branch: bzr merge
• Update parent branch with changes made on the current branch: bzr push parent_branch

Some [subjective] basics:

• Branch = Project
• Any branches contained within a repository’s folder hierarchy “share” that repository, otherwise: Branch=Project=Repository (important for disk usage)
• Working with local repositories is the same as working with remote ones! So in the commands I described above you can swap “branch|folder” references by remote locations and it will work as expected! Really! It will!

Almost forgot! The only thing you need to share a repository with others is a shared filesystem to put the files on (ftp/sftp/network share). Bye bye svnserve!

So what are you waiting for? Try it out!

Estava eu muito contente a escrever um comentário à notícia que apareceu no jornal Público, quando me cortaram as pernas, ou melhor, o limite de caracteres. Liberdade de expressão no seu melhor.

Segue-se o meu comentário original na íntegra:

Concordo com a utilização da Internet como forma de agilizar a máquina do espaço. No entanto, não concordo que “wikis, blogs e sites sociais” sejam a panaceia para melhorar o governo.

Neste momento todos os cidadãos podem ter o seu púlpito: basta criar um blogue e eis que as nossas ideias podem chegar a milhões de pessoas (bom… para isso acontecer as pessoas têm de visitar o blogue). Isto altera um pouco as regras do jogo: para me tornar popular não preciso de ter o meu nome no jornal da minha zona, nem tão pouco concorrer à Junta ou Câmara, posso atalhar e, depois de inspirado por uma sessão da Assembleia da República, começar a versar sobre políticas como se soubesse do que estava a falar. Com alguma sorte (link baiting) eis que vou subindo no índice da Internet (a versão online de uma hierarquia política) e quando dou por mim o meu blogue surge em primeiro lugar quando os cidadãos fazem pesquisas por novas leis ou informações acerca de dirigentes políticos.

A Internet permite que a comunicação entre pessoas se processe de uma forma nunca antes possível na história da humanidade. No entanto, as tecnologias que temos actualmente são ainda embrionárias e apresentam graves falhas no que diz respeito ao controlo da privacidade, dos dados e da visibilidade das nossas ideias.

Estamos a lidar com um meio cujas consequências são tanto positivas como negativas (mas onde os aspectos positivos são aclamados).

Pegando no exemplo relativo às eleições norte-americanas podemos dizer que ficou a ganhar quem melhor tirou partido da tecnologia e não necessariamente a pessoa melhor qualificada. O potencial viral das comunicações na Internet abre a porta tanto para a divulgação de produtos como de presidentes. Assim, torna-se vital dar um passo atrás e começar a repensar conceitos como “direito de antena”, popularidade, boato e por último “partidos políticos”.

Não é uma questão de aplicar ferramentas “web 2.0″ à governação, mas sim de desenvolver ferramentas que, respeitando os direitos das pessoas, permitam uma comunicação mais eficiente e transparente entre os cidadãos e os seus representantes.

Um recurso interessante para verem o lado negativo da Internet é o livro “The Future of Reputation” (leitura gratuita online).

Se quiserem comentar façam-no aqui. Isto de ter de ir visitar outro site para ler comentários só porque o público.pt não tem “Feeds para os comentários” não é para mim.

Bye Bye Meebo?

The Windows Live Messenger IM Control enables web sites to show the presence of Windows Live Messenger users, and let site visitors engage in instant messaging conversations with the Messenger users. A Web site can invite its users to share their Messenger presence and exchange messages with visitors to the site. When a site hosts the Windows Live Messenger IM Control, site visitors can instant message Messenger users directly from the browser without installing the Windows Live Messenger desktop client on their computers. This provides an ideal mechanism for Web sites to enable site visitors to send messages to Windows Live Messenger users who agree to share their presence on the Web. For example, a social networking site can invite its users to share their Messenger presence on user profile pages, or the author of a blog could use it to invite readers to discuss a particular topic.

My take is that Microsoft has just unleashed hell (see bold comments below)! This is taken from the visitor’s sign-in window:

Automatically sign in

Each time you visit <sitename> you will be automatically signed in to Messenger. You can allow your Messenger contacts to see that you are visiting <sitename> and send messages to you.

Choosing this option also allows <sitename> to:

• Learn your Windows Live ID (ok, I can live with this one)
• Set your status, display name, and personal message on Messenger (WTF?)
• See the status and e-mail addresses of your Messenger contacts (see their e-mail addresses? ohoho! Affiliate Heaven!)
• Add and remove your Messenger contacts (<brand X> wants to be your friend!)
• Send and receive messages to your Messenger contacts (any messages? Is “Fuck you” eligible?)

Microsoft has authorized <sitename> to connect to the .NET Messenger Service provided that it follows certain rules, such as not asking for your password. <link to <sitename>’s privacy policy.

This is going to totally mess up people’s IM usage and create LOADS of noise in MSN’s Network.

Anyway… Docs for developers here. More details as I delve into this. 

I’m now reading an increadible book called “The Future of Reputation” which happens to be available online for free (the real deal! No need to share your mother’s maiden name).

Just got through chapters 1 to 4 and I must say that the book is really awesome! So far it got me thinking about Privacy VS Free Speech and also about Norm enforcing (through shame) on the Internet. And on this last subject here is some of the referred material:

• Don’t Date Him Girl
• Peoria Crack House
• Plate Wire
• Bitter Waitress
• Dog Poop Girl
• Revenge World

“Norms” and “Shame” are new additions to my concept map. The Internet as a new support for norm enforcement kind of turns a good mechanism into a recipe for personal disaster. There’s no way for you to change your digital identity (to avoid further prosecution), or even a way to ensure that someone doesn’t damage your reputation by pretending to be you online.

Lots of problems need fixing:

• Persistent online information (accessible out of context in future interactions);
• The easy creation of discardable identities;
• Lack of liability in online communications;
• Mob behaviour enhanced by anonymity (taking “free speech” to damaging levels);
• Instant global reach for messages that “were” directed only to friends (turning gossip into something quite different);
• Lack of judgement in assessing the quality of information sources by readers;

All for now. Probably more later today.

This post is an attempt to capture the portuguese web landscape.

I’ve juggled with the data available at Alexa (dropping some sites along the way) to come up some groups that might give me some insight into what my fellow countrymen/countrywomen are doing online.

Because some entities are hosted under other domains (e.g. gmail.google.com) the data concerning the visits to the subdomain get concentrated on the domain. So big companies are ranked higher without any chance of knowing what assets are contributing to it. A portuguese example is the Expresso newspaper that is hosted by the ISP Clix. :\

Search Engines | Portals | Webmail | Internet Infrastructure

• Google
• Windows Live
• Sapo
• MSN
• Yahoo!
• Iol.pt
• Clix
• Universo Online
• AEIOU
• IG
• Terra
• Globo.com
• Portugal Mail

Another good name for this group would be “Homepages”. These are the starting point for looking up stuff on the Internet or just browse through the available services (webmail, recent news, and in some cases classifieds).
Social Networking Sites | Community Sites

• Hi5
• Blogger.com
• Orkut
• Netlog.com
• Myspace
• Wordpress.com
• Adult Friendfinder
• Facebook
• Imeem - Music/Video Discovery
• Dada.net
• Chupa-mos.com

After opening the browser and getting past the homepage it’s time to go to our all time favorite site. Depending on the person this might be a social networking site or one’s blog.

According to Alexa, Hi5 is the most visited site in Portugal. I think this makes perfect sense in that each “add me as a friend” and “someone wrote something on your profile page” emails all contribute to turn a regular email check into a hi5 visit (and probable browse).

Video Sharing Sites

• YouTube
• Megavideo.com

YouTube ranks 4th in Alexa’s list and I bet most visits happens during work hours. In the mind of many portugueses (I reckon) the workplace is that place where you have to go and be at if you want to get your pay check. So… while you’re there you might as well make the most out of it. And after you’re in, it’s hard not to checkout the “Related Videos” which happens to be a recursive feature.

Adult Video Sharing

• Megarotic.com
• Youporn.com
• Artecorporal.org
• Redtube.com
• Gexo.com
• Yuvutu.com
• LiveJasmin

Incredible! So far, I’ve only came across YouPorn.

This gives a new meaning to the concept of User Generated Content (UGC)! It’s the realization of a long dream for every teenage boy: “free porn” as in “no-credit-card-involved free”. The short term consequence: bye, bye, porn industry!

Humm… could this also mean the extinction of the father-son talk? And stepping away from sexuality, just how much is the Internet taking over the role of parents in teaching their kids?

Gaming Sites

• Travian.pt
• OGame
• Hattrick
• Tribalwars.com.br
• MiniClip.com
• Brincar.pt
• Jogos10.com

A sugestion for a new definition of “Work”:

The thing people do while waiting for the next turn in an online game.

The definition would sound better if I actually had played any of the first few games. So far, I’ve stayed clean.

One thing that surprised was that the last two sites offer flash-based games, but without any built-in social features!

I believe these sites are on the top 100 mostly due to a younger crowd. Think about it! The games load fast and they are colorful, simple and addictive, so their bound to capture kids attention and keep it(!). And for the parents… “flash-based” means no installation and no virus to worry about. And finally! The lack of social features ensures a predator free haven for their kids to play in.

Well… at least this is what I think.

Information Sources

• Wikipedia
• Record - Soccer
• A Bola - Soccer
• O Jogo - Soccer
• Techzone - Tech stuff
• Zerozero.pt - Soccer
• RTP - Rádio Televisão Portuguesa - TV Network
• TV Cabo - TV Network
• Ptgamers.com - Games
• Jornaldenegocios.pt - Financial
• Instituto de Meteorologia - Weather
• GameSpot - Games
• Autohoje online - Cars

This list concerns vertical portals that reflect people’s interests.

A quick look shows us the leading interest: SOCCER! The fact is that portuguese people breath, eat and shit soccer (at least most of them… I must have been homesick the day they assigned soccer teams to each child in kindergarden :)).

Other than soccer, the other interests seem to be technology, gaming and cars. I argue that some of listed sites (Techzone, Autohoje) are timely visited by people gathering information about products.

Movie | TV Series | Software Download

• RapidShare
• Megaupload
• Btnext
• The Internet Movie Database - What movie should I download today?
• Mininova
• Isfree.tv
• Islifecorp.com.br
• Legendasdivx.com
• Easy Share
• Icrfast.com

Yesterday I went to the cinema with some friends. While we where driving there we got a SMS from another guy we invited to join us. His message said:

Get the movie of the Internet. That’s what I do.

And according to this listing, he’s not the only one!

Online classifieds and Auctions | Vertical Search Engines

• Olx.pt
• standvirtual.com
• Miau.pt
• eBay
• Pai.pt
• Fnac.pt
• Clubenet.com - Hotel Booking Service
• Net Empregos - Job Listings

I kind of messed up this grouping… but hey, you’re getting it for free so don’t bitch about it.

Having “Net Empregos” on the top 100 can’t be any good.

Image Sharing

• ImageShack
• ImageVenue hosting
• Fotolog
• Photobucket
• Flickr
• Deviantart.com
• Slide.com

Hadn’t a clue that image sharing sites where so highly ranked. Actually, “sharing sites” seems to be all over.
Mobile Phone Related

• Wixawin.com - Luck Gaming? (how do you call this? :|)
• Tmn.pt - Mobile Phone Operator
• Vodafone.pt - Mobile Phone Operator
• Celldorado.com - Content Provider - Ringtones and stuff

I was very surprise to learn about Wixawin and celldorado! A big market getting bigger by the day!

Online Banking

• Millenniumbcp.pt
• Caixa Geral de Depósitos
• Banco Espirito Santo
• Santandertotta.pt

This could be a boring category but the fact that it has entries is quite cool! Go Portugal!

Governmental Sites

• Ministério da Educação
• E-financas.gov.pt

lol… The first entry is the site of the Ministry of Education and contrarily to what it might seem it’s presence on this list is not a good sign! Things aren’t going very well due to recent reforms and the popularity of the site might just be the result of an horde of teachers trying to desperately understand what the government is deciding to do with their lifes.

Anyway, it could have been worse. At least there’s a site where they can desperate over.

The second site belongs to the “Ministry of Finances” and I think that one is doing a good job (they’ve learn their lessons about “scale”).

My Conclusions

After looking at all of these sites I think I’d sum up the portuguese Internet usage habits as:

• In the morning:
  • checking for emails;
  • reading the soccer news;
  • turn MSN Messenger;
  • play a bit of travian or ogame;
• Mid-morning:
  • receive a link to some video on youtube (via IM);
  • browse youtube for a bit;
  • send the video via email to some friends;
• After lunch:
  • coffee break;
  • checking emails;
    
  • browse the youtube videos we got in the emails;
  • travian/ogame;
• Afternoon break:
  • online banking to pay the bills;
  • track a sale on miau.pt (it’s the portuguese eBay);
• Late Afternoon:
  • check which movies have finished downloading;
  • check for new TV Series episodes;
  • interact social with friends social networking sites;
  • go into anonymous mating mode trying to get a partner;
  • on failure… turn to video sharing sites for confort.

And that’s that. Let the conversation begin!

I’m looking forward to get your feedback (that means you!). Do you agree with the groupings, have you learned about any new sites in this list? Which sites do you normally visit? Shoot away!

I’ve transcribed part of a IT Conversations talk on the Dunbar Number and decided to share it.

I just wrote down the part (> 9m35s) where Christopher Allen shares his ideas on group sizes, related problems and the relationship between group size and the need for different tools to sustain the group’s communication.

Here goes:

It’s really easy to form a group. Up to ten, twelve people and it gets increasingly harder and harder and harder to maintain cohesiveness compared to smaller groups when you’ve got groups that are 150-200 people.

My own personal hypothesis is that the size of groups can have a profund impact on how the groups behave, and how they work and what tools will work for them.
My own hypothesis is that there seems to be these two nodal sizes. There’s one that’s sort of between 5-11 or so, groups that behave in a particular way, and there are certain group processes and software that seem to work very well for them. And then we have another one that seems to peak around 50 people and drops off torward the Dunbar number.

But then we have this little interesting valley of around 13,14,15 where these small group processes don’t seem to work and these large group processes… you don’t have enough people for yet. Some people call this the judas number - all of the sudden the group starts breaking up, can’t work/function very well at 13.
I’ve found this is in many, many different things, I’ve seen it in conferences, I’ve seen it in companies. The company where I’m doing Angel investing that’s at 13-14 people, I know I have to watch them very carefully. They either going boom and go up to like 20-25 people and start being successful or they’re going to collapse back down to a more sustainable small team size.

So, how do we identify group size problems?

The most important to identify too small… is that there’s insuficient critical mass, you’re unable to sustain a conversation, people kind of talk and aren’t listening and you kind of feel like you’re alone or that no one is responding.
Another thing that can happen even when there is conversation is that you have group think or echo chamber, that’s when everyone is saying the same thing. “Yeah, I agree with you. Bush is a terrible president.” “Oh yeah, Bush is a terrible president”. There ain’t any actual information exchange happening.
So that’s an example of too few.

Too many… the most obvious is too noisy. And we’ve all experienced this. How many have you belong to a mailing list that was great and everyone thought “Oh my god. I have to be a member of this member list.” and now the mailing list is too noisy and it’s not worth participating in.

Another category of recognizing too many people is this lack of trust or unequal trust.
One of my theories about the Dunbar number, what causes the Dunbar number is that we lose that innate internal trust that we have in our heads and we start having to rely on external things…. “Did you give me has much of your time, did you called me back as often as I called you”. You start measuring whether or not you’re getting the results that you want from your community rather than just saying “The community works, this is fun”.

The clicks and bad gossip is another thing that’s a classic sign of a group growing too big.
Inappropriate politics… I think there’s always going to be politics. It’s the nature of the beast.
But it can get inappropriate. It can get where the politics so much dominate the discussion that it becomes bad for the group. And that stuff can be a sign of too many people.

Other social contract/construct failures… flames, trolls, tragedy of the commons.

Mapping between group size and communication tools

Intimate Social Network

• yackpack

Small Groups

• chat rooms
• teleconference with back-channel
• cooperative editor - SyncroEdit
• flat discussion lists
• blog shared online as private
• team blogs (at most 9 people)

Medium Groups (50)

• instant messaging
• avatar chat
• threaded discussions lists (enabling people to divert into different subjects)
• wikis

Large Groups (> Dunbar number)

• For software that is beyond that number you have to get out of unstructured trust. Where you trust that other people are going to participate. The trust that other people are going to give equal value to the value that you gave to the group. You have to put more trust built into the software.
  So that includes things like reputation filtering, things like slashdot, advogato, or wiki which is another way of you having multiple workspaces.
• Public blogs… > 150 readers
• MySpace - social network was a feature of the product, not the fundamental offering of the software.

There you have it. Hope you make the best of this information.

Two interesting presentations by Daniel Burka and Leah Culver:

No added value on my part, just spreading the word.

While reading Many-to-Many’s archives (2004 at the moment) I found some unrelated links which I could help but relate.

The first is E-mail’s special power where Jon Udell suggests:

Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose that some malign force knocked all the Internet mail servers permanently offline but left everything else intact. How would we cope?

Funny enough, in October 2003 such a maligne force did appear. (lol) With the maligne force enacted by an Internet worm. And guess what! The results wasn’t quite the expected one: 48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity<- Yeap, you’re reading it right, that’s Productivity.

An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992.

And then there’s the case where the “maligne force” coming don’t on email is… your boss: Firm bans e-mail at work

“Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of being constrained by e-mail proliferation — the ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect.”

P.S. - By the way, E-mail’s special power is it’s unique ability in supporting the dynamic/ad hoc creation of groups simply by adding/removing people from a message’s CC list. Hint to the gmail folks: I keep having hitting ‘Reply’ instead of ‘Reply to All’ (thus breaking the group messaging) and I think it’s not all my fault.

Looking back it’s funny to read about predictions about the demise of email when now (2007) everything seems to revolve around it (Inbox 2.0 anyone?). My take is that email is a legacy technology that doesn’t provide for control over one’s personal data (your privacy lies on the receiver’s end) and should be replaced as soon as possible.

Long time no blog (the job offer post didn’t count :P).

I’ve spent the last few days doing an invalidity search for a “beverage dispenser” using google patents. I’ve went back and forth over the last century using up all my search skills to the point of being pretty sure no “beverage dispenser” was left unturned.

Google is working pretty well to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful! The useful bit isn’t quite there yet. Strangely enough in google patents they messed up the centerpiece: the search results!

You start off your query with a nice “beverage dispenser” and hit Search which gives you back the default 10 result per page + 10 pages to explore.

You start clicking away and on page 9 you realize that you don’t want any results containing “coin”. So “beverage dispenser” -coin it is. Search!

What the hell?!? Blue links? Yeap, you’re fucked! The resulting patent urls are encoding the search string so all the patents you’ve already searched are bright blue again, justing begging for another click.

What else? The search engine doesn’t tell you how many patents it found and limits the results to 600 patents. The best way to get around this is to sort the results by date and when your 600 results are up use the advanced search to place a filter on the date period you’ve already explored.

Humm… What else to bitch about? :\ Nothing really! Compared to esp@cenet Google Patent search really really really ROCKS! A very nice piece of engineering on google’s part! Congrats!

Next step: adding semantics to the data and firing all patent officers.

And now for something completely different (which I found amidst the “beverage dispensers”)!

• PORTABLE TOILET - don’t leave home without it!
• On-line dating service for locating and matching people based on user-selected search criteria

Female   Male

These are the default sexual choices supported in site profiles around the web.

And now introducing GenderHack:

The Problem
Social software including social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace often encode certain cultural values into their profile builder. There are minority groups for whom such constructions are not appropriate.

The Aim
GenderHack is meant to be a document intended for people involved in designing or building social software, social networks, data interchange formats or Semantic Web projects, so that they can adequately consider issues of sex, gender identity, social constructed gender status and more flexible approaches to matters of sex and relationships. Eventually, it could become a gender and relationship equivalent of accessibility guidelines.

If this is successful, we can also put together technical formats representing a more enlightened view of gender - specifically, RDF and XML representations.

Overall, the ability to express one’s identity online sucks. Everyone is being mapped into constrained (western) visions of what humans are all about.

Even more expressive visual digital representations, such as my WeeMe, your own SouthPark character and Second Life avatars, are limited in the reality that they convey to others.

What if I had an accident and lost my legs? I saw no disability features while building my WeeMe!

Imagine I wanted to use my WeeMe in a dating site. Since there are only two legged versions of WeeMes, at some point in the online conversation I would want to disclose that my WeeMe was “a little bit” inaccurate.

No, it’s not the sweater. Try again.

While in the real world my handsomeness (cof cof) would immediately get through and conquer my date (handsome guy - in a wheel chair), the online interaction lowers up my date’s expectations (cool guy -> cool guy in a wheel chair). Screwed over by a WeeMe…

Expressing one’s identity online is a big deal and backlashes regarding our identity are hard to handle (online or offline).

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people worrying about these things (at least under the spotlights) and those that worry are thinking “small-time” normally constrained by a need to fit people into a database schema.

There are sites, dating sites namely, that need to “know you” well enough to match you up with others. Those are probably the only ones which understand that “You” are more than just a set of values on a profile. Interesting enough, current research into “digital identity” don’t seem to include concerns for just how expressive that identity is. They are more concerned with your “consumer persona” -> and that one fits perfectly in a database.

And to finish off, some related questions:

• When sites ask for our information, what are they using it for?
• What value (for you) comes out of it?
• How much of our individual humanness is captured and how much of it do we want to be captured?
• Can we force those sites to delete our information from their databases?

Previous posts: here and here.

I’ve finally completed my research into “the” Web 2.0. Hurray!!

The last milestone was reached when I figured out how everything I’ve looked at in the last few months fitted together! Hurray x 2!!

The bad news is that it all fits together in a very different Web - one that’s very far a away from what we have today. :\ The good news is that I have come up with a fairly realistic roadmap and I’m very much interested in building it. Muahahahah! Ahahah! Ah!

I’ll be spending the next weeks writing things down and then I’m off to convince people to join me in building the new Web. And now…

What I figured out about Web 2.0

I think:

It’s the data, stupid!

sums it up quite nicely.

Web 2.0 has been all about data: community-aggregated data, product reviews, mashups, map mashups! All in all a very creative and innovative phase in Internet’s history.

But it wasn’t all good! The downside of web 2.0 was that it gave everyone “data glasses”.

Data seemed to be everywhere, begging to be freed from its host, to be republished in other places, to be combined with related data and create new and useful data.

Unfortunately, there was one kind of data that caught everyone’s attention: their own. After a while “people’s data” became the only thing anyone talked about.

The problem? People’s data isn’t “plain old safe data”. You mess around with it and you’re messing with people’s lives.

And this is where we are now. There are no maps showing where we’re headed but despite that the people handling our data seem terribly sure that they’re going in the right direction…

Via the Particls Blog:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
My opinion is still the same.

The upgrade to WordPress 2.3.2 didn’t go very smoothly… in that I”ve lost several posts in what seemed random circumstances.

When hitting the post “Publish” button I would be redirected to a “Are you sure you want to edit this post?” page, at which point the post would already be gone!! Bah!

Apparently the “Auto-Save” feature was the culprit. But don’t worry, here’s a fix!!

If you also need Gengo working check out the gengo-wp23 project.

Here’s something I liked in Mark Zuckerberg’s 60 minutes’ interview:

“I mean there have to be ads either way because we have to make money,” Zuckerberg says. “I mean, we have 400 employees and you know, I mean, we have to support all that and make a profit.”

I disagree. But hey, he’s the one with the money not me.
On the other hand, I don’t have 400 employees and dozen’s of million of people’s data to worry about… I just have a laptop, my business ideas, a calm lifestyle, great and supportive friends and… HO! some very concrete ideas on how to make Facebook profitable.

Update: ThinkArete just sent me this great quote:

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 19th Century German Poet, Dramatist & Scientist

I haven’t seen any ads online for the last two weeks!

All thanks to my new best friend: Adblock Plus!

Check it out for yourself.

The Wayback Machine totally ROCKS!

Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

Just today I looked for three articles that are nowhere to be seen on “today’s web” and here they are:

• Towards a Peer-to-Peer Business Model
  Part I - The Problem with P2P
  Part II - Kazaa and the One Night Stand

• Eric Gradman’s Distributed Social Software

While finding information that is not longer available is nice… knowing that others can lookup old (supposed to private) stuff about you is just scary!

While reading Economist Confused About the Semantic Web?…

The Semantic Web sees meaning as something that needs to be added to documents so that computers can act intelligently about them. Web 2.0 seeks to discover the ways that meaning has already been implicitly encoded by the way people use documents and digital objects, and then to extract that meaning, often by statistical means by studying large aggregates of related documents.

… two things stuck on my mind:

• Semantic Web - add meaning for machines;
• Web 2.0 - extract meaning for people.

A match made in heaven! The first for heavy lifting and the second for dealing with costumers.

We already have some great examples of the potential in the form of RealTravel and True Knowledge (video below).

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Password:

I’m now using bloglines to manage my feeds (which are shared here on the right).

The bad part about using a feedreader is that reading posts out of their context is a poorer experience and cuts off direct access to the comments. :\ But on the other hand… going to the blogs and spawning firefox tabs for everything (comments, blogrolls, inner links) that seemed interesting was what got me into information overload in the first place!

The good news is that (after a bumpy month) I’m finally back in control!

Notice: Just updated wordpress. Let me know if anything’s broken.

That said, somehow I lost the previous version of this post - still figuring out if it was wordpress - and now I’m not in the mood to repeat it all again. So I’ll just write a smaller version…

• XDI

XDI (XRI Data Interchange) is a new service for generalized distributed data sharing and mediation using XRIs (Extensible Resource Identifiers), a URI-compatible abstract identifier scheme developed by the OASIS XRI Technical Committee. The goal of XDI is to enable data from any data source to be identified, exchanged, linked, and synchronized into a machine-readable dataweb using XML documents just as content from any content source can linked into the human-readable Web using HTML documents today. Because the controls needed to mediate access and usage of shared data can be built right into every XDI link, the emergence of a global Dataweb has the potential to do for trusted data interchange what the Web did for open content exchange.

• Higgins

An open source Internet identity framework designed to integrate identity, profile, and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications, and devices. Higgins is not a protocol, it is software infrastructure to support a consistent user experience that works with all popular digital identity protocols, including WS-Trust, OpenID, SAML, XDI, LDAP, and so on.

IMHO: XDI = boring, Higgins = interesting.

Just read Bob Blakley’s Antisocial Networking:

Opening the social graph will destroy social networks, and turn them into sterile public spaces in which formation of meaningful and intimate relationships is not possible. Opening the social graph is a bad idea. Relationship information is not the property of individuals - it held in joint custody among all parties in a relationship, and it cannot be used or disclosed in violation of the rules under which it was brought into the relationship - or else the relationship will die and the individuals in it will be harmed. If you don’t understand this, or come to understand it, you will never have any real relationships, and neither will the software you write.

This guy knows his stuff (really! :)) so you might want to read the whole thing.
I also agree that opening up the graph is a bad idea!

The whole rationale for “opening up” is wrong!

We have a small group of people trying to solve the problem of having to invite your friends to yet another social network (YASN), and incidentally the same small group of people that are trying to relief us from having different usernames/passwords across sites.

Well… a recent pool I’ve made with my surrounding non-geeks (frequent internet users) didn’t show any of these problems. Who knows… maybe these are localized problems and it might be a good idea to chillout before creating a worldwide solution for them.

The current social network portability approach is trying to solve a problem: easily moving your data around. Is this a problem you want fixing?

One fellow commenter states that opening up the graph is possible if there’s “some level of federation between social networks sites […] within a proper governance model” which means “a group of social networks behaving while sharing access to your data”. As that federation grows (to include your “Cricket players of 66″ social network) you’ll have to trust each one of the sites to behave. But what if one of them doesn’t behave, who’s responsible for your stolen identity? Who’s going to cover the damages?

As far as personal control over my data and privacy goes, I’m better off dealing with walled gardens than with open deserts, thank you very much.

It’s just a matter of perspective: mine is that the real problem is the proliferation of social networks - which further split our social graph across the web.

Kill them all, I tell you! Kill them all!

Update: They’re going for the kill!

Previously feature FindMeOn is having problems with Google’s choice for their widget platform:

Random: What does FindMeOn do?
FMO: We created the first technology to port and sync identity information across the internet through Widgets and APIs, and foster social network portability through open standards we call “OpenSN - Open Social Network”
Random: Oh cool! Google just bought you, right?
FMO: No. That’s Google’s OpenSocial. It’s like Widgets & APIs. Too.
Random: They kinda sound the same.
FMO: Yeah… I know… We’ve been using our name for about a year before them. Its becoming an issue.
Random: I’m not surprised.

Ouch!

Hitchhiking info: Caught an description of FindMeOn in (year old) The Problem With Profile Aggregators:

Jonathan said,

January 22, 2007 @ 8:48 pm

Hi, I run FindMeOn and I’d like to quickly address a few of your concerns:

a) All users identities are kept within the context of the social networks or blogs they appear on. This is used for trivial cross-network friendship mashing right now, but a far more robust friendship tracking system that illustrates this will be launching in the near future.

b) Everything the site offers through widgets and profile management is available through an API. Also , the technology we use to bind profiles against one another was released as an open standard.

c) The purpose of the current FindMeOn system isn’t to aggregate identity information for profile consumers, but for the profile providers. Our goal is to help people drive friends to the ‘right’ social network or system for each task: photos on flickr, music on myspace, business on linkedin.

We really wanted to have a system with write access, and that acts as a great über portal for each network — but for an initial launch thats impossible unless you’re very well funded. Like all the other people in this arena, we’re not.

But truth be told, the majority of people who use our system right now aren’t the people who are using our website directly — just as we designed, it’s the people who are interacting with widgets on their pages.

MyID.is blog as some additional details on what they’re cookin’.

Here’s my attempt at translating the story:

MyID.is hopes to protect Digital Identities

With the increasing risks of identity theft in the Web, protecting a person’s digital identity becomes a major challenge.

[… FUD introduction …]

MyID.is will allow an internet user to control and secure it’s “digital identity”. Using the site a user can prove and assert her identity, even using a nickname.

Password aggregation
Concretely, the user will group all the things that he produces online. MyID.is presents itself as a portal like Netvibes. But “Netvibes agregates information about what we ‘consume’ online: information from our favorite blogs and sites, while MyID.is agregates what we ‘produce’ online: our blog, the comments we leave on foruns, etc”. MyID.is will thus allow to concentrate in a page all the things we produce online as well as vital information for our digital identity such as passwords for foruns, e-commerce sites and banks. Several levels of security will allow a user to define which bits of information she whishes to make private, public, and even share with her professional, friend or family network.
But what if this page, containing intimate user data, is broken into? “MyID.is, is very secure, it will be unbreakable” ensures Charles Nouyrit. He announces partnerships “with trusted third parties, including banks and internet service providers”, which will validate the information about the users.
So, questions remain about the project. “A site is never really inviolable, and this will show which are the trusted third party” warns Pascal Lointier, president of Clusif (the french Club of Systems Security - http://www.clusif.asso.fr/). When a user places all its information in the same page, “MyID.is will ensure him enough bandwith, with a secondary backup site in case of problems, and ensure the security of his data?” Pascal asks. Finally, will MyID.is be recognized as a worldwide identity certification authority?
There are already other approaches to protect the online identity of the internet users. Such as Sxipper, a Firefox plugin that allows safe-keeping of private information like passwords, or web-reputation.com, a provider which proposes to remove a photo or unwelcome testimony from the Web.

Credits go to Christophe (which as recently joined the blogosphere! :D) for reviewing the translation.

The first time I heard about about WeeMes I thought… WTF? Why are people making these things? What’s up with this?

But now, having spent some time browsing through Identity Meta-Systems, OpenID Personas support, FOAF, vCards and hCards I now “get it”!

A WeeMe is a FUN way to express your identity and relate with your friends in a more colorful world (literally)!

You can build your very own WeeMe and customize it to look and dress just like you! Beat that hCard!

Update: I found a stored copy of my original comment in a document I was building about Identity (sometimes I simply rule! ;)):

Hi Jon,

I’ve been wondering about the same subject recently and it is my believe that somewhere along the way we dropped the chance to build a nice personas/facets layer between people and internet services. Tough luck…

I think the missing concept is that of personas. Not the limited ones same some Open ID providers support, but those described by danah boyd in her thesis http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/.
Jonathan Vanasco has a good implementation of these ideas with findmeon.com (more details over at http://destructuring.net/IdentityResearch/) but I think the real solution should go even further in order to give users control over their social >unified< graph and their online presence - both managed from a persona/facet perspective.

I would like to go deeper in what I’m ranting about, but this is just from the top of my head. Eventually I’ll have to take some time to write these ideas down.

Now… why would you want to delete this? Is it out of line in any way?

I’m not angry for having my comment deleted. I should have simply posted this on my own blog which is under my control and where the message remains in it’s due context.

And now for the original content of this post:

I have to get this one out my chest…

The other day I dropped what I thought to be a pretty constructive comment over at Jon Udell’s Omnidirectional (or public, or broadcast) identity pointing to personas and mentioning the research done by Jonathan Vanasco of FindMeOn and danah boyd.

I’m pretty sure the comment was posted (and I didn’t suffer from some Ajax cockup) because I’m a very slow writer and I remember going through the process of building up the comment, fetching sources, backing it up to CLCL before posting, and refreshing the page to see if it got there afterwards.

Well… today my comment is gone and I don’t know what to make of it.

Who knows… maybe too much reading is getting the best of me. At least I’m not not hearing voices!

Good idea guys, I’ll finish off with a good/bad/uggly block.

The good

Today will be backup day!

The bad

After being posted a comment gets out of our control and goes public subject to the blog owner’s control. The same thing happening to your comments on this blog.

The ugly

That’s just blog comments! Now think about every other bit of information that you typed into your keyboard while using the Internet (or while hosting a Trojan ;)).

• Where is that information now?
• Is much of it still around?
• How much does it say about you?
• Who’s got it? And what are they using it for?
• Can they change it and keep your signature?
• What are the consequences if that happens?
• …
• <your own doubts here>
• …

Update: Some P2P legal insight gathered over at the AllPeers blog!

First of all, there are many types of P2P software that allow the transfer of media files between machines. The most obvious are instant messaging clients, which increasingly enable users to send files directly without passing through a server (Skype was a trailblazer in this respect). I’ve never seen anyone suggest that this software is a potential target for legal action, and with good reason. P2P itself is basic enabling technology without which the internet would be very much poorer.

More recently, the United States Supreme Court ruled in MGM vs. Grokster that a company cannot be held accountable for potential copyright infringement committed by its users, upholding the earlier Betamax Decision (which otherwise would have resulted in the banning of the VCR, to the media industry’s great detriment). They did rule that a company can be sued for “actively inducing” its users to infringe on others’ copyrights. This is a vital distinction, as a number of companies based their business model directly on profiting from the illegal copying of commercial media files. While I don’t agree with the way that media companies have thus far reacted to the digital revolution, I think it is reprehensible for a company to try to make money in this way, so I support the Grokster decision wholeheartedly. We don’t and never will base our business model on encouraging copyright infringement on the part of our users. In fact, we hope in the future to contribute actively to developing innovative new ways for consumers to acquire digital content legally, and at a fair price, without succumbing to the oppressive restrictions inherent in today’s DRM technology.

And the previous links I’ve posted.

• Freenet - The Free Network Project;
• I2P and Tor - anonymous networks;
• AllPeers - share all the videos, music, photos, and webpages you want with your friends - privately and securely (this is an open source Firefox plugin);
• RetroShare - secure communications with friends;
• Tribler - Find, Enjoy, Share;
• Wirehog - Facebook’s P2P file-sharing program (now suspended);

Who’s interested in trying out some of these programs?

LoL… The serious part of my brain has shut down temporarily after watching this video:

This was one of those few times when a digital ‘lol’ corresponded to a lung-powered laugh.

(Via Identity Theft is not a crime)

Nicholas Carr is wisely using his blog to promote his new book - “THE BIG SWITCH” (yes, that’s an affiliate link ;)).

Yesterday’s please-buy-my-book post - Where did the computer go? - features an excerpt from “Burden’s Wheel”, the first chapter of Nick’s book.

Here are some statements I strongly disagree with:

Although every user had to install a little software program on his own PC, the real power of Napster lay in the network itself - in the way it created a central file-management system and the way it allowed data to be transferred easily between computers, even ones running on opposite sides of the globe.

The real power of Napster lay in that every user had to install a little software program on his own PC! This was it’s real strength: taking advantage of resources that were out of anyone’s control!

Napster died, but the business of supplying computing services over the Internet exploded in its wake. Many of us now spend more time using the new Web 2.0 services than we do running traditional software applications from our hard drives.

… fallacy: Noun. A misconception resulting from incorrect reasoning.

Today’s please-buy-my-book post shares part of A Spider’s Web, the book’s tenth chapter. I liked reading this one but I won’t think I’m buying the book.

This review cut it for me:

This book gets four stars as it’s is a good anthological review of broader issues that have been in the marketplace for some time. It loses one star because that is all it is, a discussion, without analysis, ideas, alternatives or business applications the book discusses rather than raises issues for the future.

“They say” the book “weaves together history, economics and technology to describe how and why computers are changing — and what it means for all of us”.

If you really want to take a look at “what it means for all of us”, read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or… watch this:

(Video found in the comments for Anil Dash’s “Google and Theory of Mind”)

Cross-site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerabilities suck big time because they exploit the most basic behaviour on the Web: following links.

This post is just to let you know that swf files can be used as means for these kind of attacks (article by Rich Cannings; timestamp: January 2, 2008).

Users (you and me) should update their Flash Player plugin to reduce one of the vectors for the attack.

Website owners and flash developers should check the original document for further details.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to:

My feeds - 123 great people (more if we count group blogging :D) covering all aspects of the so called Web 2.0.

The feeds still need some sorting out so I better help you get through them.

What’s up

• Daily: who’s new, who died and who’s who in the web - the 1st wave of information;
• Leaders: people you should pay attention to, or the 2nd wave of information (after being hit by the 1st wave);

Main Research

• Social: people that said something that “clicked” according to my understanding of how social should be(come);
• Identity: just picking up the pieces - this is probably the area where we’ve failed more terribly in the last few years of building “stuff” online;
• Design: user-centered design, building stuff [caring] for people;

Secondary Research

• Mobile: “the next billion people are going to connect to the Internet for the first time through a cell phone” - need I say more?
• Maps: location! location! location!
• Scalability: the people that know what scale is are here;
• Programming: one must feed the inner-geek;
• Erlang: feeding the inner-geek with something that might help him get some food on my table;
• Weekly: people that don’t say much… but I like them just the same!

Later today I’m gonna add these feeds here as my new blogroll.

All for now! Happy scavenging!

Yesterday (update: last Saturday :)) I took the day off to dig deeper into Open ID!

I did an overview on the system trying out providers, consumers and support for personas.

Here are some links I found interesting (some are cross-conversations so I sorted them by date):

• The problem(s) with OpenID
  A great article to start with.

• Stefan Chooses to Take the “Fox News” Approach to OpenID Blogging
  Open ID proponent David Recordon fighting back.

• Freakonomics of OpenID
  Non-geeks can read this one without fearing for their sanity.

• OpenID Credibility: Harry and Bess Truman
  The best part are the comments!
  Mark Dixon:

I realize that OpenID doesn’t make a claim about verified Identity. That is my point.OpenID is useful for those types of interactions where the relying party doesn’t need to know who I am or if I have ability to pay. There are certainly several cases where that is completely valid.

Dick Hardt:

There are likely hundreds of attributes about you that 3rd parties may be authoritative about you. The identifier should not have the attribute overloaded to represent the attribute. Instead, a SAML or similar assertion can be made about the identifier by the authority. The user proves they are an OpenID, and then provides a claim that the OpenID has a particular attribute. OpenID Attribute Exchange lays for foundation for doing this.

Interesting! At this point I realized that Open ID might just not cut it to some of the things I’ve been wondering about.

• King of Fools
  Another look on Open ID from what it appears to be an expert on security (well, at least the background is black! :P)

• Braying About Sun’s OpenID Support
  The part that got bells ringing all over my head:

OpenID Is for Showoffs
[…] Roughly, OpenID enables a person to demonstrate control over a given web property to a stranger (who understands OpenID). It’s a web version of showing someone you own a car by hitting the “unlock” button on your key fob.

This was the kind of stuff I’ve been wondering about. Using Open ID, not as an identity aggregator, but as an easy way to express your participation within a group. Something like davide@sheeptalk, davide@former-ist-student, davide@benedita-village, davide@portugal… Using URLs that is.

On the comments there is a mention to MicroID… I looked it up and while it allows others to check who’s the owner of a resource, it doesn’t allow authentication before others was being the said owner. Not quite the best scenario for a showoff.

• What is OpenID for?
  Heavy reading: almost feel asleep reading this one.

• OpenID Dogfight
  The guy with the black background again:

My conclusion about OpenID is still the same. OpenID design is broken. Fundamentally. That’s the bad news. The even worse news is that it will probably gain acceptance anyway. Some market demand is there and if there will be no viable alternatives (at “almost free” price level), OpenID can succeed. But it will be marketing success, not a technical one. We have seen that happen too many times in history (with Microsoft being the most obvious example).

But there is a good news as well. I think that OpenID can be fixed to provide simple (but sufficiently reliable) SSO system for low-value applications. But it will require substantial work (read: “complete re-work”). My recommendation for OpenID guys is to stop marketing nonsense and go back to drawing boards.

At this point I’m a little bit unconfortable reading that some client-side magic is needed to make Open ID secure.

• One OpenID to Rule Them All…or Not?
  A LifeHacker’s article on Open ID Pros and Cons.
  A good read to sum it all up.

Well, that’s it. Hope this helps you get up to speed with Open ID.

Another technology worth looking at is OAuth - It offers a way for you to grant access to your hosted data (Flickr photos , Live Messenger/GMail contacts) without having to give away your password (and risk having it stolen or misused).

Starting of with the right (or just with a) business model is very important.

Take for instance this old page from the meebo blog were it reads:

Many of you have asked, how is meebo a business? Well, we’ve got some great ideas, some of which are crazy, but some have the potential to be really interesting. There are easy, traditional ways of making money (no worries, flashy, invasive ads aren’t our answer!) and there are many other possible paths that we’re going to explore — all of which will be subject to user feedback and critique, as usual.

Bottom line is, meebo’s all about user experience — with funding, or without, that will never change. We will always strive to build a great user product, and we hope that you’ll love what we have in store.

And a more recent one called meebo ads. WoW! Checkout all those non-invasice ads!
On another IM related subject… this is from the meebo firefox extension page:

alerts

Get notified when your friends send you an IM so you’ll never miss it

Sometimes I (and I’d bet most people) do want to “miss it”.

Introducing START - the Portuguese National Entrepreneurship Prize 2008!

The 2008 edition brings even more glittering prizes. This is the best time to be entrepreneur and compete to the START prize!

• The winner will receive 50.000€ in cash;
• The total amount in awards sums up to 300.000€, including Optimus’ communication packages, preferential conditions on BPI, executive training in faculdade de economia da Universidade Nova