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Data Portability for whom? Some psychology behind the technology Gavin Bell gavinbell.com 8th May, XTech 2008 1 Three topics - exploring who are we building things for? Technology adoption Psychology Identity and social network portability Basically this is me getting to the bottom of something that keeps bugging me Some comments and reviews of the talk http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/05/xtech-review.html - Simon Wardley!s generous review http://adactio.com/journal/1467/ - Jeremy Keith!s review of my talk as given I!ve revised the talk a bit and given more context in the notes so that this stands up on its own Ian Forrester videoed the talk if you want to see the original http://blip.tv/file/894551/

Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

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A talk I gave at XTech08 looking at the psychology behind technology adoption, looking particularly at OpenID and OAuth using RSS as a guide. This is a slightly revised version of the original talk. How relevant is the data portability of social networks to those who don’t knowingly have an OpenID already? Millions of OpenIDs are deployed but how many are actually used? What about microformats, ever tried explaining why the hCard is a good idea? It makes a smart demo if you have the right plugins installed, but the holy grail of browser adoption may never come for many people. Defining the problem is the real issue; yes, solving it is hard, but we need to assess whether we are solving the right problems or just satisfying our own curiosity. The psychology of why non-geeks need data portability etc is murky. However understanding the needs of the rest of usHH them will mean these innovations take root. We live in a small tight circle of people who care about a new beta of Firefox. We are more prone to criticise a website for not being fully buzzword compliant than on its actual merits as a project. We don’t make sites to show off new technologies, we build them for people to use to do something relevant to their lives. How can we ensure that we include their needs and expectations along side the buzzword tick list? We are no longer building software components which are aimed at other developers, this is no CSS or XHTML. The last mainstream new web technology aimed at the general population was RSS. OpenID, OAuth and their kind are much more social in their impact, we expect people to use their OpenIDs in multiple places, we expect them to allow OAuth to enable access to their data. Happily, there is already plenty of research into how people understand and process information. It is called psychology. I’ll give an overview of cognitive psychology and how the learning from this subject are can be applied to the kinds of systems we are developing. How people form models of the world, how they handle change. How people setup expectations and what happens when we break these. Come, find out about how the people you are developing for function as individuals and as a group.

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Page 1: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Data Portability for whom?

Some psychology behind the technology

Gavin Bellgavinbell.com

8th May, XTech 2008

1

Three topics - exploring who are we building things for?

Technology adoption

Psychology

Identity and social network portability

Basically this is me getting to the bottom of something that keeps bugging me

Some comments and reviews of the talk

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/05/xtech-review.html - Simon Wardley!s generous review

http://adactio.com/journal/1467/ - Jeremy Keith!s review of my talk as given

I!ve revised the talk a bit and given more context in the notes so that this stands up on its own

Ian Forrester videoed the talk if you want to see the original http://blip.tv/file/894551/

Page 2: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

2

A bunch of clever technologies aimed at making the web a better and more manageable place

All good things, but we are starting to build a common infrastructure for the web with these tools and the integration is not yet

clean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OpenID_logo.svg

How has an OpenID

Who has used OAuth (outside Flickr!s similar system)

Who has implemented OAuth?

(most people had, making the point that the technical audience of a web conference is quite different to the average person on

the internet.

Brad Fitzpatrick had similar thoughts http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/ last year.

Page 3: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Web BrowserDesktop Application

Relying party Identity provider

Requesting data from website

Desktop access to web data via OAuth with OpenID

Is user signed into website

Sign in on OpenID provider

View request from desktop

application

Confirm request and set options

Website grants request to application

When user clicks on confirmation

link, access token is saved

Application has access to external

data or media

Approve access to relying party

OAuth OpenID

The important aspect of this is the second jump to another website, a 3rd party is involved in access

to data via OAuth if OpenID is used, this is a potentially confusing user experience.

YES

NO

3

An example of the kind of thing that I find troublesomeThis is the “better than the other options” version of authenticating a website from the desktop

Two things about this are odd, the jump from the OAuth data provider to the OpenID identity provider.

Secondly the requirement on the part of the person to request the access token with a second click on the application, we are making the individual request the both aspects of the token based authentication.

Page 4: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

The chasm

4

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rethinking_crossing_the_chasm.php

We are making products, collectively on the internet, Defining a common feature set for the new web

The chasm shows the process that technologies generally go through to become adopted.

Too much focus on the other side of the chasm can result in ill thought out technology. Or premature ideas of adoption rates

I!m not saying that OpenID or OAuth are like this, but allow me to give a different example.

Slide borrowed from Tara Hunt

Page 5: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

RSS adoption

5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Feed-icon.svg

1999 things started with RSS, but it took until 2006 to become “evenly distributed” and embedded

Why is this significant, RSS was the first major change to web browsing behaviour.

Technology adoption takes a long time.

See http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3 for detailed

research on web adoption and demographics.

the alpha geek crowd were making RSS by hand in 1999 and following the bitter arguments over the specification process

Yet there are many people even now who have no idea what RSS is, but they can understand a web feed in GReader, or

netvibes or a macosx widget.

Page 6: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Cognitivesurplus

6

Other people are thinking and working in this space too, Kathy Sierra and Clay Shirky

Clay gave a great talk about the Cognitive Surplus

http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Which the web is unlocking as we escape TV... And adjust to our free time (society takes time to adapt, a theme I!ll return to)

The things we can do with the web, given time and encouragement, many of these will be about collaborative content

creation. We are planning the services and systems which will manage this collaboration, identity and content management.

I!m an optimist, these other people are not stupid, they just have their energies invested in other places than making the

internet happen.

So if we are to encourage them to discover the internet as we feel it will become, then we need to enter with a respectful

manner.

So how is this cognitive surplus arranged and managed in our heads.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/1399862175/sizes/l/

So how do people process information.

Page 7: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Psychology

7

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/1932306220/sizes/l/

Cognitive = thinking, Psychology = study of the mind

The process of understanding and processing information

internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_psychology

The field is 40 years old, same age as AI, 1956

We are all systems of human behaviour

we make decisions based on the information we extract from the radiation bouncing around this room

we understand other people on the basis of this processing,

we form social relations on the basis of these decisions

Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook (5th Edition): A Student's Handbook (Paperback)

by Michael W. Eysenck (Author), Mark T. Keane (Author)

Page 8: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Schema

Congruence

Adaption

8

A schema is a model of understanding of the world

It helps us manage expectations of the world

eg a restaurant schema

cutlery plates waiters menu food

however some restaurants serve different types of food so we have some ability to vary

chopsticks rather than knife and fork still works as everything else is present

Congruence is the degree of fit between the external world and our schema

that it meets our expectations

The email update with no content

Eg x updated, click here to read. (too many social web apps do this)

Flash websites and no bookmarkable urls

barlett schema and correction we can ignore the things which don!t fit in to a degree

teddy bear with missing leg is still a teddy bear

But a teddy bear head, is that still a teddy bear?

http://www2.qeliz.ac.uk/psychology/Barlett1932.htm

Also a take away is not a restaurant

or if we went to a restaurant and they didn!t serve food -

we might decide it wasn!t a restaurant maybe that is a bar or a coffee shop

We can deal with change, this is termed adaption in schema theory

Page 9: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

9

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adrianblack/371301544/sizes/o/

Expanding on adaption

schemas are not set in stone, they adapt according to experience

We are all now comfortable with the idea that we can browse the web on a phone, yet three years ago it was uncommon

Older phones on the left it was hard to use the web

The iPhone makes it easier, Imagine Apple had launched the iPhone three years earlier, it would have had a slower adoption

rate I think

People felt the phone was for making calls.

We can take gradual changes in our schemas, too fast or too big a change will feel incongruent.

society takes time to adapt too,

jet packs might take a while to fit into our lives. See Fusion man http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/15/5

Page 10: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Stability10

what does schema theory tell us about how we approach web development

two things

ONE

Firstly offer some stability

Gradual change is better as it lets our users adapt their schemas to fit the new world

iterative development,

not large scale changes to site structure, navigation or layout.

TWO

Bridge the gap

Schemas come into our world as mental models,

Secondly we need to design our products to support existing mental models we have of the everyday world

so we get shopping cart and filing systems and message boards, the “desktop metaphor”

Completely new will not fly very well, except amongst the geek crowd

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64672616@N00/190596601/sizes/o/

Page 11: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Notice board

11

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndunster/61856886/sizes/o/

Social software is a good example of schema change

the church notice board or newsagents window is a long way from punBB, but the underlying traits are still there

the concept of a bulletin board is based on these notices in the window

we have added to the concept with replies etc

yet we still know what is happening

Even our language has shifting to the more modern usage over the past 15 years

bulletin board for most people no longer means the physical board

Also the language changes that Simon Batistoni spoke of earlier, surfing and surfing.

See http://www.slideshare.net/hitherto/ni-hao-monde

Flickr!s very successful blending of video is a great example of how to do it well

And how passionate communities can react to change. (but that is another talk)

Now on to a few more slides of psychology

Page 12: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Consistent or Coherent

12

Slightly change in topic now

A good debate can be had about the relative merits of one vs the other.

I would argue it is impossible to be both coherent and always consistent

consistency is rule following, we!ve always done it that way

coherency values context more and through following this you may end up breaking consistency

people often debate this and strict usability people often push a hard line consistency line,

where as a coherent choice can be more appropriate. Consistency is not wrong, just over rated.

Be consistent, but decide when to be coherent

Another viewpoint on these issues is simplicity vs complexity

Many things can be simple, some things are complex, if you give a simple interface to a complex issue, then you give up

control where it maybe required

John Meada!s book Simplicity is a good one to read.

In terms of identity, most people think email = identity, with OpenID we are changing this

The change is coherent in our minds, gavinbell.com is my website, but not consistent with their schema, I!ll return to this later.

Page 13: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

AffordancesJ.J Gibson

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

13

A useful way of relating to simple physical objects and the environment

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception From http://web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~masanao/affordance/

gibson.gif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

He defined affordances as all "action possibilities" latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the

individual's ability to recognize them,

they are perceived relationships, so not quite the same as schemas

a door affords an opening, a glass holding wine, a chair sitting.

computers in general only offer perceived affordance, though the iPhone is changing that slightly

useful in terms of visual metaphor

use common conventions, we have a history of usage with these items, cf a basket and a bin similar function, different

representations

however they are contextually bound the basket vs bin metaphor see later

words and images are better than images alone, the words confirm and strengthen the message

be coherent in their usage, people should be able to take something learned in one place an reuse it elsewhere on your

site."

eg the plus symbol adds it to a shopping basket,

Then don!t use the same metaphor to mean “give me a bigger image”

Our moves towards gestural and touch based computing make this much more important

Identity for most people is about email

Urls are places you go to read something.

Page 14: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Operant Conditioning

BF Skinner

14

Slight diversion, but relevant to the discussion of social software, normal programming continues in a couple of slides.

BF Skinner ran a series of experiments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner

rats and bars to press for food.

comparing always giving a pellet of food in exchange for pressing a bar

vs

giving it on a regular schedule, say evey 5 presses

vs

Give them food randomly

In the random condition they will press the bar a lot more than often during the training

once the training is over in the random condition they press the bar for much longer

this is about expectation, the rat is never sure if the next press of the bar will produce a pellet of food

Pigeon video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ctJqjlrHA

remind you of anything?

the web, email and RSS all exhibit intermittent reinforcement

Where is the new information?

we never know when there is an update so we keep checking and checking.

Page 15: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Social Software

15

checking facebook or flickr or twitter to see who has updated

usually there is some sort of update, but is it new content from others or content directed at us.

We get a stronger reward from the content aimed at us

most of us have broken Dunbar!s 150 limit, the predicted maximum number of people we can socialise with comfortably based

on the size of our brains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

However some of the updates are less satisfying, as they come from people we are less close to, or those we feel “obligated”

to follow

friends vs contacts as on Flickr, gating the amount of information we receive

we even provide lossy updates, the deniability of not receiving every update is important,

it aides social relationships and stops us drowning in information.

Deniability as Adam Green said in Everywhere

So we are very prone to wanting more from these kinds of systems, so we need to factor this addiction into our designs so that

we do not create an unsatisfactory experience for them, unsatisfied desire is not healthy

Page 16: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Experience vs features

16

Or features vs service as Simon Wardley mentioned - http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/05/xtech-talk.html

Being feature led is a poor idea.

There is much to learn from the ideas behind experience design and service design approaches.

Imagine your app as a small part of someone!s overall interaction with other people and the world.

Your app is not the centre of the world

CF the iPod, focus on the one thing it needs to do well and ignore the rest, then iterate.

Page 17: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

17

Anne Asensio, then Head of Design at Renault.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Scénic

http://www.dexigner.com/design_news/7407.html - it wins design awards

– The judges praised the Scenic's "thoroughness and thoughtfulness of interior design" and the "orgy of surprise-and-delight

features". According to Ged Bulmer, editor of Wheels Magazine, "The Scenic possessed innovation, visual impact and appeal,

detail design, control location and clarity”.

Keyless entry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMH1qVIf0sU

http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/15/video-renault-keyless-entry-keeps-you-from-freezing-your-nuts-o/

Automatic handbrake, level open tailgate / boot for sheltering from the rain

---

In the move from experience to feature list to copycats something gets lost along the way.

There is a strong aspect of this which is the “right feeling”, an experience. However it needs to be one for the people who!ll use

the product, not one for the people who are making it.

The hard part is to be able to continue to improve the experience so that you can continue to sell products. Staying still is fatal,

you need new product ideas / product design. To return to the iPod five years ago it was a music player, now it is a web access

device, camera and phone.

Still no radio, voice recorder, dozen preset buttons and the rest of the 2003 MP3 player noisy feature list.

Page 18: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

The beta addiction

18

We live in a small tight circle of people who care about a new beta of Firefox.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16851909@N00/93136022/

How many have you signed up to, how many have do you think the general person on the internet has joined.

Have you lost count?

Do you think they have ?

Page 19: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Install this and then...

19

Anytime you need to say, firefox only, install this plugin then you!ve lost people, many people.

Our ways of thinking are different, we experiment, we hack about with things.

Other people just want the web to work, the web has a different schema for them,

it is a place to find information and utility, for us it is a place to play and explore.

Like satellite TV or a mobile phone, it is something they use.

Page 20: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Itches & Artisans

20

http://flickr.com/photos/rgordon/190575944/sizes/o/

The scratching an itch is a core driver for open source software

Or there is the more artisanal design approach, build something you like and others might like it too

Do distributed efforts like open source do UX well?

Atom and AtomPub are marvels of technology, but they are back end technology

OpenID and OAuth are placed directly in front of a non-technical audience,

plugins are hard to get people to install Flash and Quicktime etc, but with considerable effort and widespread content for their

usage.

How many stock Firefox installs are there (the majority?)

We are changing the model of how people use the web, making the term browser redundant perhaps, certainly encouraging a

more active role for them

How do we get these tools taken on board?

Not focusing on the technology helps

Page 21: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Get Satisfaction

21

Lovely interface from Leslie Chicoine

No technology is mentioned on the page, no mention of hCard or identity transfer, just simple language describing the process and items in terms that people coming to the site will understand

Page 22: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Anti patterns

22

This is UX on a distributed scale, we!ll try many approaches and some of them will suck badly.

Eg the password anti-pattern

Signups where you give you account details for another third party site to create your signup.

Not nice.

Page 23: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Deployment23

OpenID - hundreds of millions of deployed accounts, mostly latent

Mainstream consumers / relying partners, scarce on the ground

Oauth, some great examples, but they are all in our bubble.

What about the rest of the web?

http://static.flickr.com/175/397708723_e106fdb996_t.jpg

Technology takes a long time to get deployed and then uptake is slow too.

Page 24: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

The h’internet

24

Mean joke I know.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peteashton/69395016/sizes/l/

There is another web out there,

These are the people who will never own a domain name

They share email addresses, because they can!t make XP do a second user account.

They don!t have webmail, they are not small in number but they are invisible.

They might be your parents or your friends, it is not just an age differential

They use things like hotmail or photobucket, snapfish.

They can!t write html or buy domain names

They don!t want to, nor should they.

Page 25: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Web of people

vimeo.com/zzgavin

twitter.com/zzgavin

del.icio.us/takeoneonion/

freebase.com/view/user?id=/user/gavin

flickr.com/photos/gavinbell/

25

We are already partly online, there are lots of bits of me all over the internet from the various places I put things.

So some questions

Who here ego-surfs

Are you number one for your name (yes for about 5 years)

We are highly visible and represented on the web

This is coming for other people and it is a shock when it does, eg the scientists on Nature Network, or the please take me off

google twitter FAQ

What about for the rest of them, how does the internet work for them?

Page 26: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Delegation

• <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />

• <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://gavinbell.myopenid.com/" />

26

OpenID delegation

Who can do this?

Who has done this?

Do you think the people on the previous h!internet slide can do it

I doubt it

So we are heading for a two tier web.

The new age of identity provision is upon us,

The first was the yahoomail / gmail / hotmail here is your identity phase.

Now we are offering OpenIDs (note the numbers of providers vs relying parties)

So if you cannot delegate, then you cannot migrate from one identity provider to another

Page 27: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Portability

27

So if I exist on the internet which bits of me are being moved about.

Identity, content meta data

What is portable,

My data?

What about the context, too much focus on the data, example follows

Page 28: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

28

I can move this picture, but I can!t recreate the context of him being born.

I can!t move the 30 odd comments about his birth to another system.

I don!t own them and I can!t make these people move.

(side point from Q&A - I can do this with my own blogging software, but not services which host identity, you need an account

on Flickr to comment, the comments belong to the commenter)

Also I don!t think the general internet population think this would even be possible.

There is a regular pattern which danah boyd identifier of people ditching old identities and moving nothing over.

This is present in the teenage market at the minute.

How will this behaviour carry forward into professional life?

Page 29: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Domain centric

29

A lot of our tools are domain centric, there is an expectation that you!ll want to own a domain.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/2370841575/sizes/l/

This would be a simple model, everyone with their own domain, email, openid etc, but I hope you have gathered that the world

is not like that

There is a second aspect to this.

They!d never think of buying a domain name, they use the internet, they don!t make the internet.

Like having a phone or a tv, it is a service. Sure they might have a myspace or facebook page, but a hosting account no

They have a different schema for the web to us.

Page 30: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

http://30

Following on from domains, urls are anther tricky issue.

People are getting better about URLs, they can remember domain names, they don!t need the http://www bit anymore

However our precious hackable memorable, lovely urls are foreign to them

The idea that you can use the url as a command line is alien to them, well outside their schema for how the web works.

Many people hide the location bar.

Portability in terms of urls is odd too.

We can get our data back, but no service I know of will create redirects from one service to another. Eg blogger to typepad to

wordpress?

(blip.tv will map across to archive if they go out of business)

So data portability breaks our precious urls and the general internet population find them hard to deal with.

Page 31: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Larry TeslerLaw of the Conservation of

Complexity

31

http://www.flickr.com/photos/protohiro/413972313/sizes/l/

http://www.designingforinteraction.com/tesler.html

Larry Tesler came up with this Law of the Conservation of Complexity to explain the need for the MacOS toolkit in 1984.

It was to explain to Apple senior management. It encapsulated the File, Edit, Print services into a single Apple provided set of

tools.

I think we need a toolkit for our distributed web ambitions.

Page 32: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Complexity

32

I think we owe it to the people who use our sites to give them a common experience.

More than that I!d argue that we need a common web experience.

We now have years of experience of developing web applications, latterly we have experience in developing web applications

that represent people on our sites.

Essentially on the third iteration

We can make the web

We can make money from the web

Now making the web something that people inhabit.

Given the mixed level of current applications how can we create a common experience when we have tens of thousands of

providers.

Oauth and OpenID are important aspects of this development.

Yahoo design patterns and patterns in general are a good approach to this

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/page.php?page=lifecycle

There is a need for healthy competition and no Apple like company which can set a single standard.

for the back end to this, see Matt Biddulph, Kellan Elliot-McCrea and Blaine Cook talks on asynchronous messaging passing

message passing via Rest and AtomPub & Oauth will help to break these monoliths down

Polling rss vs XMPP message passing (less human checking too would help with the CPA)

new patterns of development which are still a good fit for the current schema in web users heads

Page 33: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Tailored

33

there are a range of small single purpose apps which are very focused

The 37 signals apps, twitter, blinksale etc

this new breed of app tends to do one thing well and stays focused on it

Often they *are* framework based apps coming from small companies, but they stay small

they exhibit good behaviours in being small and remixable

The schema for these apps is easier to relate to

However why can!t I integrate these web apps into my desktop based work flow. (should I care if my workflow is desktop or

web based, if I!m offline perhaps)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/munir/358093259/

Page 34: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

I should be able to use highrise to manage contacts synced to my macosx address book

and then raise invoices on blink sale via highrise on the basis of a complete task in basecamp

34

I should be able to use highrise to manage contacts synced to my macosx address book

and then raise invoices on blink sale via highrise on the basis of a complete task in basecamp

If these were desktop apps I could do this,

So as the web bleeds further into our computers,

I think we are setting these expectations up with our audiences

Page 35: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Blurring

35

What we are making and what the web is becoming is blurring

Desktop web applications can offer better perceived affordances than running a web app in the browser

Eg the unread mail count on MailPlane, the bouncing from Pyro etc

http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/1629269/

Ajax and AIR muddy the water, then add in widgets, embedded webkit or prism, fluid or weave and it isn!t clear what is being

made other than something that can render information from the internet on a screen

Marsedit and blogging apps - which bits are on the web

MacosX widgets - delivery status

Devices that measure power consumption and put it on the web

Initiaitives like Fluid show this desire for a clear and simple approach to making the web easier to use

It changes the experience to one of not using the “web”, I!m reading my email or reading campfire - the task changes and

focus returns

A version of Fluid holding basecamp has become essential for me.

What the web comprises is changing, we are moving back to the internet and the web as part of this.

I!m really excited to see what will come from RubyCocoa, but I!d expect many people to have to look that up on google.

Page 36: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Brokerage

36

I think that brokerage services are going to become a large part of how the web operates in the future.

OpenID is one of these

Services like Fire Eagle too are part of this shift, location management as social software, but without the social network. It

plugs into other services.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbk/294045879/sizes/o/

Page 37: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Science author disambiguation

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To give an example from the science world, where I work at Nature.

There are identifiers for papers commonly available, they come from Publishers, often as a DOI, or a pubmed id

However there are no such services for people.

Such a service would be very useful for finding collaborators etc

Arguably Linkedin performs this kind of service but not widely in the science sphere, nor tied to the publications.

Page 38: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Identity brokers

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Which leads me to an idea to throw out to you all.

Do I know you services

Last year I proposed idsix.com, then ran out of time to actually build it.

However friendfeed, socialthing etc have appeared and the Google Social API

So this year.

Services that consume and rank those myriad invites you get.

We already do this for one another - can you introduce me to...

One of the reasons Tim O!Reilly holds foocamp is to do the introductions.

Probably an email based service in the first instance.

Later an API

Page 39: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

A walk through

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Assesses the person requesting a relationship.

Already a friend on other services => make friend relationship

Friend of a friend on other services => score for later approval

For none friends there are a range of metrics to look at and then rank

Not a friend, but included an akismet approved message

Not a friend, but included a domain name (query domain name)

Not a friend, no message, but real looking name

Not a friend and user=real name

Send a once a day / week summary and action email

Page 40: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

A distributed future

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We are making a smarter more complex web. Less monoliths, more small parts.

People are starting to live amongst the data.

Projects like Diso from Chris Messina and Steve Ivy are interesting experiments in what it might look like

Intelligence on the web

Connected selves

But we do not own this playpark, it is the web for everyone.

So learning from the RSS and plugin experiences how can we make the coming transitions better.

Sharing best practice as much as possible is vital.

Making sure the best patterns thrive and the anti patterns die out.

Page 41: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Making sense of the web for them

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We need to make sure that we are making a web that non-technical people can inhabit.

If you need to write code to make it happen then it is outside the general schema and it will not happen.

That is not to say that we need to make things for stupid people.

They will use more than one openid, once they get the idea.

They will take to OAuth, but we need to hide away the technology and work on the transitions between states.

A lot of this is about the details. Kellan Elliot McCrea mentioned passing the name of the person

and their permissions back as a parameter to the clients.

So that you can have the Thanks Kellan, you can upload pictures to Flickr now welcome.

http://www.slideshare.net/kellan/advanced-oauth-wrangling

This kind of step by step reassurance makes things trustworthy.

It is our responsibility to make this work well.

Page 42: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Good commonUser Experiences

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We are starting to hide away the OpenID branding

You and I both know that several of these options are openids, but no-one else needs to know that. It is just their LiveJournal

id.

The address book import tools which are now available from nearly all the main companies.

There is no competitive advantage to be gained in having a more clever authentication or authorisation system,

when the base systems are now distributed.

Adding / denying / inviting contacts could be a good one to standardise next?

There are others I!m sure, but these may be more subject area dependent.

Page 43: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Sharing content, not making friends

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A further shift in the web is the move from making friends on the web

To sharing data, Dopplr (the new web poster child) does this most explicitly

Twitter does it less explicitly.

This might seem like language changes for the sake of it, but there is depth to these ideas. They work particularly well for the

more focused single social object sites. Once could imagine a reworking of flickr as sharing photos, not making friends. (not

that I!m suggesting this is necessary)

The change being to have private photos and non-private photos which you choose to share with certain groups of people.

More like the Pownce approach to people management, which they borrowed deliberately from how email works.

Essentially we are social creatures and we share different things with different people. So we should design our newer apps

around the objects, not the friends lists.

Page 44: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Gradual change, scaffolding

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/ldm/14296081/sizes/l/

Scaffolding is another psychological concept and the last one to leave you with, as a concept for the future.

It comes from developmental psychology and is the process we use to learn hard things.

Two apples and three apples makes how many apples.

Remember that, well that is a scaffold,

2+3=

I!ve just taken away the scaffold.

We need to some how take the general internet population to this place,

so that the ideas that identity is email based move to a resource based future.

Remember people still share email addresses and have difficulty with any url more than bbc.co.uk/something

To get them to where we are headed will take years

Page 45: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Building Social Web Applications

New book for O’Reilly

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I’m writing a book for O’Reilly Media Inc entitled Building Social Web Applications.

Page 46: Gavin Bell Data Portability For Whom Xtech08

Thanks

me at gavinbell.comhttp://gavinbell.com

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