March 28th, 2008
A Journey of a Thousand Steps
by Brian Oberkirch | 
30 Comments
In the last year, I’ve tried to think about, write about, argue for and cajole people into building portable social networks. I think it’s the richest direction for the systems we design, for service providers and for people who use these services. I choose my words carefully, thinking that short-term worries are standing in the way of long-term value & creativity. There are a handful of technical building blocks at the ready, but as Kara Swisher notes, the problems around making social networks portable aren’t really technical.
I will happily note Microsoft’s recent work around their contact API, creating limited interop with some of the leading social networks. I would also point to the creation of the Open Social Foundation. I interpret these as further signs of the inevitability of free(er) flowing social data. While some of my peers are overly concerned about getting today’s social gorillas to adopt our approaches, I’m more interested in researching, testing & promoting the building blocks of what will become the more durable infrastructure of the social Web. Which is to say, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be built or mandated by today’s leading lights.
If you want to see the future of social network interop, watch smaller, more nimble and daring players like Matt Biddulph, of Dopplr. Above is a screenshot of his recent test, moving beyond contact import to contact subscriptions. Or watch what happens as Ma.gnolia mandates OpenID for all new accounts. Dopplr and Ma.gnolia aren’t on the hook to generate revenues to support an untenable valuation. We’ll see truer results from such experiments. We’ll note what works. What doesn’t. Who benefits. How we have to tweak that solution for other contexts. We’ll rinse. Repeat.
In this muddled, two steps forward, one stagger back dance, an interoperable social ecosystem will come to life on the Web. No shot heard round the world that they can write up on AllThingsD. The open social Web, like life, will happen while your back is turned.
It is for this reason that I think globalized, generic, manifesto-driven approaches are unsound. No one wants data portability. They want to reuse their Last.fm contacts to find the right muxtapes. They want to invite all their PHP tagged contacts in Highrise to a particular event on Upcoming.org. They want to share ffffound objects with select groups. And so on. Instead of acting like graduate students, let’s be makers.
My hope is that OwnYourIdentity.com will become an open notebook for those efforts. And I invite you to help us write this story.
[...] my first post there, I start to talk about what I think works, and why I think terms like ‘data [...]
I could not agree more. This is exactly what’s going on. I can’t wait.
That’s like saying ‘no one wants wifi, they want to connect their computer to wireless networks easily’
You’re just splitting hairs
Wifi, DVD and many other combined/branded standards efforts all came about to accelerate a given usage scenario using a set of formally disparate technologies.
Some people will focus on the mpeg4 standard or the 802.11 standard, others will focus on the ‘DVD’ or ‘WiFi’ - both are just as valid pursuits.
We’re all working toward the same thing - no matter what it’s called
No, Chris, it really isn’t the same thing.
I’ve watched people try to point this out to you before, don’t gloss over it. Until you grok the difference, you’re going to miss out.
Chris I disagree,
My take on what Brian is saying is that the portable social network revolution will not spring from the giant players making pronouncements and signing agreements, but from smaller players who actually start to build the damn thing.
Can Facebook live up to its $15bn valuation if it makes one’s content and relationships totally portable? They seem incompatible. It is owning people’s content and relationships that give FB long term value, without it they would have to go back to a valuation based on (shocker) actual revenue. Are we really likely to see meaningful change on this while this fundamental point remains the case?
The Enlightenment didn’t come about from the Kings of Europe gathering together and making a pronouncement, but from often-ignored individuals creating new ways to do things in tiny workshops and studies without patronage. So too, will the enlightenment in the social network world come from smaller more nimble players who can experiment with ways to not only make openness and portability the centre of their technical advantage, but their commercial advantage too.
Talk is great and should be encouraged, but build is better.
Nice work guys! I especially like the point about this stuff happening while your back is turned. Altho I would argue it is not so much when your back is turned as when you are planning out the big stuff. I wonder if coming at it from both directions is indeed useful in the long run. Either way in my mind:
The two most important things that will lead to ease of use are
1)Develop real world examples of ’stuff’ that demonstrates the value of interoperability/portability - whatever.
2) Use plain english to describe said value. That means using language that both geeks and non geeks understand.
Cheers for now
@deb absolutely! I think your second point is particularly valid. I remember at the SXSW Openid panel there was a question on whether the main barrier to openid adoption was technological, security or user-interface. No mention was even made of marketing and the barrier that is simply dissemination and understanding.
The same needs to happen around SN portability. Leslie Chicoine from Get Satisfaction is very hot on this area too and they have some great examples of how to couch this kind of subject in plain English.
Tony I didn’t make a distinction between small players or large players. No one said that ‘Data Portability’ will come from big players.
I don’t disagree that smaller players and startups have the most to gain. That does not change the fact that it will be helpful to have a key phrase and iconography to describe the interoperability experience.
Don’t confuse endorsement by big players with some sort of allegance to them. The DataPortability project is a grass roots effort that just happens to have big players participating.
I fully expect startups, however, will be the first time move - and to win. They have started already.
In regard to OpenID - agreed - education and marketing are key - again this is why a group like DP can help. Another key factor around OpenID adoption is the lack of real end-user value.
Unified authentication is only incrementally better and therefore does not justify the additional cognitive load of OpenID style URL logins.
If OpenID came with complete identity and Data Portability, however, the value equation changes. That’s why treating these things as a stack of technologies to enable a seamless solution scenario is also useful. That’s why branding properly so users understand is also useful.
Chris, I love the idea that if Flickr goes bad, I could export all my photos into Picasa (yeah, right!) and simply carry on. That is, of course, cool.
But I’m more interested in being able to share that information with all my friends and contacts in such a way that they can come along too - without us all having to construct yet another replica of our actual relationships within the construct of Picasa’s social infrastructure.
I’m far more interested in being able to consolidate all the various services I use around the web under my identity (or facets of it) than I am in having the same/similar data in various services to do the same thing.
I don’t want to store my bookmarks in both Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia and sync them (which is already possible). I want people looking for my bookmarks to simply find them - regardless of which service I use.
No one is saying that making data portable irrelevant. I don’t think Brian even mentioned Data Portability, although you *could* read read sections of this post as inferring his disinterest. What I was trying to say in my previous comment to you was not to take this as an attack or to ignore it. Some folks find the concepts of integrating identity and relationships on the web more interesting than that of sharing data. That’s okay, you know.
My personal take is that I far prefer playing with metadata than data itself. I think that binding metadata from various services together to form, illustrate and project the (partial) sum of an identity will lead to the requirement for data portability anyway. It’s doing that binding and projection that interests me.
@Lachlan Brian did in fact mention data portability mate.
To quote: “No one wants data portability. They want to reuse their Last.fm contacts to find the right muxtapes.”
Also nothing you mentioned is out of line with ‘data portability’ or DataPortability. Data and Metadata is all ‘data’ in the end. ‘Identity’ and ‘friends’ are data as well.
When we talk about ‘porting’ we talk about physically moving or copying the data OR porting the context in which use that data OR porting the meta-data about that data - it’s all the same problem.
Trying to re-name or re-phrase the problem is sort of like arguing ‘we don’t need a richer web experience, we need AJAX’ or ‘we don’t need wifi we need WEP’.
Each of the scenarios you described, and indeed those that Brian described, are all Data Portability problems. A problem that will indeed be solved in small increments.
Sure we can get specific and start saying “no no this is a ‘Data Rights’ problem or a ‘Data Interoperability’ problem or a ‘Data Access’ problem”. Again, however, we’re focusing on the wrong thing.
It’s no more a Data Access problem than WiFi was a security problem (hence needing WEP as part of the solution). It was an end-to-end scenario that needed a combination of technologies and approaches.
Maybe we can just call it a ‘Data Problem’.
You have also asked me not to take the post as an attack or ignore it. Far from it - I welcome the debate! It’s a debate we are having in the DataPortability project every day!
@Brian I am intrigued by the idea that you once championed Social Network Portability but somehow feel that the slightly broader ‘Data Portability’ phrase seems to throw you off. We are talking about the same thing here - the only difference is some of the data may not be social or from social networks.
[...] Own your identity. Sounds like data portability right? Not so fast. Tags: identity [...]
[quote]My take on what Brian is saying is that the portable social network revolution will not spring from the giant players making pronouncements and signing agreements, but from smaller players who actually start to build the damn thing.[/quote]
No doubt.
[quote]No one wants data portability. They want to reuse their Last.fm contacts to find the right muxtapes. They want to invite all their PHP tagged contacts in Highrise to a particular event on Upcoming.org. They want to share ffffound objects with select groups.[/quote]
I would consider most of those use cases to be more an example of “data federation” than “data portability,” FWIW. And those are good examples of the kinds of things we hope to enable with OpenQabal.
Clearly there is an interesting conversation to be had. Hopefully all those interested in diving into the details can make the Data Sharing Workshop and 2nd Summit http://www.datasharingsummit.com. Yes we are collaborating with “the” data portability effort - however we are not wedded to their approach or anyone other one - I think they key at this point is to get passionate caring people in a room together and see where the real concrete converation goes. It is also a good idea to build on the success and technology coming out of the Identity community. Clearly you get this have many of the key people and aggregate blogs in your blog roll.
I’m actually a little bored by [lowercase] data portability in and of itself. Whether we’re making analogies to WiFi as the conduit or whatever, the point is, I would posit, that it’s actually less about WiFi or about ethernet, but about what being connected — in today’s age, through millions of tiny cables and airborne radio frequencies – to each other and to services and to companies and ideas that we care about, that we want to interact with, that seek to serve our needs. WiFi is incidental, as is data portability.
If data portability is “doing its job”, you never have to think about it and it fades to the background. That’s why I’d argue that Brian seems to be making the right case here. To reduce “identity” and “friends” to mere data is missing the point. The network of people using the web didn’t come about to elevate the status of WiFi to godliness; WiFi came about to support human interaction and connection. Data portability — or what I think is more important — data interop — is a means to an end, an end that, personally, I’m betting is going to be better for the web and better for people in the long run.
There’s some degree of reductionism necessary to draw down the complexity of the task at hand, but ultimately, relationships between people, between their activities and between them and their “data” is complicated. But it’s complicated not because of the data. The data is dumb. It just sits there. What difference does it make whose server it sits on or how much money it’s making for Mark Zuckerberg? The challenge is with working with people, and with shining the way to a better path, better for individuals and for businesses — where data can move around between services because competition is a good thing and being locked in and having limited choices is not.
We solved this problem on the desktop with things like OLE. Now we need to do the same thing on the distributed web where not all players are as savvy (or care) and where the system is not centrally controlled. This is the space of politics, relationships, and human and social capital.
I’m very eager to see where Brian will take the conversation on this site, because it’s going to take all manner of efforts to make progress here, not just a meiopic obsession with freeing one’s data.
P.S. It’s a little odd that you’re not using the wp-openid plugin here!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/
I feel like this will probably get lost in the huge torrent of comments here. But I think the sentiment of this is important. I’ve been talking a lot about “how to make creating social networks easier” for the last year. Part of this discussion has involved the people associated with Social Network Portability and some of it has Involved the people associated with Data Portability.
For the last couple of years a number of people have been fighting a battle waged in the world of publishing. “How do we get closed networks to open more of their data”. During that time I’ve been working on problems like “How can we use xmpp’s roster as a distributed social network”. I feel like the problem of publishing data has largely been solved, this was a marketing problem and the space is now familiar with many of the contemporary companies and the idea has reached a tipping point. What remains is a problem of digestion and one that has gone relatively unheralded. That is, how do we make this data that is now being exposed useful and relevant.
One of the interesting things that I find happens when you reframe the problem like this, is that “importing” users data becomes minimally interesting. As a social network built around providing a set of features being able to import a starting set of social data is only minimally helpful. My big problems still exist. I need to build tools to help me manage those relationships and I have to market my product such that the user base is large enough to make my application useful. If we extend that into other types of data the same kinds of problems emerge.
Basically, we’ve tackled a problem that exists for consumers, “I want my data back”, and done a pretty good job. But forgotten that these tools we’re providing need users themselves, and that the users of these tools are not consumers of social applications, but rather the creators of new social networks.
New social networks need a user base, but the creators also want to reduce the complexity of creating their applications. This means that tools that we provide these creators need to offer something. They need to not only help the creator build a user base quickly, but also provide tools for managing complexity. In the case of importing relationship data, the tools should include abstractions for adding and removing friends, and storing the state of that data off site. The tools might want to bring with them features that are painful to create in and of themselves, like messaging, and presence. The should make the life of the creators of social networks easier, and the fact of the matter is, is that right now getting social data doesn’t appear to be the problem that social networks creators are facing.
So how do we approach this? I think the first thing to do is to start using the tools available and imaging ways to bring things to the table. If we look at OpenID and oAuth, and open social, those technologies have seen fairly serious attention from large sites. And if you look all of those technologies help reduce the complexity for the people making social networks. They either help reduce the overhead of exposing api’s, logging in users, or creating applications on top of your tools. When we look at the other technologies (XFN, FOAF, Microformats, etc.) that Data portability is championing I think we see a very different pattern. I know I’ve suggested that xfn offers almost nothing back to creators, but there are solutions I’ve found for FOAF (pinback + oauth + sparql), and certainly XMPP brings a lot to the table. That being said, these tools don’t exist yet, and they’ll take time to build. But until our tools are tailored for the creators, I don’t think we’ll see significant adoption.
It is unfortunate that there is so much bickering over the details of what ultimately can and should be defined as data portability. There is a lot of misconception about the term portability, although its definition might lead you to believe that it describes the action of removing data from one location and moving it to another. That is not the only option and way to describe the process, porting data is more akin and will most likely be handled through linking and copying data between locations. You could call it data sharing or data interoperability, but those are specific subsets of what portability describes. Why should anyone argue about this when a little research at DataPortability.org will lead you in the right direction?
To be honest I feel most of the bickering that has been happening falls more into the category of controlling interest. Some people benefit more from certain ’scenarios’ more than others and that is where most of the division comes from. Certain people have their own products and ideas that they want to push and the all inclusive open nature of DataPortability scares them off. Regardless if it succeeds or fails, the impact is being made every day that we are talking about data portability. Maybe instead of complaining about the details you should create tools for people to use, or write how people can make it all possible.
@Chris Saad Agree that openid will not win through unless it is intrinsically tied to the rest of your identity online. I still see delegation or provision from your own domain as the key to this.
So pre-2007, we had scores of communities all working away in their own silos. Then the DataPortability project came to life, to try to synthesise their conversations and evangelise the proposed solutions to the end consumer in a simplified manner. And now that DataPortability has captured the attention of the industry for the very fact it helps simplify understanding, something clearly the existing groups were not very successful in doing, people feel it is necessary to divide the conversation again?
The concept of this blog looks great as it seeks to educate. But the reasons stated in this posting, seem more a case of dividing the conversation again in order to conquer some of that attention generated. I’d like to see less nit picking about trying to downplay data portability (lower case), because we all know we can make it represent whatever we want given how broad the concept is, and more positive discussion which builds off the successes of each other.
The DataPortability project is a community hub that encourages discussion. Existing communities like those of the Identity, need to harness it not try to kill it.
I loved the conversation here, but took it to a longer posting..
http://tinyurl.com/2s3kph
This is lengthy discussion about semantics. Not the semantic web, but semantics. Despite some subtleties, everyone above is talking about the yet-to-be-defined DataPortability standards.
The questions being address by DataPortability include:
1) What is the end goal of DataPortability and data portability and portable social networks and portable contacts and portable music lists, etc, etc, etc, etc.
2) How to achieve this portability?
The only way this can work, as Chris Messina points out, is that we need a solution analogous to OLE (Object Linking & Embedding). This is DataPortability.
You can always argue semantics but someone still has to answer HOW all this will be achieved.
I agree with Chris Saad that the little guys will be the first to implement DataPortability. Most of the tools already exist. This will happen blind to most and the little guys can get quite popular, at least among Early Adopters. However, the big question is how DataPortability standards can apply to the many hundreds of millions of internet users.
OpenID is the center of this portability that you mentioned.
Gooog tryed their own service, but did not succeed.
I think people will quickly adopt online portability, if it is available.
[quote]There is a lot of misconception about the term portability, although its definition might lead you to believe that it describes the action of removing data from one location and moving it to another.[/quote]
Quite so, which is why I prefer using the term Data Federation when specifically referring to scenarios that do not involve picking the data up and moving (well,copying anyway) it. “Portability” in and of itself suggests, at least to my way of thinking, a focus on an “export / import” kind of scenario. Now probably I just need to do more reading of the dp.org docs to convince myself that the group isn’t focused on only those specific use cases…
Maybe it is all just arguing over semantics, but I think there is some value to this discussion. It’s hard to have a useful conversation without a shared context as far as the meanings of terms.
[quote]
The only way this can work, as Chris Messina points out, is that we need a solution analogous to OLE (Object Linking & Embedding). This is DataPortability.[/quote]
Nice analogy.
TheA broad goal, as I see it anyway, is to be able to mash-up or compose applications using data from many disparate sources, using standard protocols. Does this jibe with anyone else’s way of thinking about this?[quote]
A broad goal, as I see it anyway, is to be able to mash-up or compose applications using data from many disparate sources, using standard protocols. Does this jibe with anyone else’s way of thinking about this?
[quote]
Yes Phillip - you are exactly right. And also to ensure that, in most cases, it is an easy to understand, interoperable experience.
[...] A Journey of a Thousand Steps by Brian Oberkirch Brian does not believe that the future of data portability comes from globalized, generic, manifesto-driven approaches but rather small nimble startups like Dopplr and Ma.gnolia that implement focused changes allowing for some level of data portability / interoperability across sites. He also thinks that data portability will be driven by data portability needs arising from limitations of using existing popular social sites like Last.fm, Upcoming.org, Highrise, etc. [...]
If we want the deep-pocketed interests to play along with any serious data-sharing efforts, we must first prove out a revenue model that doesn’t require a page impression at a specific domain name. Without that revenue model, the data silos will fight the mashups.
As a few have pointed out in this discussion, the data portability trend will emerge from the grassroots, even if the big players don’t play along. Some users yearn for it and, where there is demand, supply will emerge. It would all happen faster, though, if there were incentives for the data silos to play along. Those who want to champion data portability should be blazing a trail to a profitable transition from data silo to mashup API.
Kind regards,
Justis Peters
@Justis Absolutely, while long-term value can only be justified by content and contact lock-in we’re unlikely to see much real progress from the majors.
It’s finding the business case that supports data portability that will be key, and I can’t help but think that the large companies are so hamstrung by their own valuations that they won’t be able to get there before the torch has passed to someone else.
[...] A Journey of a Thousand Steps by Brian Oberkirch Brian does not believe that the future of data portability comes from globalized, generic, manifesto-driven approaches but rather small nimble startups like Dopplr and Ma.gnolia that implement focused changes allowing for some level of data portability / interoperability across sites. He also thinks that data portability will be driven by data portability needs arising from limitations of using existing popular social sites. [...]
[...] Brian Oberkirch [...]
[...] A Journey of a Thousand Steps, We don’t need DataPortability [...]