Most folks don’t think twice about the interfaces they use. They use software to get stuff done, to do work, rarely stopping to consider how that interface is dictating their behavior.

Interfaces are, by their very nature, both enabling and confining at the same time. While they allow us to do some interesting thing, they completely dictate how we must do it. They constrain our behavior, defining a rigid set of allowable actions that we must abide by. If an action isn’t available in an interface, then for all intents and purposes you can’t do it. When an interface designer creates an interface, they are not merely adding features, they are drafting the laws of the land.

Over time, we accept the dictates of our interfaces. We come to align our expectations with the interfaces we use. This was the power of Windows for many years. So many people started using computers that happened to be running the Windows operating system that they never considered there were alternatives. Windows was computing.

Similarly, web-based interfaces have taught us a bad lesson: that we don’t own our identity data. We upload information to a web site and forever forward are confined by the hidden privacy policies that we never read in the first place. Because software wasn’t providing features to get that information back out again, we never thought to ask for it. We assumed, slowly but surely, that this was the way web-based software was supposed to work.

Thankfully, this is changing. Consider this wonderful feature on Dopplr, a site to manage your trips. When you choose to close your account, Dopplr exports all of your data and sends it to you via email, by default. Without you asking. And Everything.

Now, most software doesn’t look after us like this. Most software teaches us that in order to keep our data, we must keep using the service. It’s not even polite about it.

But when Dopplr reframes our world with such a simple feature as this, people notice. Here’s the reaction of someone who was pleasantly surprised to get a data-filled email after they closed down their account:

“(Dopplr) clearly get that the owner of the data isn’t them, it’s me and that I shouldn’t have to jump through any hoops to take my data with me after I’m finished using their site. This sort of attention to detail and user friendliness in something as normally mundane as closing an account is exactly the kind of thing that makes me remember them and want to return to their service”

Kudos to Dopplr for teaching their users what is possible with the data they own.

Noticed a nicely-designed element on the Get Satisfaction signup form today.

While creating a new profile, Get Satisfaction asks you if you happen to belong to one of a few sites that serve up hCards. (they may be using an API as well) If you do belong to one of the sites, simply enter your username and getsatisfaction will pull down your hCard and pre-populate your new profile with the information. Nice and simple.

They’ve done several things well with the design, which I’ve annotated in Skitch…

Very nice interface element. Well done!

Know of any other well-executed identity-related interface elements?

Mark Sigal, writing on Gigaom, says what’s been on my mind lately in his piece The Social Map is All About Me:

“regardless of where my content and data originate, I have a right to pull this data into MY sandbox, a sandbox where I track my threads, organize my media, filter my views and push my content wherever and however I please. While this position seems to raise a virtual middle finger to almost every service provider’s terms of service, it should not be viewed as heretical.”

Heretical, indeed. It’s quite odd that Mark has to describe this as heretical, even though he’s simply talking about his own content. He uploads a picture on a photo-sharing site, and he wants to be able to share it on even other sites, maybe his blog. Smart services have APIs with which they allow other services to transfer data in and out. Stingy services throttle this ability to try to keep that information on the site, within the confines of the domain.

We need a new frame for discussion surrounding ownership on the web. We need this issue to be less heretical and more commonplace. I think this will happen as more and more services like Flickr, Twitter, Dopplr, and Ma.gnolia open up their content and quietly make awesome services with robust APIs focused on specific activities and social objects, without trying to create the next destination network.

I remember when I first started using feed readers. I was excited. So excited, in fact, that I wrote an enthusiastic post about it. Here was a tool that would allow me to know whether sites had been updated without having to visit each one in turn. I wouldn’t have to suffer from the pain of manually checking web sites to see if something was new. From the single interface of my feed reader, I could keep track of all the domains that I was interested in, without missing anything. In theory, I would save a tremendous amount of time and be able to receive much more signal and a lot less noise.

The reality, however, was quite the opposite. Once I got a taste for feeds, I started subscribing to more and more of them. I subscribed to hundreds of them: news, design topics, friends, bloggers whose writing I enjoy. But before long I started being unable to follow all of them, as I would fire up my feed reader and have literally thousands of new posts to look through. I was suffering again.

Instead of solving my information problems like I had imagined, feeds had simply substituted one problem for another. Whereas before feed readers I was having a hard time finding all the newly updated content, after feed readers I was having a hard time reading it all.

Lifestreams

We see the same thing happening again with a new type of interface element called lifestreams. Lifestreams (also called activity streams) display the aggregated feeds of individuals in reverse chronological order. The Facebook news feed is probably the most well-known example of a lifestream. It aggregates all the activity of your friends on the service and displays it in a neverending stream of content. Ridiculed at first for being a privacy concern, the news feed is now a primary driver of activity on the site. People I’ve talked to seem to be very polarized about the feature. Some love it and use it constantly. Others ignore it, especially since the introduction of applications. And, just recently Facebook added the ability to import activity from other services such as Flickr, Digg, and Del.icio.us, adding even more content to the flow.

So, again, we have the firehose problem. While at first it seemed like a great idea to be able to follow our friends on all the services they participate in, the reality is that seeing it all in one place is overwhelming. Information flows in at such a high rate that you can’t come close to seeing it all, let alone making sense of it. If someone asks you if you saw their most recent macro shots of flowers uploaded on Flickr, for example, you have to think back to the hundreds of Flickr pictures you’ve seen floating in your stream recently and try to remember which ones were theirs. This might be manageable if you only follow a couple people, but it quickly scales out of control.

Instead of solving my information problems like I had imagined, lifestreams have yet again substituted one problem for another. Whereas before lifestreams I was having a hard time following my friends, after lifestreams I find out that most of what they do isn’t that interesting after all.

The Curse of Granularity

One way to combat this problem would be to create tools that allow people to granularly define what content they want to see. So, for example, you might be able to say “I want to see Josh’s pictures on Flickr but not his activity on Digg” or “Show me only Josh’s Del.icio.us feed”. This sounds like a great thing to be able to do, but it comes at a big expense: the time and effort of managing all of those decisions. Do you really want to manage settings for each one of the people you follow? I’ve started to do this on those services that allow me to, but one thought keeps niggling in my mind: what if I’m turning off good content? What if, for example, I miss a great photo in Flickr because I’ve granularly shut them out of my lifestream?

The larger problem is that we don’t know what content is valuable before we see it. While we would think that most of our friend’s content would be worth seeing, it’s definitely not the case. Once we are able to track the activities of the people we know and love we can’t help but come to the conclusion that they’re as mundane as we are. Perhaps this is another example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of the valuable information we receive from our friends comes from 20% of their activity.

What’s Next?

So how can we best manage the information firehose? We could hope for more granular controls, which have the overhead of managing them. Or, perhaps we need to periodically declare feed bankruptcy, where we simply turn it all off for a while to regain our sanity? Perhaps I’m not being optimistic enough: is there a way to help solve this problem with software that we just haven’t seen yet? Or, perhaps it exists and just isn’t evenly distributed?

I learned from Carsten Potter that myOpenID has just launched myOpenID for Domains. The new service makes it even easier for you to make your domain your OpenID. As I’ve said before, using domains as OpenID URLs is essential for personal ownership of identity online. Congrats guys, a great move.

Once it becomes ‘the year of [something]‘ what was truly new & vibrant & interesting about that [something] has moved on down the road.  So it is with our year of lifestreaming.  Forgive me for thinking there isn’t a whole lot of life in lifestreams.  Dumb rivers of updates are a stop gap, surely better than what we had before (no centralized method for keeping watch) but not a durable solution for user or service value.  These dim aggregations cloak beautiful seams.  The next round of really interesting personal informatics services won’t have any hestitation over being made up of bits & seams.  A la Dopplr, they’ll strut about in a suit made of many services.

What’s interesting about our current round of science projects is the glue that holds them together.

Or, rather, what you could do if you started to really think about the various forms of data glue you could give your users.  Post It Notes use weak adhesive to make your information surface mobile and the medium more plastic.  Let’s not get hung up on form factors, but intstead look to the deeper needs this rash of feature copying is trying to meet.

• How can we centralize management of all these disparate personal points on the Web?  (Blog It, ping.fm)
• How can we easily view the activities that matter to us?  (FriendFeed,  SocialThing, Netvibes)
• How can we round up our publishing efforts and present various views of what we are up to?  (See Loic’s plaint, Mike’s extented discussion of the centralized Me, ‘enhanced’ Facebook Mini-Feed, FriendFeed, Action Streams)

By fixating on one or two specific types of data views (status messages, ‘life’ streams) we miss the larger point.  Adam Greenfield isn’t wrong when he notes that our current social software offerings are weak simulacra of the rich interplay we enjoy in our ‘real’ lives.  We aren’t going to give people richer experiences by mimicking a narrow range of interface ideas.

Instead, we should help people curate and cultivate their social lives.  Let them go granular, reuse bits, and, most importantly, remix and reglue those bits in contextually powerful ways.  Such nuance is likely to come from users.  We, in turn, should pledge to pave the cow path experiences they dictate.  Ma.gnolia’s announcement to go all 3rd party for its ID system wasn’t merely about championing OpenID.  The bookmarking service will also let users rely on their existing Facebook accounts for login and profile credentials and contact lists.  What is exciting about what Larry’s team is doing is that they are getting out of the identity game and focusing their scarce resources on a richer sandbox experience.

Or, rather, with all this stuff in one place, now what?

OpenID is pitched as an open and decentralized identity system, designed “not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business”. This is great for the system, but still fails the user if their identity across the web is tied  to that evil/bankrupt company. The system persists but the user is screwed.

The ‘big wins’ for OpenID thus far have been the decision by Yahoo, AOL and Google (well, Blogger) to become OpenID providers. It could now be assumed that most people online would have some kind of OpenID whether they knew it or not. This was a great step forward for encouraging relying parties and OpenID’s standing in general. However in the rush to embrace a URL-centric identity and tell people to make their Google/Yahoo/AOL URL their OpenID, we seem to be forgetting that it matters what kind of URL we use. It’s not enough that one URL is able to represent and authenticate who I am across the web, that URL should be in my control and portable, so that I am able to change my provider should I find out that they have been collaborating with oppressive regimes or their servers run on the blood of baby seals. We don’t need URL-centric identity, we need domain-centric identity.

With URL-centric identity we are locked to a particular provider, stuck with the unattractive choice of staying with that company no matter what it does (or does not do) or performing the laborious task of going into every site that we have ever associated with that OpenID and making the necessary changes. The system is set up to encourage stasis. With domain-centric identity, I control the URL that represents me. If my current OpenID provider provides poor security, fails to keep up with the pace of innovation or engages in practices I dislike I can change providers simply and easily. My identity is in my hands and the system is set up to encourage innovation and competition for my business.

Some might argue that people don’t care about who their OpenID provider is as long as it’s secure, but recent experience suggests this isn’t true. The SXSW OpenID panel saw a surprising number of questions fielded about the idea that OpenID seems to be moving towards an oligarchic version of Microsoft Passport in which two or three big companies controlled our identities. The less than comforting answer was that two companies is better than one. The potential acquisition of Yahoo makes that answer sound even more alarming.

Kaliya Hamlin recently wrote a post titled ‘What about Flickr?’ discussing the consequences of Microsoft owning Yahoo: ‘now with this hostile take over situation with MSFT it could be owned by THEM. It is really devastating to think that all the energy I and others put into this space would be owned by THEM.’  For Kaliya, the nature of the company that provides the service is as important as the service they provide. How would she feel if she used Yahoo as her OpenID and it was suddenly owned by THEM too?

If OpenID was designed so that no one company owns the identity management system for the web, making a domain your OpenID ensures that no one company owns your identity for the web. The easiest way to make your domain your OpenID at the moment is through delegation, and Simon Willison has written a handy guide on how to make that happen. For those without domains, chi.mp will be providing them for free later on in the year.

Delegation and domain-centric identity means greater competition and innovation between providers not just to attract new entrants to the market but to retain current customers. It means I have sole control over who I am across the web. If the OpenID community really wants to put people in control of their identity online, there should be less talk of signing up with behemoths and more talk of delegation, less talk about Yahoo OpenIDs and more talk about our OpenIDs.

In the 1990s the cell phone number was the key component in our virtual identities. That number was the unique identifier that represented us, and was the main conduit of communications with our friends. We were asked to leave our name and number, as if both held equal claim to us. However, throughout the 90s and beyond, that number locked us in to a deal with a specific carrier. To change providers you had to jettison your old number, your old identity, and start again afresh. The price of this freedom was paid in lost friends and missed opportunities.

Much of the role of the cell phone number as the centre of our digital identity has been usurped by our social network profiles. Our unique identifier is now our URL, messages that once might have been SMS texts now find themselves on our Facebook walls or in status updates and the profile has become the main conduit of communications with our friends. Our digital identities have become much richer with the web of content and relationships our profiles display and yet the same problems remain. Our profiles lock us in to a specific provider and to change means jettisoning everything and beginning again with nothing.

The fight to make our cell phone numbers portable, to be able to change service providers without paying such a heavy price, seems remarkably similar to the fight to open up the social networks that we see today.

Throughout the 90s there was a rising tide calling for the right to take your phone number with you if you changed providers. The carriers saw number portability as a threat to their valuations and lobbied against it furiously; without it there would be few ways to compel subscribers to stay with their service. They knew one thing: lock in the number, lock in the value; export the number, export the value. They feared a commoditized, cut-throat world where the business of today could vanish by tomorrow.

Today, the social networks’ value is derived from the content (be it your words, photos or friends) with which it is populated. They also know one thing: lock in the content, lock in the value; export the content, export the value. There’s little chance that a $15bn valuation at such variance to performance could be sustained in an open interoperable world, and one might actually have to go back to calculating valuation in far more boring ways like as a multiple of revenue.

This is the crux of the problem that the large-scale social networks face, they know that calls for openness will only become more strident over time and that to survive in the long term they must open up. And yet if they lose the vendor lock-in and thus potentially have to recalculate their valuation, their investors will be out for blood. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they suggest palliative measures such as widgets being available across multiple networks and mutual email exchange between oligarchs. None of which really gets us any closer to an open interoperable network where we can move our identities to whichever provider best satisfies our needs.

In 1996, the FCC mandated that all cell phone numbers should be portable, and then the fight began in earnest. The carriers claimed that of course they would like numbers to be portable, but there were huge technical barriers that would cost $1 billion to implement. Unsurprisingly, these technical barriers turned out to be less than insuperable and the $1 billion estimate turned out to include such costs as retraining sales representatives.

Next they claimed that there was no demand as large volumes of subscribers were already switching carriers despite the lack of a persistent portable number. This was something only a few people really cared about and thus there was no need to spend money on a demand that didn’t really exist.

We seem to be seeing very similar arguments coming from the major social networks today. Facebook representatives regularly claim that they want to move towards openness but technical barriers and privacy problems are slowing them down. Technical barriers and privacy problems that smaller more nimble systems without the access to Facebook’s funds and engineering talent seem to have dealt with without issue.

We are also told that people enjoy being able to cut free from their old identities and begin again afresh. Apparently, being able to move your friends and content around with you to whichever service you want them to be on is a non-problem only found within the geek community, and those who push for it need to step outside the bubble. The same viewpoint suggests that people ‘enjoyed’ the opportunity to dissolve old social connections with the change of a phone number and found that a benefit of switching carriers was the ability to start again with a blank slate. Just who is in the bubble here?

The same problem, the same arguments and the same intransigence. The carriers fought tooth and nail to appeal the FCC order and it took seven years for number portability to become possible. Even after that, the carriers went out of their way to make the process difficult for their subscribers: AT&T customers complained that taking their number from AT&T to another carrier was taking several days, instead of the two to three hours it was supposed to take and that AT&T’s customer service representatives were not being helpful, with hold times on phone calls often lasting hours.  We’ve seen a similar philosophy behind the roadblocks put in place for those wishing to delete their Facebook account and there seems to be no rush on their part to improve this situation.

What made persistent portable identity possible in the cell phone sphere was overwhelming pressure from outside forces, in this case the FCC, and even then it took years. It seems that it will take a similar timeframe and measure of external force to compel the social networks to open up too. This time, though, that force is more likely to come from open networks invading market share, rather than from government intervention. However, the social networks can take a measure of comfort from the carrier experience too.

Since number portability was introduced, subscriber churn has not been as great as many feared. Customer service, price and network availability, strategies that facilitate rather than exploit their subscribers, have become the keys to retention. If the social networks were to open up, they might have to face more competition on quality of provision and innovation, but for the market, the users and their own long-term success that’s no bad thing.

For most people using the web on a regular basis, joining social networks has become an everyday activity. I’m certainly joining lots of them myself. When a new service sprouts up that sounds interesting, my curiosity gets the better of me and I dutifully go through the motions of signing up for it. The process goes like this: enter a username, choose a password, and in some cases even enter more personal information. After I do that, I go through the process of finding anybody on the service that I know. Chances are there are at least a few of my friends already using the service but I have no way of discovering them easily.

But then something interesting happens: I hit an invisible wall, tire of the service, and forget to go back. I call this phenomenon the Fade…as I slowly fade away from using the service regularly. And, days or weeks later when I realize that I’ve faded away from yet another service, it serves as a painful reminder that so much of my time is spent managing connections instead of enjoying being connected.

I’m not alone in this. This problem has become so widespread they even have a name for it: Social Network Fatigue (SNF):

n. Mental exhaustion and stress caused by creating and maintaining an excessive number of accounts on social networking sites.

What causes social network fatigue?

1. Repetitive motion: We do the same things over and over: create an account, add our favorite things to our profile, try to find friends, add some (but never all) friends, wait for something to happen. It’s a repetitive cycle that, when we realize we’re going through it yet again, reminds us that we’re not being productive, but repetitive.
2. Too many things to remember: After we sign up for a new network, we have to remember that we did and know how to get back there. If we do remember to check back, we have to remember the username and password that we used to create the account. With only a few accounts, this is easily done. But after you’ve joined a dozen or so social networks and the thought that you might want different passwords for some of them enters your mind, this becomes a real challenge.
3. Wasted time: With more and more social networks to manage, the time we have left to enjoy interacting with friends dwindles. The other morning I woke up, checked my social networks, and then realized that I had wasted 30 minutes simply managing my accounts, not really getting anything useful done.
4. Lack of consistency between networks: One of the biggest problems between social networks is that people we have signaled as friends on one network aren’t our friends on another. For example, my Facebook friends list isn’t even close to my LinkedIn contacts list, though both contain people who are important to me. This lack of consistency is incredibly frustrating, as it not only means more repetitive motion of friending them again, but it also makes us think twice about who is where.

The involved process of recreating our identities on multiple services leads to frustration and eventually exhaustion. Who knew that surfing the web could be so difficult?

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.