Laughing Meme

One of the key topics (I think) in my Casual Privacy talk last week was the importance of “context” in privacy and sharing. That some people have trouble understanding how fundamental context is to all social interactions was my primary take away from SG Foo, and I’ve been preaching it quietly where I can.

All by way of saying, I made one of my rare visits to FriendFeed this evening, and I was reminded that I consistently regret it. Breaking down those contextual walls means I consistently like the people I find there less then I did when I was able to interact with them in isolated manners; fire walling the aesthetic from the technical from the political from the personal.

We need routing not aggregation.

Other folks are talking about and writing about the long germinating, launched in beta, location broker from Yahoo’s Brickhouse, Fire Eagle.

I wanted to call out just a couple of the cool, and non-intuitve decisions they made.

Is NOT a consumer brand

Fire Eagle is a service for building and sharing location data. Its the application built on top of it that you’ll interact with, unless you’re building stuff.

Fire Eagle does NOT manage the social graph

Its a service for sharing your data with friends (or services, or your toaster), but it doesn’t know who your friends are. The social graph has been outsource. Best example of a small piece loosely joined I’ve seen in a long time.

Cares about privacy and ease of use

Ninja privacy is built in. But you don’t have to care. The TOS requires developers to discuss how the data is used. And privacy levels are front and center. And from day one data is delete-able, and in fact data is flushed on a regular basis.

Built on OAuth

Yay!

from __future__ import the_cloud

the_cloud.twitter.me.unfollow.everybody
the_cloud.me.addressbook.known_twitterers.each |identity|
   the_cloud.twitter.follow.(identity) 
      if the_cloud.geolocator(the_cloud.dopplr, the_cloud.fireeagle).nearby?(identity)
end

Last year I wrote a SxSW Twitter killbot, but what I really wanted was the above. I almost wrote it, but there were one of two annoying problems, and I figured someone else would write it for me.

Its one year later, I’m starting to realize that I’m about to go into conference mode again, which on top of a sleep deprived delirium, and a certain disconnect form external data sources, also is the only time when I have Twits come to my phone. And I still can’t do the above! What have you people been working on all year! Don’t make me come back there and start a start up.

Other questions I’ve asked my addressbook lately, and failed to get a response:

Please partition my social graph into a Dijkstra Nikon/Canon split.

Does Bob like cilantro? And is Alice lactose intolerant?

Do any friends.known_vegetarians.have_yelp_reviews(Austin)?

Lots of others, all unanswered.

Learned a new word tonight from MattB, SimonB, and Yoz.

A hashbot is a robot that hangs out on an IRC channel (hence the #) and provides a conversational interface to a resource.

hashbots are the ancestors of Social Software for Robots, and the idea of Twitter/YubNub as Web CLI.

Here is my quick dump of the notebook, probably useful to no one but me. Names mostly removed to protect the guilty.

I think “Social Graph” is kind of a dumb phrase to apply to the back question of relationships. I promptly re-dubbed the event “Social Foo” and thereby found interesting things to talk about. Kevin Marks proposed “social cloud”, clouds hide details. (operations people get hives when you talk about clouds)

XMPP, OpenID, OAuth are all going to be huge in 2008; DiSo, DataPortability, and Social Graph API aren’t as clear winners to me.

“Bowling Alone misses the point. There has been a transformative change from groups to networks. Groups are just a funny form of network.”

“Differentiated role networks”. Differentiated roles, and the failure of monolithic identity and friending were one of the things I went to Sebastopol to talk about this weekend, the people who got it got it, and everyone else wasn’t interested in the hard squishy details of real community. I think this might be the side effect of running social software for social softwares sake vs social software as bath for social media object sharing.

“Relationships can be broken down into 5 types: emotional aid, sociality, major help, minor help, and $$$”

Note to self: try block modeling interactions in high profile/high turn Flickr groups. (central, utata, etc)

No one really understands user expectations. Privacy expectation is currently, “unstable”.

Huge conceptual issues with the difference between public information hand aggregated, and public information computer aggregated. Cognitive dissonance ensues.

Rules, games, and rulesets. Modeling of social software as games. Tension of implicit vs. explicit rules. Mag.nol.ia’s altruism game derived from the cracks board (witnessing altruistic acts is a public good, way to update the Mag rules of game to support this?), Satisfaction’s status update game. Hoping Teresa can bring the quality gaming to BoingBoing’s anemic community. Social games + adversting.

Parody/pastiche as lit analysis. Investigate for web.

Social networks need NPCs. e.g. the Instructables Robot.

Standards works should be done in small groups, with a clear need, that selectively grow the list of participants. No hierarchy of early/late joiners (aka OAuth did it right)

“Everything public” bores me.

Beyond LAMP.

Find a feed for Nathan Eagle’s research.

“locations rights management”

“trusts are largely not transitive”

Language communities are “small world networks”, partitions communities by language. 2-5 hops vs 8 in analyzed network.

The Plaxo way: “We gets ze data Lebowski”

“Twitter is my early warning system. My blood pressure has gone down over the last 18 months”

Identity and sharing can make everyone warm and fuzzy, but also came face to face with sobering consequences that kept me up at night with a bottle of tequila. Re-thinking proposed Flickr features.

Collapsing the GTalk buddy list, and Reader sharing list was a serious blunder, and one that could use a bit more ink spilled about it. But one click sharing is one of my favorite Reader features.

GData Won’t Save You

Except there is a bit of a problem. I don’t really want to share with other Google Reader users, I’m not even sure I’m destined to be a long time Reader user. I want to share links the way I’m already doing it, through del.icio.us.

No problem, Reader has an Atom feed of shared items. A really good feed, with the source info maintained, well formed, nicely done. Simplest thing in the world to parse the feed, and write the entries back to del.icio.us. And I can tag any post in Reader, which is perfect, easy Ajaxy sharing into del.icio.us with a few minutes work.

Except for reasons I can’t fathom Reader isn’t including my tags in the Shared Items feed. Which all of a sudden makes my data feel a bit more locked up and trapped then I’d really like.

For Our Sins

Casting around a bit for a solution, I noticed the “Email” button, which allows me to send a link via email, along with a short note, and so “Email to del.icio.us” was born.

Super quick and dirty Perl script that:

1. Parse the Google Reader HTML email for the relevant URL (no semantic markup, alas)
2. Pull the del.icio.us link description from the subject
3. Look for a line beginning “tags: ” followed by a space separated list of tags.
4. Look for a line beginning “note: ” for the extended description.

Add the following rule to /etc/aliases file, and away you go.

to_del: | /home/you/email_to_del.pl

Takes 10-15 seconds vs 1 second to share, but much more flexible.

And Perl is still unbeatable when it comes to these kind of scripts.

Thinking about what “personal data stores” are going to look like, how this interacts with decentralized models for community services, (I swear I’ve written something more recent then 2005 on that topic, but can’t find it), mulling models for updating clouds, wondering if projects like G’s OpenSocial, and Portable Social Networks are a step forward or back, speculating that digital curation is a viable near future business model, and that individual curations would work well as shareable social media objects.

Nothing necessarily novel. Just where my head is at.

Via the HA blog (an obviously unserved niche in retrospect), a very interesting 30 minute presentation on the Google Talk architecture.

ConnectedUsers * BuddyListSize * OnlineStateChanges

Interestingly people keep independently re-discovering that maintaining presence is the hard part of scaling these systems.

Its something that really came home hard in my talking with Twitter helping with their scaling challenges (so much so that we took a slide out of our “Social Software for Robots” talk to talk about it, and Blaine mentioned it again in his “Scaling Twitter” talk)

So by way of a PSA:

Presence isn’t easy.

Growth in social systems in non-linear. Ignore the network effect at your peril.

Kick the Tires

Also interesting was “Real Life Load Tests”. The GTalk team deployed to Orkut and GMail weeks before actually turning on the UI for the features to be able to monitor the load. These are the practices that make Bill’s recent observation on HA systems possible:

An interesting takeaway is that it’s clearly possible to re-architect data storage on super-busy production systems seemingly no matter where you start from.

For the rest of bullets see the HA blog post.

Okay PMOG is super early in its life, but it intrigues me on a couple of levels (not the least of which is the engaging archetype art).

However there are some things about it which are broken. Not surprising in and of itself, but in the process of trying to report said broken-ness I ran into a larger problem.

No community space.

There is a Google Group but it’s a moderated announce only kind of thing (HINT: thats what you’re blog is for!) not a public discussion space. No message boards, no wiki (though presumably we could start one, Twitter Fan style), no groups.

Someone needs to see Andy’s talk about group forming, social software, and out of band spaces.

Especially for a game, a social game, an experimental game.

Uninstalled for now, in an attempt to reduce unexplainable spinnies.

Playing a bit with OpenID, created an account with JanRain, and was presented with the below captcha. Really changed the whole value propisition of OpenID for me.