Right now the big social net players are making a bid to be the silos of our data. Oh, they’re playing nice, adopting some “open” strategies for identity “portability”… But essentially Facebook wants to be the centralized storage locker for your identity data (which you may access from third party sites,which really isn’t open). Enter Brad Fitzpatrick and his dreams of microformats and a decentralized graph that lives in the Cloud. And then there’s VRM… Let the claims for Identity 2.0 begin…
I often chat with my UK colleauge, Ben Bose– who happens to be one of our most brilliant, and we often get to chatting. I thought I’d share:
me: when i say ‘the web is social’ people look at me strangely
i think marketing people dont like it
well, digital agencies
will nod and say yes!
but if they REALLY accepted it
it has much broader, fundamental impacts on the BUSINESS of digital agency
than the industry is willing to admit or change at the moment
Ben: You should see the looks we get here! Absolutely!
It’s all about products, and business.
The web is social.
The web is not an add-on.
me: right, well and the current approach to the web is fairly siloed…especially if you consider that ‘social media’ is considered a channel and not the state of the web itself (by most marketers)
Ben: Indeed.
me: there’s still a lack of adoption industry-wide of the paradigm shift from a web of pages to a web of applications
Ben: We had a deck flying around recently from another company.
It dealt with their web strategy.
Drove me up the wall – a spokes diagram with words like “social media” and “synergy”.
Grrrr.
Mark H. over here has a nice paradigm of the web.
He doesn’t believe in sites, just pages.
So the web is constructed per individual, based on their experiences.
I doubt I’m explaining it well.
me: no i know what he is saying
i don’t believe in a ‘sites’ paradigm either, but would not necessarily a ‘pages’ one either
i would offer a web paradigm of streams
rather than pages
Ben: Interesting….
me: my personlized web experience is really one of streams
both fragmented and aggregated
not in pages themselves….but in the actions i take on the web
it is those actions that live beyond pages and can live simultaneously was well
this becomes apparent with examples like FriendFeed
but even beyond that
i think we will begin to see our ‘life streams’, if you will, in browser functionality perhaps
Ben: With things like Ubiquity?
me: sure
and perhaps Chrome
Goog’s play into the browser is more than a browser war,
its an-access-to-data war
data=streams
Ben: What do you think of Chrome?
me: or rather,
streams=data
i haven’t used it yet…i have a mac
For some reason there is debate around the merits of data portability, and more specifically the Data Portability Workgroup. But really, data portability is merely a step in a further abstraction from the present structure of the Web– contained sites to a “pageless web” that is an open, fluid, ever ubiquitous form of computing. The promise of a web that is at once networked, liquid, social, and semantic. Data portability nay-sayers, in my opinion, lack the vision to see that DP is simply one of the first elements in many iterations in the progression towards a seemless, social web. We are evlolving from lock-in “sites” and “social networks” even now (to creating microformats and the promise of data storage in the decentralized “Cloud” of virtual servers). It seems we are only at the tip of the iceberg…if we step back and think of computing as a series of abstractions, each iteration enabling a higher degree of connectivity, ease of use, decentralization and seemlessness– we may begin to see that a fluid, connected, “portable” web experience (even a VRM) is not far flung. I say “portable” because eventually “portability” would in theory disolve into simply “ubiquity.”
what's the social graph got to do with it?
Hey [Redacted],
In regards to your questions around the deck:
The deck has a lot of voice over that goes with it…but i wanted to strike a balance between clarity and brevity as its going on slideshare and needs to function as a stand alone (a lot of the data portability geeks will know what the cloud and the mircoformats are so i didn’t want to be redundant). FOAF and XFN are microformats for expressing relationships between people online (vs. proprietary markup that say FB or MySpace uses). The “Cloud” can be described as distributed, interlinked virtual servers where data can be stored instead of within proprietary, dedicated hardware, thus decentralizing where personal data is stored. this is the vision of the likes of Brad Fitzpatrick (invented the FOAF and XFN microformats) and the Data Portability Workgroup and the likes of Doc Searls in creating a silo-less, open, semantic Web that functions like a VRM (vendor relationship management).
You could almost think of the Cloud as the “meta-web”…if the internet freed documents from device, the Cloud frees data from device and it becomes permanently cached on the internet (rather than any one server). Right now our data on FB is stored on FB servers. For all intense and purposes, they maintain control over our data. So right now, the “data portability” initiatives like FB Connect, while a step, are still lacking. Its still FACEBOOK granting permission to access OUR data to third parties rather than the end user accessing and granting permissions….
Anyway, this is a favorite topic of mine, and one that has been around since the birth of the net (and there have been a few failed attempts at creating this VRM such as the Lumeria Project back in ’96)…anyway, if you want to read about it, there are of course super smart peeps (the ones actually making it happen) to turn to: http://www.vrmlabs.net/vrm-in-a-nutshell/
So, the point of the deck was that while a lot of this geeky stuff is still a ways off, marketers are usually 2 years behind developments in the Web and technology. I wanted to float some of what has been a discussion within the tech community for the past few years. That we are seeing open strategies from the major networks is only indicative of the momentum this movement is gaining and that the realization of a silo-less, open and fully semantic Web is not just a pipe dream after all….
Also, this is not a “the future is VRM” deck…its much more basic and simpler than that (and mainly sticks to talking specifically about FB Connect as an example).
hence too this picto-post i did: http://www.thewebissocial.com/2008/10/on-future-of-data-portability.html
cheers,
alisa