David Recordon's presentation at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin on creating open platforms and discussing the social graph.

1. Open Platforms
(with portable social networks)
David Recordon
Open Platforms Tech Lead
Six Apart
david@sixapart.com
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007

2. Who am I?
• Live in San Francisco
• Workthe largest independent blogging company!
for Six Apart
We're
• OpenID Foundation Vice-Chair
• Recipient of a 2007 Google-O'Reilly Open
Source award

3. so what's the problem?

4. My 20+ Social Networks
- Balancing many services online already
- Having to re-enter the same information and make the same connections

5. My 20+ Social Networks
- Dopplr, great idea, wanted to use it, asked to re-define friends again
- So sick of doing this!
- Broke the camel's back

6. - Dopplr, great idea, wanted to use it, asked to re-define friends again
- So sick of doing this!
- Broke the camel's back

7. why is this?

8. Social Networks
• Generally mammoths
• Lots of 80% complete features
• Lock-in business models
• Strong competition with
each other
• A long tail of social networks
is evolving

9. Social Applications
• Each with a few great features
(UNIX philosophy)
• Data portability - mashups
(RSS, Atom, OpenID, Microformats)
• Creating combined value
Combined value as they don't compete to do everything, rather compete within their area of
expertise

10. social networks have your friends
- You've spent time defining them in each one you use

11. social applications need your friends
- Their mini social networks

12. social applications
- But it isn't Dopplr's fault
- Hacks such as scraping address books
- No current way to get the social graph without asking for it, choosing a proprietary
platform, or only riding on the back of these social networks

13. social applications
- But it isn't Dopplr's fault
- Hacks such as scraping address books
- No current way to get the social graph without asking for it, choosing a proprietary
platform, or only riding on the back of these social networks

14. social applications
- But it isn't Dopplr's fault
- Hacks such as scraping address books
- No current way to get the social graph without asking for it, choosing a proprietary
platform, or only riding on the back of these social networks

15. social applications
OpenSocial
- But it isn't Dopplr's fault
- Hacks such as scraping address books
- No current way to get the social graph without asking for it, choosing a proprietary
platform, or only riding on the back of these social networks

16. So what about platforms?
OpenSocial
- None of these services interoperate (with rare exceptions of RSS support)
- Not a new problem
- OpenSocial is promising, though both Facebook and Netvibes UWA are successful

17. So what about platforms?
Facebook OpenSocial
Lots of talk of Facebook vs OpenSocial this past week
Bill Tancer (hitwise)
- Weekly market share
- Adding MySpace and Six Apart

18. So what about platforms?
Facebook OpenSocial
Lots of talk of Facebook vs OpenSocial this past week
Bill Tancer (hitwise)
- Weekly market share
- Adding MySpace and Six Apart

19. So what about platforms?
Facebook OpenSocial
Lots of talk of Facebook vs OpenSocial this past week
Bill Tancer (hitwise)
- Weekly market share
- Adding MySpace and Six Apart

20. open platforms shouldn't be
about big company political
battles
- This isn't about Facebook <em>or</em Google, it is about the web itself

21. quot;IM Warsquot;
- Their IM networks couldn't interoperate either
- People were forced to pick one
- Hacky solutions such as Trillian and Adium -- not real interoperability
- Going where their friends are

22. Jabber / XMPP
- Still evolving, but providing true interoperability between walled gardens
- Even the Dude in his garage can participate

23. Jabber / XMPP
- Still evolving, but providing true interoperability between walled gardens
- Even the Dude in his garage can participate

24. Jabber / XMPP
- Still evolving, but providing true interoperability between walled gardens
- Even the Dude in his garage can participate

25. Jabber / XMPP
- Still evolving, but providing true interoperability between walled gardens
- Even the Dude in his garage can participate

26. Identity Silos
- Have to create a new account everywhere you go
- Poor security using the same password everywhere, hack one account get them all
- Overwhelming

27. Identity Silos
- Have to create a new account everywhere you go
- Poor security using the same password everywhere, hack one account get them all
- Overwhelming

28. - Decentralized identity
- Reduce the number of accounts
- Strongly protect your OpenIDs
- Session dedicated to OpenID Wednesday afternoon

29. HOSTS
- Examples of non-emerging technologies
- Had to FTP a single quot;HOSTSquot; file around to resolve all names
- Couldn't get to new sites until they were in the file and you fetched the updated file
- Didn't scale

30. DNS
- Changes automatically propagate
- Made sysadmins happy
- More complicated than a white-space line-break separated file, but it scales

31. Segregated Messaging
- Most successful example of centralization -> decentralization
- 1960s demonstrated at MIT, required all users be on the same server

32. Email
SMTP as you know it today
- Took until the 1980s for SMTP to become popular
- Couldn't imagine a World without interoperable email

33. Centralization
- Social networks today are generally centralized
- Remember the business model of quot;lock-inquot;
- By making open platforms via open technologies, the social networks can become
decentralized

34. Centralization
(Why can't a LiveJournal user friend an Orkut user?)
- Social networks today are generally centralized
- Remember the business model of quot;lock-inquot;
- By making open platforms via open technologies, the social networks can become
decentralized

35. Centralization
(Why can't a LiveJournal user friend an Orkut user?)
(If Orkut supported OpenID and RSS they could!)
- Social networks today are generally centralized
- Remember the business model of quot;lock-inquot;
- By making open platforms via open technologies, the social networks can become
decentralized

36. Decentralization
- But as history shows, technology becomes decentralized

37. it's harder
(but we always get there)
- Scale
- Data duplication / re-entry
- Business decisions (geeks want to do the right thing)
- Interoperability standards

38. quot;Either social networks will keep their walls up
to force individuals to choose, or they will open
up in the hope that they'll get the
customer even if their competitor
does, too.quot;
O'Reilly Radar
- Dopplr, don't go there for everything
- Not trying to steal users, let them go there
- This is not a zero-sum game
- Traditional network eects

39. quot;A lot that you have heard here is about
platforms and who is going to win. That is
Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won.
The web is the Platform.quot;
Jeff Huber - Google (Web 2.0 Summit '07)
- There won't be just one walled platform, interop is a must
- This battle was tried in the 1990s and was lost
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML
- There will be many social networks and social applications

40. quot;As long as people feel that if they don't like
what we're doing they can just switch, then that
keeps us honest and keeps everybody else
honest as well.quot;
Eric Schmidt (Web 2.0 Summit '06)
- This year has had a trend reinforcing decentralization
- With the move toward services in the cloud, data import/export is increasingly important
- Good to see the large services understand this

41. Open Data is increasingly
important as services
move online
Tim O'Reilly (OSCON '07)
- Hosted services change the quot;openquot; game
- Data is as important as source

42. quot;Proprietary platforms based on the web are
ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend
themselves above the web at large. But over
time, they only ever melt into the water. And
maybe they make it better when they do.quot;
Anil Dash - Six Apart (Dashes.com 2007)
- Embracing open technologies earlier will get you more later when others catch up
- Proprietary platforms, like tried in the 1990s, don't survive forever

43. So to Recap...
• I like social networks and social applications
• I like my friends
• I hate finding my friends again
• Decentralized technologies end up winning
• The web is the platform
• OpenSocial allows light-weight applications
to run on potentially thousands of social
networks (more detailed talk at 15:50)

44. social graph
(another type of user generated/owned data)
- Social graph already exists as Zuckerberg said
- Everyone is having to map it out
- Every user is declaring their own maps
- The user maps are THEIR data, not the services they're giving it to

45. people

46. relationships

47. people + relationships

48. social graph

49. Isn't it already portable?

50. Not really...
• My phone
• My address books
• My email addresses
• My IM accounts
• My 20+ social networks

51. They don't really talk to each other!

52. Translators
(and many others)

53. Feed Aggregators
(and many others)
- Aggregating actions versus only content

54. Open Aggregators
(and some others)

55. How are they open?
• Open standards
(RSS, Atom, XFN, FOAF, hCard, OpenID)
• Publish, not just aggregate
• Manage my friends across networks and
republish them for social applications
- So via Lifestreams I can comment on a blog and have it published on the blog

56. What about privacy?
(Tom may only be my friend on MySpace)

57. quot;Didn't you say privacy was harder?quot;

58. Yes, but still possible!

59. OAuth
(emerging standard; quot;your valet key for the webquot;)
- Standardized existing duplicate protocols from Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft
- Remove the need to ask for email provider passwords

60. What is OAuth?
• Distributed authorization
• Open community specification
• Converging proprietary specifications from
Flickr, Google,Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft
• With the involvement of Flickr,Yahoo!, and
Google!
- Companies had very similar specs
- Wouldn't use each others
- Would use an open version from the community
- Really important for sharing non-public data

61. How does it work?

68. I never gave Keynote my
YouTube password

69. let's imagine a world

70. Of portable social networks

71. Of portable social networks

72. Of portable social networks

73. Of portable social networks
- Already better today since Dopplr uses Microformats

74. Of portable social networks
MyFriends.com
- Already better today since Dopplr uses Microformats

75. Of portable social networks
OAuth
MyFriends.com
- Already better today since Dopplr uses Microformats

76. OpenID says who and describes where
...to find my services and data

77. OAuth keeps me in control

78. So how can we all make this happen?
- Today you'll be laughed at if you say you're a blog site and have no RSS/Atom
- Want to get to the same thing for social networks oering an analogous form of data
interop
- To make it just as easy to move it, share it, mash it up as it is with blogs

79. markup and share data
- Microformats, FOAF, RSS, Atom, etc
- Format wars don't benefit users, we don't care where the curly braces go

80. import data
- This is common

81. export data
- This is not so common but many services do a good job

82. put the people in control
- History shown
- Network eects as David said
- Decentralization

83. privacy is important
(As seen on Facebook and others)
- Just fully public or fully private doesn't cut it
- Share with your friends

84. Email Hashing
• david@sixapart.com becomes
b448b79a2380daec5578d8df767c7b639c745250
• Protects against SPAM
• Doesn't protect against account linking
• Six Apart doesn't share your hash if you're not
sharing you're email
- Have to think about all aspects of privacy when running services

85. provide context outside your walls
if users want to link accounts, allow it...they may even link to
your service from another profile

86. Who does this right with XFN?
• Wordpress
• Twitter
• Pownce
• LiveJournal
• Google Profiles
• TypePad
• Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox coming soon
- Markup both on the service and outside the service
- Context matters for XFN rel-me

87. TypePad

88. make your network
more accessible
You can't fight it forever...David beats Goliath
- As seen with content, services will just scrape you if they want it
- Proactively sharing while respecting privacy reduces your own server load
- Talk of nasty hacks within the browser for uncooperative services

89. Real-time Stream of
Relationship Changes
http://updates.elsewhere.im
coming soon
- As a way to make more accessible
- Allows real-time relationship changes to be noted across services
- Don't have to quot;pingquot; every news feed service that you're now friends with me

90. We Have the Tools
• Identity
• Data formats
• Distributed authorization OAuth
• Distributed applications OpenSocial
• Translators
• Open aggregators
• Realtime data Streams, PubSub

91. Now we all need to weave them together!
- Watch for developments in this space
- quot;social graphquot; as a tag
- O'Reilly Radar, TechCrunch

92. Questions?
David Recordon
Open Platforms Tech Lead
Six Apart
david@sixapart.com
OpenSocial session today at 15:50
OpenID session tomorrow