Entries Tagged 'data portability' ↓

Jeremie Miller is a revered figure among developers, best known for building XMPP, the open source protocol that powers most of the Instant Messaging apps in the world. Now Miller has raised funds and is building a team that will develop software aimed directly at the future of the web.

Called The Locker Project, the open source service will capture what's called exhaust data from users' activities around the web and offline via sensors, put it firmly in their own possesion and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data. Miller's three person company, Singly, will provide the corporate support that the open source project needs in order to remain viable. I'm very excited about this project; Miller's backgrounds, humble brilliance and vision for app-enabling my personal data history is very exciting to me.

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Here's how The Locker Project will work. Users will be able to download the data capture and storage code and run it on their own server, or sign up for hosted service - like WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Then the service will pull in and archive all kinds of data that the user has permission to access and store into the user's personal Locker: Tweets, photos, videos, click-stream, check-ins, data from real-world sensors like heart monitors, health records and financial records like transaction histories.

Where data extraction is made easy already by APIs or feeds, Lockers will pull it that way. Where the data is appealing and the Locker community is motivated to do so, data connectors will be built.

Searching those data archives has been a technical challenge for many other startups, but the Locker team says it is trivial for them - because they only have to build search to scale across your personal data and the data you've been given permission to access by members of your network.

Seach and sharing across a user's network will be powered by Miller's eagerly-anticipated open source P2P project called Telehash, described as "a new wire protocol for exchanging JSON in a real-time and fully decentralized manner, enabling applications to connect directly and participate as servers on the edge of the network."

The team was not yet willing to disclose the identities of its investors on the record.

Apps on Your Platform

Building a developer ecosystem is going to be the team's biggest priority. What will apps look like in the Locker ecosystem? They'll be pieces of software run locally on top of your personal locker and across any of your network connections that give them permission.

The app model is a compelling one and provides a logical source of revenue for Locker and Singly. Presumably they will monetize sales of apps.

The team is collecting video testimonials from industry luminaries about what kinds of apps they'd like to see built on top of their data. Singly won first prize in the startup competition at the O'Reilly Strata conference and Tim O'Reilly himself later gave the project a shout-out in a panel on data ownership.

The team behind the project say they fantasize about apps like:

• food recommendations in neighborhoods they've visited from restaurants their friends have checked in at


• a newsfeed filtering out what their click-stream history shows they've already read


• pre-diagnosis of possible medical conditions based on personal medical and other history.

Your personal data will likely be of interest on its own, as a type of diary, but it's probably going to be much more interesting and useful when cross-referenced with other sets of data. Those other sets of data will provide context, surfacing correlations and patterns that would otherwise be invisible. Recommendations, personalization, alerts, benchmarks, social and self assessment: the types of value adds that can be built on top of a good data set are just beginning to be explored. And there are few data sets as interesting, to you, than you.

Part of a Big Picture

Exhaust data, data created as a matter of course by our various activities on and offline but to date under-utilized, is believed by many to be the next big frontier in the creation of apps, services and value in many forms. That's presuming that things like privacy, permissions, data transmission, storage and more can be done right. The Locker Project aims to do that by doing everything on a personal scale.

Kaliyah Hamlin, long-time online identity expert and now Executive Director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Collaborative Consortium, is enthusiastic. Hamlin says Miller's project is "a great development from the perspective of this emerging market/ecosystem happening. Others are looking at getting into the personal data store market as well, personal.com is coming to market for example, services businesses too - this is really happening."

In a blog post on the sector in general earlier this week, Hamlin put it this way:

"A nascent but growing industry of personal data storage services is emerging. These strive to allow individuals to collect their own personal data to manage it and then give permissioned access to their digital footprint to the business and services they choose--businesses they trust to provide better customization, more relevant search results, and real value for the user from their data."

She also expects the personal data market to become subject to extensive regulation soon.

Miller says that some ad industry people he's spoken with hope that an independent system for data stores under the control of consumers themselves will help create an atmosphere concerning liability more amenable to innovation on top of that data than exists today. Advertisers are interested of course, but far more app developers will likely seek to build on top of that data once it's accessible and properly permissioned.

The people behind The Locker Project will have no shortage of issues to tackle trying to take a distributed, open-source, app-centric approach to leadership in an emerging era of data. It wouldn't be the first time that Jeremie Miller has managed to change the world though.

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Facebook announced this morning that its wildly popular Instant Messaging service now supports the open IM standard XMPP/Jabber. That means that 3rd party developers will be able to build support for Facebook Chat into their websites and chat applications with ease.

Standards are great like this for making development simpler but the other promise of technical standards so far remains unrealized. Interoperability is the big promise of open standards in general and XMPP chat specifically, but at launch Facebook Chat by XMPP does not federate with other XMPP servers. So this isn't about interoperability, it's about further extending Facebook around the web.

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Does Facebook have plans for the future to federate with, say Google Talk, the other leading XMPP chat service online? Or with people using Jabber directly? We haven't gotten a response from the company yet, but we really doubt it. Facebook could change the game in a big way around IM interoperability if it did so. Unfortunately, this is much more likely to be a case of an open technical standard being used to extend the dominance of a closed market leader.

Update: Facebook's Malorie Lucich responded and told us that interoperability "isn't something we're announcing today, but we are looking into it." Lucich is the same Facebook team member who advised users last month about how to use Facebook to subscribe to syndicated news sources, so she's cool. Looking into it? We sure hope so.

Facebook is supporting the open standard, though! And thus it will be much easier for outside developers to build on top of it. That's great. The open standard of XMPP now has all the more support behind it, all the more reason for developers to implement on it - now it offers access to 400 million Facebook users. That's nothing to underestimate the importance of.

We sure would love to see someone step up and use open standards to support interoperability between people on different IM platforms, though. It would be great if it was Facebook that did it.

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At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of.

With a community of nine million sites that use OpenID logins and one billion enabled accounts, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too.

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OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo, with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites.

As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House's Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and related agencies.

Not only is the government's involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID's innovation, it also speaks to the product's security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash.

In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there's also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009.

Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Update: The title of this post was changed to reflect the discrepancy between the number of OpenID enabled accounts now online vs. the number of probable OpenID users.

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Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management.

The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes.

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Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website.

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, "Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook... This is just one more chapter in a much larger story - but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!"

But now, Mozilla's UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla's Weave to make your online identity something that's stored in your back pocket more than it's stored in your cookies or a third party's server.

Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we've seen yet:

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for "sign in" on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site... Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

Finally! They said it!

And now, we give you screenshots:

So, what's the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome's identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don't want their personal traffic tracked?

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Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

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What does Cliqset offer that the Facebook-acquired FriendFeed doesn't? According to Cliqset: "We're much more standards compliant, we allow broader sharing, granular filters, a different permissions model, a much more open API and we have more services tied to ours (70 vs. FriendFeed's 50)."

The most important thing Cliqset is doing is probably transforming all these different update feeds into the standardized format called Activity Streams. That format is already being supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Opera.

Michael Calore explains what Cliqset is doing with Activity Streams as follows:

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, "Amy shared a video" or "Mike rated this photo." It's a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.
But if not everyone is reporting their users' activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.
As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web's mess as it goes.

Cliqset tells us that it's working on making a streaming API for this data available and let us in on some secret projects to bring real-time cross-platform data flowing to places around the web that it's not available today.

Right now you cannot easily pull Activity Streams feeds through Cliqset for people who have not signed up for the service themselves. It would be great if Cliqset began consuming the Webfinger protocol, for example and let me point at all my Google Contacts, discover their social media sites from around the web and then transform those into Activity Streams for consumption in other apps. That future isn't here and it may never be, but a web user can hope.

For now the company is using the long polling method and this newly normalized data to do some impressive things with its own user interface. Michael Calore goes into depth about that part of the project on Wired.com's WebMonkey blog. We'd like to recommend his post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day, in fact. Check it out for a closer look at the innovative effort underway at Cliqset.

We're highlighting one article about the real-time web from off-site every day, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Data normalization, Activity Streams, filtering and APIs are going to be big topics of conversation there. We hope you'll join us for those conversations.

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MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code in order to comprehend what those updates are about and make more sophisticated update highlighting and recommendation decisions.

It's a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities - it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too.

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"We don't want to do anything without semantics, to be honest," Monica Keller, group architect for activity streams at MySpace, told us by phone today. "We can't afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren't going to like." At a time when MySpace is in serious trouble and trying to regroup, a home run by Keller and crew could make MySpace more relevant to people again and impact the rest of the web in positive ways radically unlike the impact of Facebook's proprietary software.

Keller told us today that MySpace is working on increasing the amount and sophistication of user activity updates on the site in a number of different ways. In case anyone is chuckling and thinking MySpace doesn't matter, we should remember that only ten sites on the web are visited more often than MySpace still today. MySpace may be on the decline, but it's still hugely important and these moves it's making could help it become even more so.

Adding "Write" Functionality

MySpaceID currently allows sites around the web to offer sign-in using MySpace account credentials. The sites can then pull in some amount of a user's data from MySpace and use it to personalize the experience they have on the new site - friends lists can be synced and taste information can be gleaned from a profile to customize recommendations, for example.

The next step will be to bring in user activities from these third-party sites and display them in your MySpace user activity feed, much like Facebook Connect allows. This gives other sites access to distribution inside MySpace. Developers of other sites will be able to offer users the option of publishing their activities on these other sites back onto their MySpace profiles and friends' activity feeds.

Here's how MySpace's plan is unlike what Facebook is doing. The updates will be marked up for the types of activities they represent with standardized microformat code, beginning with the events format hCal and soon to include the book, movie or other review format hReview. Those little bits of code that will be added could have big consequences.

Keller says the company acknowledges that this won't be a small task for third-party developers, so in the meantime she is working on automated methods of pulling user data in from other sites' Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and marking them up automatically, with the microformat code communicating what kind of updates they are (events, reviews, etc.)

Why This is Important

This kind of data normalization creates the level playing field of information that allows new applications to be written and scale up through accessing and processing large quantities of information that have effectively been translated into the same "language." You want to build an application that processes hCal events? That will be a lot more appealing when the MySpace ecosystem of connected sites is all speaking that language.

Keller says that MySpace and the community of people working on building a common Activity Streams specification for all sites have been working closely with the Open Social community, the Google-led cross-site application platform that competes with the Facebook App platform. Keller says MySpace's new activity feed functionality will be delivered from within but extend upon the Open Social framework the company uses to connect with other sites now.

There isn't any indication yet that MySpace will make these marked-up updates available in bulk to developers for analysis; they will likely remain authenticated and limited in visibility to friends who have given approval. That would be an even bigger boost for innovation, but the promotion of the standardized data format is a huge step nonetheless.

What's In It for MySpace?

So if this has a lot of potential to be good for the web - what's in it for MySpace? Two things, primarily.

First, as Facebook grows rapidly in both user numbers and integration with sites around the web through its similar product Facebook Connect, MySpace is no longer the center of the web for millions of people. This kind of product facilitates that kind of relationship, and offering outside developers write-access to MySpace will incentivize more of them to support ongoing user-connection with MySpace. The microformatted markup makes this a lot smarter than Facebook Connect, frankly.

There is a risk that all the smarts in the world won't interest people in MySpace's declining profile, but the site remains one of the most popular on the web and a viable competitor to Facebook. (Facebook said they may or may not comment on this move by MySpace; we're still waiting to see if they'd like to.)

The goal for the program that Keller shared with us was different. She says that the microformats markup will enable the company to make smarter decisions in highlighting friends' updates and offering users' recommendations.

Keller says that MySpace is working on and will soon deploy technology that closely monitors what kind of friend updates users show interest in. If I often click on your photos but never read your blog posts, or I am very interested in your book reviews but don't care about your events listings, then MySpace will feature those kinds of your updates in my friends' activity feeds more or less prominently. Knowing what kinds of activities are being brought in from other sites will help make that more possible. The same information will facilitate smarter recommendations of content you might like.

That's why Monica Keller says "We don't want to do anything without semantics, to be honest. We can't afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren't going to like."

Watch for these new technologies to be announced in the coming weeks. They could have a big impact not just on the future of MySpace, but on much of the rest of the web as well.

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