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Open meets closed proprietary thinking in the valley of capitalism

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:12:00 GMT

Its so easy to be open nowadays that closed proprietary approaches are being hailed as open strategies and picked up by large masses of people thinking that they're part of the (so-called) Open Web.

This inherent conflict between ‘zero sum game' scenarios (as Chris Messina refers to it) and open standards efforts (which benefit us all) will be an underlying theme for the next few years until we see the behemoths support our standards and we see these ‘lock-in' strategies fall by the wayside.

Right now - the VCs are funding any sort of “killer app” feature which calls itself open, rides on our coattails and can evolve itself into some sort of ‘innovative‘ lock-in scenario. The fact that users cannot move their data out or that these systems ONLY connect to other systems on THEIR terms - seems to be escaping most of the early adopters who are flocking to sign up.

Yes - the innovative killer app feature is coolio, but when I see single source solutions, lack of dataportability or interoperability and all sorts of claims of innovation and openness - then the bells start ringing and I start demanding multiple vendor adoption or else.

This pattern is being duplicated over and over again - with each new ‘cutting edge, breakthrough solution'. Yah sure - they have plenty of VC money and sure - they're giving away the service for free - for now - but that's just their VC money talking. Unless these products and services allow their users to move their content, profile data and social graph - somewhere else - they're ultimately closed.

The end-game for these so-called open services is to either sell off their company and technology or somehow monetize their killer app innovative feature by leveraging the installed base and going for a ‘freemium' pricing model.

But (thank GOD) we have plenty of examples of the RIGHT approach to developing open standards which forgo this path to liquidity approach (again driven by VC investments) and which build open standards which benefit us all and help to move our world forward.

I posted something yesterday called “Taking advantage of open for proprietary purposes” and Chris Messina left a comment which backs me up on this:

I’m with you on this.

But the nature of our work, as hard as it is to sustain without those who benefit giving back, is to do a lot of the interop and commoditization work of the Open Web to keep the web moving forward.

Many of us want this kind of work and want the results of our work to resonate widely, and benefit many.

Indeed, much of the way we work flies in the face of the winner-take-all, zero-sum model. It’s not like we’re necessarily socialists (I wish more people actually knew what the term meant, rather than simply having an allergic reaction to it), but that our work benefits over a longer time horizon than most VCs or companies can or do operate is our wont.

Ah yes - the S word. In this election year we're seeing the manipulation of terms and concepts wrapped around patriotism and sustaining an unjust war. But I won't go into “I'd rather be Socialist and right, than a war mongering imperialist” rant.

What I will point to is the wisdom of Chris' words. The long term benefits of OpenID, RSS, Atom, oAuth, microformats and the other standards that are being developed far out reach any profits generated for the VCs coffers. We've recently seen where the greed of capitalism, the public markets, banks and insurance companies takes them - so I wouldn't count on any capitalists worrying about anything beyond the end of their greedy (now broke) noses.

What standards developers like Chris (and Tantek Celik and Joseph Smarr and Eran Hammer-Lahav and Kevin Marks and Dave Winer and a whole host of others) do is take the posture that helping out the masses and doing the right thing - is more important than profit and short term gain. Its kind of like a modern day monk or crusader POV.

I myself also find that taking this posture is really the only way to go, even if it means hurting the ultimate payoff and possibilities of profit for my company. Why is it so hard for VCs (and their funded companies) to realize that life is (in fact) NOT about making money?

Chris continues….

Personally, this is the only kind of work I really know how to do. I can only solve problems when thinking about them systematically. People and companies will invariably benefit from this work in the short term, and it's unfortunate that we don't have a better sustainability model for work like this. I guess this is why the Medicis were so wise in their patronage of the Arts; I think we need the same kind of patronage model for supporting and ensuring the health and well-being of the Open Web so that all can continue to benefit from and compete on it.

Me too. This is the only way I know how to work. So a big thanks goes out to Scott Kveton and Vidoop for sponsoring Chris and the DiSO team and to the Harvard Berkman Institute for sponsoring Doc Searls and the VRM project.

There are plenty of examples of great work going on - so it's not like we don't have opportunities to “do the right thing“. ideally allot of the good will and cash that has flowed into Obama's campaign and which helped fund Dean and MoveOn.org could also go into supporting DiSO, VRM, OpenID, oAuth, etc. - as we move forward.

That's why I'm on a rampage to out these so-called open platforms and why I'm demanding that they contribute SOMETHING back to the community! Its not like their VCs don't have the cash! They should consider these outlays and open standards efforts as part of their ‘marketing budgets'.

After helping to create one of the greatest lock-in proprietary formats of all time, I consider it my DUTY to help rectify this earlier transgression. Back in the 80's we had no idea that these sort of lock-in scenarios would transpire. So imagine my surprise and dismay at what my former company has done. If there ever was an argument why you should NEVER take VC investment - it's Macromedia.

At MacroMind we were focused on battling the lock-in of Microsoft and Apple. And here we are 20 years later still battling lock-in. Only this time it's a wolf in sheep's clothing, pretending to be open, pretending to be on our side.

But Twitter is as much of a lock-in strategy as anything Microsoft has even propounded.

And (surprise, surprise) Microsoft is starting to bring open to the masses, moving open down the marketing pyramid to billions of users who will benefit from connecting to feeds of content and people, profile accounts and participating in a unified ‘open mesh' world.

Google and Yahoo are also opening up - mainly because we're demanding it - and it's the right thing to do - and it provides their users with the kind of compelling experience which will define our future.

So I'd like to know what Twitter, Bug Labs, Twine, Glue, FriendFeed, Gnip and OpenX are gonna do to participate in this open world? And I'd like to know what they're giving back to the community - cause I sure as hell haven't seen any evidence - yet?

Evan at Identi.ca has helped to start the ‘open microblogging' initiative.

Now THAT's what I'm talking about! Right on to Evan!

And to MySpace and Facebook which exemplify closed meshes and who also dabble in being “open” I say “Keep going, don't stop, cause there's no such thing as being half pregnant. You're either open or you're not.”

Right on to the folks who are truly open and who ARE contributing back!

- SixApart

- Plaxo

- Vidoop

- Identi.ca

- Sxip

- Jan Rain

- VRM project

- Drupal community

- Technorati

- Automattic

- and all those behemoths who are doing the right thing - finally!

“Open is the new Black” continues to spread

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:29:00 GMT

NOTE: This is a post I did awhile ago (but had to push to the back burner - as we're shipping a large site right now.)

It was created when I was editing the video of a speech UI gave in Rotterdam in Sept. The cameraman was pointed at me the entire time and missed the slides, so I then edited the presentation video and laid the .ppt slides on top of it - and came up with this video - which is yet another version of my treatise “How to build the Open Mesh”. Anyway - in this speech I mention that if you type “Open is the new Black” into Google - I come up. Here's what I say about it - in the speech:

“That's our SEO - come up with a good idea, and Google will remember it. That's the ultimate SEO = quality of the idea.”

There's plenty of evidence out there that freeing users from lock-in and opening up the data of a system - is a good thing. Providing APIs to that data is enabling what Fred Wilson calls ‘Content APIs‘ and that's also a good thing. I have a chapter in my book about “persistent ubqiutous content” on just this very subject.

So we're seeing open permeate throughout our world and raising it's head in lots of interesting ways.

My friends David Recordon and the Plaxo dudes (Joseph and John) along with Chris Messina have a IPTV show called “theSocialWeb.tv” and it's probably the best thing out there to highlight the status, trends and memes of this world and which dives deeply into the geeky issues surrounding “open social networking”.

But in fact - it goes beyond just social networking. Social features will soon be built into all software. That's something else Fred Wilson is figuring out. So we're seeing him (and his VC cohorts) start to invest in all sorts of open platforms and products, but they're missing a crucial element to the game - contributing back to teh community. So that's why I created the post “Taking advantage of open for proprietary reasons“.

Yahoo has finally launched their underlying ID layer - almost four years after I first asked Jerry Yang and Dan Rosensweig for that. Over the subsequent 3.5 years I was told “it was coming”, “yah yah - we're gonna do that“, “yah sure - we'll have APIs for MyYahoo” - but yet as of this writing we still don't have two-way APIs into MyYahoo.

The BBC seems to be getting their open act together - and building their own underlying ID layer under the leadership of Eric Huggers. They'd better - they promised us Open BBC almost four years ago.

Microsoft has launched their Open Live Mesh Cloud thingie - Azure. And Facebook and MySpace (though clerarly closed meshes) are opening up - in their own way.

iGoogle appears to be positioning itself as a key aspect of Google's “digital lifestyle aggregaton” strategy. With clean integration with OpenSocial, Reader, Gmail and (one would assume) ALL the suite of Google apps - iGoogle will soon be the state-of-the-art dashboard which I talk about in Chapter 6 - “UI Objects” - in my book.

But that doesn't mean that NetVibes is going away - they're starting to white label.

And lord knows what's gonna happen once Clearspring and Gigya start running ads in their widgets. That is one of the key milestones of our monetizable distributed business model. And heaven help us once Twitter declares their business model next year. Or FriendFeed starts to ‘experiment' with ads. Watch for stampedes of new proportions.

Some call it the open stack. Others are bent on user identity oriented focus or an enterprise approach. It really doesn't matter. Open will come in a myriad of sizes, shapes and packages.

Yes indeed - Open is the new Black. Everyone is doing it, in their own way - which is EXACTLY how it's supposed to happen - to build an open mesh - where others can come in and participate.

Key milestones coming up:

- a panel we're doing at Digital Hollywood on Oct. 28th in LaLa - which rocked

- Internet identity Workshop - Nov. 10-12 in Mountain View, CA

- a panel we're doing at LeWeb8 in Paris on Dec. 9th.

Until then - stay tuned and just keep chanting this:

“Open is the new Black” - on the BART

“Open is the new Black” - on University Ave. Palo Alto

“Open is the new Black” - on St. Marks in the Lower East side.

“Open is the new Black” - at Canter's deli on Fairfax.

“Open is the new Black” - aht the public gahdens in Bahstun, on the Swan boat.

“Open is the new Black” - at the So. Kensington tube stop.

“Open is the new Black” - at the Janpath market in Delhi.

“Open is the new Black” - in Akasaka at the Hostess bars.

“Open is the new Black” - in Christiania in Copenhagen.

“Open is the new Black” - at Grey Area in Amsterdam”

“Open is the new Black” - at the Cafe San Marco in Trieste (where James Joyce went every night for 20 years.)

Hah hah hah Happy Halloween

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:14:00 GMT

Good witch Mortilla has a spell for you:

Taking advantage of open for proprietary purposes

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:06:00 GMT

I've started to realize more and more - that we're gonna see various products, services and platforms built on open technologies that will then insert their own proprietary solutions, formats and protocols into the mix to achieve lock-in.

This seems to be the formula for success.

You provide some killer app functionality, suck in lifestreams and profile data, aggregate content and services and wrap it all in some warm and fuzzy UI. Then you lock-in your users into YOUR solution and sit back and wait til your installed base grows - and then slap on some sort of ‘freemium' monetization model, if you're ever lucky enough to get that far.

This path is what's acceptable to VCs (like Fred Wilson and Saul Klein) and I think we'll see LOTS of these kind of plays in the near future. But as we see open technologies like OpenID and oAuth grow - I can't help but wonder what Glue, Twine, Twitter, OpenX, Bug Labs and a host of other startups are doing to give back to the community?

Will these folks show up at the upcoming IIW (Internet identity Workshop) and make a contribution or just listen?

Will these new breed of startups ever propose open standards that could ‘glue' each other together?

Will these startups work with their competitors for the good of their end-users?

Will these startups allow their user's profile data, social graphs and content to leave and never return?

Will these startups allow their services to be synchronzied and ‘glued' into OTHER competitive glue services?

I can't help but wonder if ‘claiming‘ that you're open is just this year's version of the free market place (which is code for huge multi-nationals moving jobs overseas and hiding profits in the Caymans.)

And what about being International in scope and focus? Will these startups do anything more than just “localize” their products into Russian, Chinese or Arabic? Will they become the new version of ‘carpetbaggers' bringing their Silicon Valley-style hucksterism to a new generation of ‘plantation slaves?'

In this era when so many Reagen Republicans and Libertarians are voting for Obama, will jumping on the “open” bandwagon be this year's equivalent of being “politically correct?”

Certainly Open is the new Black - and the VCs have figured that out.

Now they're just trying to twist it and rip it off and figure out how to exploit and monetize people in a “Web 2.0″ kind of way.

And I'm sure Tim O'Reilly will give them plenty of air time - that's for sure.

I just think that when you take advantage of being open and benefit from being open, you kind of HAVE TO contribute something back to the community.

Like Plaxo is.

And Google.

And Yahoo or Microsoft.

Sure they're big enough to afford to do that - but it's also a kharma thing. None of these behemoths are expecting to make money off of being open. They ARE however forced to keep up with the Joneses and provide their userbases with compelling experiences to keep them coming back.

So they HAVE to go open!

But what about startups? They're in a precarious position where to build up their installed bases they need to APPEAR to be open, dangle their killer app functionality in front of the world and sit back and wait for their ‘roach motel' strategy to engage.

There are plenty of smaller companies making contributions to the world of open. So it's not like you CAN'T contribute cause of lack of resources or focus.

Companies like Vidoop - which is sponsoring Chris Messina and the DiSO project. Or Jan Rain or ooTao or Meebo or everything that Kaliya Hamlin does.

I call upon incubators like BetaWorks and YCombinator and startups like Automattic, Seesmic or Glue to help us all develop open standards to extend the blogosphere, XMPP and the OpenID attribute exchange, to connect lifestreams together and to establish open servers for OUR DATA - so that web celebs like Robert Scoble don't have to build up social graphs over and over again - on every service they go to.

Folks - when open becomes the norm - we'll ALL benefit from it. And the folks who helped get us there will get the credit, the monetization and the kharma.

But companies that rode on our coattails, sucked up the air around us and then sold their companies to the highest bidders - will have trouble crossing the river Hades - when judgement day arrives.

David Recordon: TheSocialWeb.tv Visits Google

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:22:00 GMT

This week John, Joseph and I shot an episode of TheSocialWeb.tv (Episode 16: "OpenID's Historic Week: Microsoft and Google Go Live") with Eric Sachs from Google's Security Team. Eric's team implemented Google's OpenID Provider and we ended up with a very interesting episode where he talks about some of the background going into why they chose OpenID and challenges they see needing to be solved in the future.

OpenID.net: Microsoft and Google announce OpenID support

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:27:00 GMT

This is a historic week for OpenID. Google and Microsoft announced the release of code to support OpenID 2.0 across their most important properties. On Monday, Microsoft, announced OpenID 2.0 support for their 460 million users on the LiveID platform. On Wednesday Google said it will be supporting OpenID 2.0 for any user that has a Google account. Both of these deployments are great news for the OpenID community and the Internet at large. It can be safely said that within the coming months, every single user on the Internet will have an OpenID.

There was some discussion from a few people yesterday claiming that Google’s implementation was a fork of OpenID. Today, Eric Sachs, Google’s lead on this effort, has another post responding to some of this early criticism:

That registration requirement also led to some confusion because users wanted to be able to use existing websites that accept OpenID 2.0 compliant logins by simply entering gmail.com (or in some cases their E-mail address) into the login boxes on those websites. … Once the XRDS file is live, end-users should be able to use the service by typing gmail.com in the OpenID field of any login box that supports OpenID 2.0, similar to how Yahoo users can type yahoo.com or their Yahoo E-mail address (In the meantime, if you feel really geeky, you can type https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id into an OpenID 2.0 login box).

Although these are both considered “preview releases” by both companies, the fact that they have put code out there that developers can start to work with is absolutely fantastic. Both Google and Microsoft have stated that these are testing implementations and as such, their may be certain limitations while they work on localization, scaling and general UI.

Mike Jones talks about some of the details of the Microsoft LiveID testing:

One feature of the OpenID 2.0 implementation that I’d like to call your attention to is that they give users a choice, on a per-relying party basis, whether to use a site-specific OpenID URL at the site for privacy reasons, or whether to use a public identifier for yourself – explicitly enabling correlation of your identity interactions on different sites.

We also have an episode of theSocialWeb.tv where we have Eric Sachs from Google talking about this historic week with David Recordon, Joseph Smarr and John McCrea:

Simon Willison: New OpenID Implementations Abound

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:11:00 GMT

New OpenID Implementations Abound. I’ve missed linking to a bunch of OpenID news recently—in particular, Google Accounts are becoming OpenID identifiers and LiveJournal has quietly ugraded its consumer support to OpenID 2.0.

Brad Fitzpatrick: brad @ 2008-10-30T00:14:00

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:15:00 GMT

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/30/the-single-sign-on-war-will-ruin-openid/

Martin Atkins: Why OpenID discovery for email addresses must use DNS

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:15:00 GMT

I'm getting some pushback from my proposal to use DNS as the primary means of OpenID discovery for email addresses. I think this is largely because I've not done a good job of explaining my reasons for it. Aside from some idea of technical purity, what's the practical reason for using DNS for OpenID? Who would use it that way?

My previous employer provided, amongst other things, a hosted content management system product. The usual setup would be that our customer would either have an in-house IT department or they'd outsource their IT stuff to a third-party. These IT folks would generally be responsible for DNS and email in some capacity, even if that capacity was just clicking some buttons on someone else's control panel. When the customer bought a CMS-based website from us, we'd get their IT folks to point the A record for the domain at one of our CMS server clusters and configure a mapping of that domain to the appropriate site in the system.

In this scenario, the customer's pretty limited in what they can do to their website. In the interests of usability, the site is presented as a tree of pages which are edited via a WYSIWYG editor and munged into a complete page using a site-wide HTML template. There is no way that such a customer could set up Yadis discovery on their site; creating arbitrary files and arbitrarily fiddling with the contents of are not things the software provides. Even if it did, it certainly doesn't provide an OpenID provider that recognises email addresses for the domain.

Lest you consider this an isolated case, consider some other examples of such an arrangement. The domain this blog is running on has its A record pointing at LiveJournal.com who host my blog. They don't allow me to override the Yadis document returned at the root of my site, but I do own and control my domain. Users of Six Apart's hosted blogging service TypePad can't add the necessary bits for Yadis discovery without switching to "advanced templates", at which point they lose some of the easy blog design features. Google provides a similar hosted CMS service as part of its "Google Apps for your Domain" package which can't support Yadis, though we could also come at this from the other direction and see that most folks using the Google Apps version of GMail for their domain have their website hosted somewhere else, because -- let's face it -- Google Sites is kinda limited.

It's been my experience, then, that it's far more often the case that DNS and email are controlled by the same team than are email and web. In the case of my previous employer, the IT folks can readily add new records to DNS without involving the CMS provider. In the case of Google Apps For Your Domain, being able to edit your DNS is already a prerequisite to deploy GMail, so if Google were to provide a hosted OpenID-for-email service as part of Apps they could just instruct administrators to add an additional DNS record to enable it.

While I don't disagree that publishing the discovery information over HTTP should be an option, DNS should not only be supported but should override whatever's published over HTTP. The compromise of using DNS TXT records as the transport for this discovery information rather than a more "correct" record type, we make it possible to deploy these records in domain management tools that exist today.

I hope the above will serve to show that my wish to use DNS for discovery is in fact for pragmatic reasons, not for reasons of theoretical purity. That it comes with a side-order of theoretical purity (for some definition of purity) is just a nice side-effect!

David Recordon: On Google and OpenID 2.0

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:02:00 GMT

Following Microsoft on Monday, AOL last year, and Yahoo! earlier this year, Google is now an OpenID Provider. That said, people seem to like controversy...

Google is taking advantage of a feature in OpenID 2.0 known as "Directed Identity". This allows an OpenID 2.0 Relying Party to start the OpenID protocol flow using a known URL (Yahoo!'s is http://openid.yahoo.com/) to allow for "one click" style login dialogues. By performing discovery on this URL, using the XRDS XML format, the OpenID Provider advertises the OpenID Endpoint URL for the Relying Party to make a request against. Google is doing this correctly with the URL to perform discovery against being https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.

The piece that Google is currently doing differently is requiring pre-registration of each OpenID Relying Party before users can login to a given site. This does break the common deployment of OpenID on the web today, but Eric Sachs of Google has said on the OpenID mailing list that this is temporary as they work to stabilize their OpenID Provider:

We just need to do the standard scaling, stability, translation quality, etc. evaluation to make sure there are no major problems. If we are lucky, that won't take much time. However it is more then likely that we will need to tweak things in our user interface to make it easier to understand, and unfortunately translating any such tweaks into 40+ languages takes awhile.

As for using email addresses as OpenIDs, this is something the OpenID community is talking about quite a bit right now; Google included.