The Real McCrea

Apr 22 2008

Dilbert Goes Web 2.0

Readers who turn here just for my coverage of the emergence of the Social Web, please forgive this off-topic post. I saw this evening a post on Webware by Daniel Terdiman about how the comic strip Dilbert is getting a “Web 2.0” website, that enables greater interactivity with the audience, and it reminded me of a long time ago, when the Web was a truly new medium…

The year was 1994, and Netscape was still called Mosaic. Silicon Graphics, the company I worked at, was the hottest in the Valley, making the super-fast 3D wokstations that were transforming the entertainment industry (and a whole lot more). I was a product manager for the Indy workstation, and an early convert to the new religion of the Web. Soon, I would spearhead the launch of WebFORCE, the industry’s first turnkey web server, and WebMagic, the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

But first, we were just getting our feet wet with having a website that helped customers and prospects get the information they needed. The support team had snagged the domain http://www.sgi.com (a move that would ultimately lead to a renaming of the company from Silicon Graphics to just SGI). The Web was so young, and there were so few websites, that Silicon Graphics was one of the Top Ten web destinations (along with our arch enemy, Sun).

I headed up the product team’s effort to create a really cool section of the website for the Indy workstation. We had a lot of stuff to work with, and tried more than a few out-of-the-box ideas. One of them was to come up with some fun ways to play up a unique feature of the Indy: it was the first computer to ship with digital video support, with each system having a digital video camera on the top (what would now be thought of as a webcam). In truth, it didn’t really have much use at the time, what with limited bandwidth and no web, but it was “cool” nonetheless.

Scott Adams had recently done a number of Dilbert comics on videoconferencing (and how ridiculous it was at the time), and I wanted to include one of them on the Indy website. So, I called up United Media, and negotiated the first-ever content licensing deal for the web, featuring a comic strip. They were, as you can imagine, unprepared for such a call. In the end, I paid them a few hundred dollars for a single strip. But I also invited Scott over for a visit and got video of him drawing Dogbert, which I posted to the site, as well. (We wanted to push the envelope of multimedia for the Web.)

Thanks for the memories!

Apr 21 2008

Another Step Forward for OpenID: JanRain’s ID Selector Widget

OpenID has been gaining momentum in the last year, with support from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, and a growing list of companies. And just last week, OpenID was mentioned on the Today Show, of all places. So it muist be mainstream? Well, almost.

From here to mainstream, we need to see much better user experience. Clickpass and Yahoo! have made progress there already, but more is always welcome. Today, JainRain, a small outfit that is a driving force of the OpenID effort, introduces an ID Selector wdiget. What is it?

“It’s a widget that you add to the existing OpenID login form on your website. You embed a snippet of javascript code into your page, and it writes in an HTML button tag styled to match your CSS.”

Great to see efforts like this that aim to make adoption of this important technology easier, both for sites and for users. That said, I tend to agree with Allen Stern that broad adoption will likely come not from getting users to embrace OpenID, but by making OpenID invisible (as in the Clickpass implementation, for example).

Nice writeup by CNET’s Rafe Needleman at Webware, here.

Tagged JanRain, OpenID

Apr 20 2008

Fixing the Social Web: Aggregating “Me”

In a recent post, inspired by Robert Scoble’s “How to Fix the Web,” I laid out the framework for the ecosystem of an open Social Web. I envisioned that the user will be at the center, with clear ownership and control of their personal data and content, enjoying the freedom to take it with them wherever they go across the web.

Making that possible, will be the three core elements of the Social Web service layer:

– Identity Providers
– Social Graph Providers
– Content Aggregators

In a guest column today on GigaOm, entitled “The Social Map is All About Me,” Mark Sigal lays out a case for the importance of the third one of these, “the need to aggregate.” Mark asserts that “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.” I couldn’t agree more.

In a world in which nearly every website is socially-enabled or socially-aware, we will all desparately need a dashboard that brings order to the chaos of fragmentation. That dashboard will allow us to aggregate and manage our own “lifestream” and to make decisions about what parts to make public and what parts to share with family, with real friends, or with looser ties. (Plaxo Pulse is an example of such as aggregator today.) That aggregation dashboard will also bring together into one or more rivers of news, the lifestreams from the people you want to follow. (That function is common to all of the aggregators out there, including Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, and the new gorilla entrant, Facebook.)

There are other many other consequences of having a “dashboard for the Social Web,” which I won’t get into in this post. But one that does seem particularly relevant, is the establishment of a user-controlled profile for the public portion of the Social Web. An example of one is the image at the top of the page. Its my actual page, hosted at johnmccrea.myplaxo.com. It combines the portion of my lifestream that I have aggregated into Pulse and marked as “public.” It also shows “me” across the web (at least those identities I have chosen to assert publicly as me). Behind the scenes, Plaxo is leveraging Google’s Social Graph API to make that identity consolidation super easy. The page is maked up with microformats, which means that it is machine-readable, which makes the data usable by other services without re-keying by the user.

Now, imagine if the URL for the page were to become an OpenID…

…but that’s a topic for another post, at another time.

Tagged aggregator, Facebook, FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Pulse, robert scoble

Apr 18 2008

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The Social Web is Broken

I, along with many of you, am fighting hard to keep my head above the surface, as I tread the rising waters of the nascent Social Web. New sites are popping up every day. Join one, and you’re likely to go through a drill that’s become all too familiar: Generate another username/password pair. Recreate your profile. Slurp in your GMail or other address books. Build up your friends list all over again. In the process, generate a ton of connection request emails (also called “bac’n” — not quite spam, but not good for you).

Robert Scoble highlights these problems in the upcoming May issue of Fast Company magazine in an article entitled, “How to Fix the Web.” Those of us working on the problem, appreciate the continued advocacy from Robert, who became a poster child for the issue of “data portability” in early January. Sharing the controversy with Robert, I did feel some intense heat from a very polarized debate at the time, but in hindsight, the pain was worth it. Within days, the DataPortability.org workgroup managed to sign up Google, Plaxo, and Facebook, in a move widely credited with setting the stage for 2008 to be the year of data portability.

For those interested in helping move the ball forward, I encourage you to attend the Data Sharing Workshop in San Francisco in the next two days. It kicks off at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

In my view, we are really on the cusp of the opening up of the true Social Web. Making it all possible is a collection of building block technologies (OpenID, Oauth, microformats, OpenSocial, the Social Graph API, and one or two still-missing pieces). But none of those technologies is anything a user needs to know about or understand. These enabling technologies need to get wrapped up into three or more critical services of the Social Web: Identity Providers (examples Clickpass and Yahoo!), Social Graph Providers (stay tuned: Plaxo? Facebook? Others?), and Content Aggregators (Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, Facebook, and a new one every week!).

Want more detail on this vision and how it snaps together? Be sure to see Joseph Smarr’s talk next Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Or see the great post by Kaliya (a.k.a “Identity Woman”), who is facilitating the unconference aspect of the Data Sharing Summit.

Tagged data portability, Facebook, Google, microformats, Oauth, OpenID, OpenSocial, Plaxo

Apr 17 2008

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Soocial Enters the “Deep End of the Data Portability Pool”

[Disclosure/reminder: I head up marketing for Plaxo.]

In a piece not-so-flattering to Plaxo over at TechCrunch (it’s okay, I’ve developed a thick skin), Erick Schonfeld shined a spotlight on the invite-only beta launch of a new “address book sync” startup from the Netherlands, Soocial. According to the post and the company’s website, they’ve developed a multi-way, automated sync solution for address books, very much like a piece of functionality which is a core part of the Plaxo solution.

This blog, dedicated to the emergence of the open Social Web, with users owning their data and having the freedom to take it with them between all tools and services, applauds the arrival of Soocial. And, as someone who has worked at Plaxo for just over two years, I also welcome them to what I call the “deep end of the data portability pool.”

What do I mean by that? Automated, multi-way addess book sync is the Holy Grail of data portability. When it works flawlessly, it is damn-near magic. Make a change in any one tool, and it automatically shows up in all the others. Your hard drive crashes? Not a problem; there’s a copy in the cloud.

But behind this “magic” is some of the hardest work in the software business. Why? Rock solid APIs are few and far between for the various tools, and in the absence of such APIs, any company that wants to do sync has to jump through a bunch of technical hoops to make sync work at all. Oh, and if in jumping through such hoops, something goes a little bit wrong? There is Hell to pay. Sync is an unforgiving master. Mess up a person’s address book (in all the tools they use), and you may lose that customer forever.

Soocial claims to sync with just about everything out there, from mobile phones, to the Mac, to GMail, but there’s a gaping hole in their coverage for launch: Microsoft Outlook. Oh, the tales that could be told about the fine art of syncing flawlessly with this ubiquitous tool! Colleagues at Soocial, we know the pain. (Vocabulary word: “thunking.”)

But, no matter, this is great news all around. More choices in the market is always good. Users love it, and vendors are forced to make their offerings better, and to double-down on differentiation. It will be interesting to see if Soocial can overcome some their current scalability issues and round out the offering with a high-quality Outlook sync (and unveil a business model; current offering is free).

Data portability remains really hard work; let’s hope that the industry’s collective efforts make all this simple, easy, and universal!

Apr 17 2008

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Toward Data Portability: SixApart’s BlogIt

Caption: David Recordon (left) and Joseph Smarr (right) at the Social Graph Foo Camp

Recently, Joseph Smarr and I were invited by David Recordon of SixApart to take a look at something they were about to launch, called BlogIt. We got very excited and had lots of ideas about where they and we (Plaxo) could go together with this. It just launched, so I can now talk openly about it.

BlogIt is a very cool tool that embraces one of the foundational notions of the open Social Web: that once someone gets into using one social application, they will quite naturally begin to use multiple social applications, whether that’s social networks, blogs, microblogs, content aggregators, or whatever. The natural consequence of that is fragmentation, which, in the current “walled garden” phase of the Web, creates all sorts of hassles, inconvenience, and missed opportunity for richer interaction.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is right, I think, to say that BlogIt “could be the start of something big.” At the core, BlogIt makes it easy to quickly create and publish a blogpost from within a social network or application, and have the post go to multiple destinations and get promoted from multiple sources (for example, Twitter). The first implemenation targets the Facebook platform, but obviously this can go to other networks, such as MySpace, Orkut, Plaxo Pulse, etc. via the Google-led OpenSocial platform.

What I like about it, is that we are still in the early phases of social media, social networking, and the opening up of the social web. Social networks and content aggregators can be a great way to mainstream the social media experience, and help millions of voices that are not currently heard jump into the world of blogging. How? By making it really easy to post — and to have a pre-existing audience — in the form of the local social graph(s) of the user.

David’s done a nice post, helping explain where this all fits in and where SixApart might go with this. Brad King, of TechWorldNews, also has a nice piece that puts this into a broader perspective. (I enjoyed my interview with him earlier today greatly!)

Tagged BlogIt, Facebook, Google, OpenSocial, Plaxo, SixApart

Apr 16 2008

Props to TechCrunch for Supporting the Opening of the Social Web!

Saw in Twitter that TechCrunch is taking the money raised at their party with PopSugar down in LA and donating it to two organizations working to open up the Social Web: the OpenID Foundation and DataPortability Workgroup. How cool is that?

Wow. It seems only a year ago that “open” and “data portability” were just a big dream for a small but passionate grass roots movement. Now, it seems clear we are on the cusp of the whole thing opening up.

Thanks expressed by David Recordon on behalf of OpenID here.

I really like how the things are shaping up. Kinda funny, Michael Arrington is at the vanguard of the “new journalism,” in my view. And the rules are not written. I like that he took this step to jump into the story and show support for the folks trying to open things up.

I’m on the other side of things, as a marketing guy, trying to be at the bleeding edge of “conversational marketing,” which means I am not just shoving out press releases with quotes from paid analysts. I’m increasingly jumping in and being part of the direct telling. Interesting…

Apr 15 2008

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Facebook Becomes an Aggregator, Too

In a move thats been expected for a while, Facebook has just enter the lifestream aggregation space (alongside Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and a list of companies that grows nearly every week). Out the door, they are only supporting handful of external sources (Flickr, del.icio.us, Picasa, and Yelp), but they say many more are on the way.

Does this move make sense? Absolutely. Is it, as TechCrunch’s Mark Hendkrickson says, a threat to FriendFeed? Sort of. Eric Eldon, of Venture Beat, raises that question, as well.

But I see this as a very natural evolution, as we make our way from the era of “walled gardens” over to the open world of the Social Web. In that world, the user will be at the center, owning their own data and content, with the freedom to take it with them wherever they go. In that ecosystem, their will be a service layer that connects the user to myriad socially-enabled sites. That Social Web sevice layer will have three main components:

– Identity provider
– Social graph provider
– Content aggregator

Some players, like Facebook and Plaxo, will likely provide all three services, while others might focus on one or two. For example, Clickpass and Yahoo! are clearly playing in the “identity provider” space already, with consumer-friendly implementations of OpenID. The social graph provider space is the one that doesn’t yet exist, but is at the core of the vision for “data portability.” Expect interesting developments there in the coming months.

Other coverage include’s Mashable’s Paul Glazowski, here, and a nice piece by CNET’s Caroline McCarthy, which raises the interesting question of whether there is a revenue arrangment involved. Interesting question…

Tagged Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, OpenID, Picasa, Plaxo, Yelp

Apr 12 2008

8 Comments

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Who Owns This Conversation?

A debate is erupting in the blogosphere about whether it’s okay or not for comments on blogposts (or other user generated content) to be splintered off in various RSS readers or social media aggregators, such as Shyfter or FriendFeed or any of a number of other services that enable users to project their lifestreams into them.

This is indeed an interesting discussion, as we are just now on the cusp of the Social Web, a complex ecosystem with as-yet undefined rules. Their will be identity providers (OpenID providers, such as Yahoo!, AOL, Clickpass, and some day, Microsoft), online identity consolidators (i.e. Google Social Graph API and Plaxo public profiles), portable social graph providers (hmmmm, stay tuned), and myriad feed aggregators (seems like a new one every week; first Plaxo Pulse, last summer, and now in recent weeks: FriendFeed, Iminta, SocialThing, etc.).

There is a real tension here: Comments out on the anonymous web tend toward the sophomoric; whereas comments inside circles with identity bring out the best in people. Right now, in the absence of the full-blown open Social Web, we see various experiments underway that try to bridge that gap. In the process, it appears that comment threads are being “stolen.” I don’t think anyone is really trying to make a big play based on hijacking the comment thread.

There’s a bunch of interesting problems to be worked on here, and I expect rapid progress.

Here’s the posts from the debate so far: Louis Gray, Matthew Ingram, and not to be missed, Deep Jive Interests.

Update: Robert Scoble has jumped into this “bitchmeme” saying the “Era of blogger’s control is over.” I agree that bloggers should embrace the organic spread of their influence through the conversation fragments across the web, but also think we tool providers can apply some smarts to the problem to stitch some of this stuff back together.

Tagged aggregator, bitchmeme, FriendFeed, Plaxo, robert scoble

John McCrea on the exponential wiring up of humanity

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