Folks like to use it for marketing. Big organisations have differing uses depending on departments and focus.
There are techniques, practices and technologies that promote the Open Web, and there are those that discourage it.
Folks like Brad Neuberg and Chris Messina have led a lot of discussion around this. I joined the Open Web Group. We use the 4 following guidelines
(royalty & patent free)
Some of you may not agree.
There is a reason philosophers are such respected figures in human history.
Okay. If you remember Finger? It’s back. Now with added HTTP.
Basically, it’s Personal Data Discovery. Google have had it in alpha for some time and rolled it out to Google Profiles to coincide with the launch of Buzz last week. Many other companies are working on implementations.
To throw in the mix depending on what your site or product does
It uses a simple grammatical pattern of subjects, verbs and objects. Johnny threw the ball. Spot chased the ball.
Harmonised with a schema from OpenSocial and using the same discovery specs as OAuth and WebFinger
OpenID Foundation. Microformats is tidying up IP issues but intend to submit to IETF or W3C. Open Web Foundation.
Let’s take a break from the openness for a second.
I’m not a hippie. I’m not a fanatic. And I’m not a communist. Not that I have anything against hippies or communists. I like making money. I’d *prefer* to make lots of it. Like most people I’m only passionate about certain things. Everything else is boring and should be easy so I can get on with the interesting things that pay well.
Or pay for their work. But it makes sense to pay your teams to spend some of their time working on these specs, because they’ll know them better and make them more useful to you.
Web standards are easy. They’re made by standards bodies.
Open specifications are easy. They’re made by open process and guaranteed to be open.
While we’re here, did you know that Google reads “national-geographic” as two words?
While we’re here, did you know that Google reads “national-geographic” as two words?
I’m not suggesting you leave here and put verbs in all your URLs. I am suggesting you think through what your URLs do for your site. AND for your users.
Not every site needs one, but you’d be surprised how far you can get with microformats and hackable URLs.
We’re not going to go diving into software architecture here, but if you’re building an API, build REST. You may add other types on top, but REST is simple, hackable and everybody understands how to use it.
Twitter. Of course. By this stage, you probably either love it or hate it. Or both.
140 characters. That’s it? When you first hear that it sounds so limited. But that limitation provides so much flexibility. All you can do is add 140 characters. There’s very little metadata. Very little cruft. Just content. What if your site was just content?
You can use it from everywhere. What if everyone in your council area could access council services from - not anywhere - but *everywhere*?
Anybody can write code to access tweets. Anybody can pull tweets into their own site or service. What if anybody could write code to access your service?
Twitter uses the XFN microformat to connect your friend’s profiles with your own. And they use them to connect back to your own site and claim it. What if your site automatically associated people’s accounts with their own site?
Gnolia - formerly known as...
Gnolia does not accept new registrations by itself. All new accounts must come from third parties.
When I’ve explained this in the past, I’ve asked for hands. I won’t do that, but I reckon we’d pretty much cover everybody here.
This is my hCard on Ma.gnolia. A microformat. They use others on my profile too. Like hAtom, NoFollow, XFolk etc
In so many languages. You just have to set it up.
We hear this time and again at conferences. The Web of Things. The Web of the Real. I say,
The web connects stuff. The web connects increasingly more *stuff* because it’s getting easier to do so.
Some of this will have problems. Maybe all of it. Maybe budget constraints or resource limitations. That’s okay.
Whatever you’re working on is your problem space. You’re the experts. I’m just trying to show you what I see.
You guys offer a *lot* of services!
Or Word Docs or whatever. Offer the document file for download if anybody wants it, but make the data available in HTML.
Do you have regular updates on certain pages? Offer a feed. It doesn’t have to be a blog page to have Atom. And if you write it with the hAtom microformat, you can just generate the Atom.
Or just publicise all your nice accessible data sets.
Build your own services and share your data.
Everybody you offer services to.
They always were, of course.
They change their address as necessary.
Let third-parties offer services to your customers. Saves you having to do it.
Every developer lives somewhere. Every designer uses web sites. Some of them will use yours. Give them incentives to work with your site.
You know my name. You know my interests. You may even know where I live or where I am right now. How about explicit notifications? There will be roadworks on my street next week. There’s an amazing sushi restaurant around the corner and it’s lunch time.