The Real McCrea

Today, Microsoft launched a new API that enables better and more secure address book portability. That’s certainly a welcome step, but what I found really fascinating is the way they describe the context: 

“To tackle the issue of contact data portability it is important to reconcile the larger issue of data ownership.  Who owns the data, like email addresses in a Windows Live Hotmail address book?  We firmly believe that we are simply stewards of customers’ data and that customers should be able to choose how they control and share their data.”

I call that breathtaking. It was only a few months ago that Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authored the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, which asserts:

“We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.”

Microsoft’s announcement and how it is framed hits the ball out of the park on bullets one and two. But because the API is built for import, not for sync, it comes a bit short on bullet three. Nonetheless, this is a big day for data portability.

My hat is off to Microsoft!

Earlier this year, I wrote a post on my personal experience leaving print newspapers behind.

 In it, I wrote:

“When my Wall Street Journal subscription was up for renewal recently, I chose to let it expire. And yesterday, when a bill arrived for renewal of my San Jose Mercury News subscription, I called up and cancelled. And so, this morning, I did not have a pile of newsprint wrapped in a plastic bag awaiting me on my front step.”

For anyone who liked that post, which generated a lot of discussion inside my inner circle in Plaxo Pulse, I highly recommend this lengthy piece in the New Yorker, which actually manages to breeze through in some detail 300 years of the history of American newspapers.

My favorite quote in it is Arriana Huffington’s response to Bill Keller:

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times’ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog.

Additional color/commentary on Gawker. And Rafat Ali adds to the discussion on paidcontent.org, calling the New Yorker piece “long and ponderous.”

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is stirring up debate on the important topic of OpenID, with a post last night calling the “Big Four” Internet companies to task for being OpenID supporters without actually becoming “relying parties.” Some of them have at least become OpenID providers as “issuing parties”.

Funny that, Plaxo, forever focused on who-you-are and who-you-know, is a rare example of a company that is just a Relying Party (but is not yet an Issuing Party). What does that mean? All OpenIDs are welcome there, whether issued by Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Clickpass, or any other standards-compliant provider. 

The momentum behind OpenID has clearly been building over the past year, and OpenID is looking to be one of the key building blocks for the Social Web. That said, much work remains to make this a mainstream technology. Yahoo! made a bold first attempt to create a consumer-friendly implementation, but that remains an unfinished project. Clickpass, a startup focused completely on that challenge, has come out strong, but has losts of tough work ahead of it to make the Clickpass signin anything approaching universal.

That said, expect to be hearing a lot more about this promising open standard as the year of data portability rolls on.

Some good analysis and commentary by Jason Kolb here.

And additional context and thoughts from David Recordon here.

In the March 19th print edition of the venerable The Economist, they take up the hot topic of social networking’s open future and the implications up that for Facebook. The piece, “Online Social Networks: Everywhere and nowhere,” takes up the vision recently articulated by Forrester’s Charlene Li that social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of the open Social Web:

“We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.”

Henry Blodget of Silicon Valley Insider has just written a post in response, entitled “Faceook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow–Like AOL?” It includes reference to what he calls several “flies” in Facebook’s “ointment,” including:

Most importantly, the “walled garden” social networking model–a single site that retains all your information and relationships and forces you to do most of your business inside it–could be analogous to the 1990s AOL: Amazing industry leader for the first few years, ossified, flawed model for the rest of time.

It is such an amazing time. Since folks at Plaxo and Google and several other companies started amping the volume on this concept of opening up the Social Web just last summer, it’s gone mainstream really quickly. It’s the meme for 2008.

[For a bit of comic relief, see Fake Steve Jobs’s post on Blodget’s post!]

A recent podcast I did with Mashable’s Mark “Rizz’n” Hopkins went up on their site last evening. For anyone curious about the business context and results associated with going open, it should be a good listen. In it, I assert that “walled gardens are heading for the same scrap heap Compuserve and Prodigy ended up on”. Listen to it here.

Recent announcements from Plaxo and Facebook speak to a trend toward improving the quality of the “social graph.” Plaxo revealed what happens when users have a choice of family, friend, or business as categories for relationships, rather than being forced to declare all connections as “friends.” (See charts below.) Facebook implemented more granular privacy and sharing controls.

Why the move toward quality? Because the data portability drum is beating  louder. Soon friends lists will become portable, which means that each user will be able to take their local piece of the social graph with them to other sites. And when a friends list becomes useful across many sites, there begins to be a reason to invest in it.

When Plaxo launched Pulse last August, it broke with tradition and introduced the first relationship categorization system for a social network. That put friction into the system, and was therefore a bit of risk. What if people weren’t willing to take the time? Based on the chart below, it looks like the gamble paid off!

Chris Messina just did a post on this topic, too, though from a more technical perspective, thinking through whether and how we can better model real-world relationships via things like XFN.

The details are a bit sketchy, but in a piece on TechCrunch, Michael Arrington reveals that Yahoo! is embracing “the Semantic Web” (with a broad embrace of microformats ):

“A few details are being disclosed now, and Yahoo promises more in a few weeks. They are saying that they will support a number of microformats at the start: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN. They will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others. They will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages.”

This follows in the wake of Google’s SocialGraph API. Together, this should push microformats over the top. Already, sites like LinkedIn and Plaxo mark up their public profiles with microformats. Expect many more to follow suit.

Why does all this matter? It addresses a pain point that is becoming more common. As more and more socially-enabled websites emerge, users must build their profiles from scratch at each new place. What microformats makes possible is for you to have one or more public profiles that are machine-readable. So sites should allow you to import from your existing profiles with a click or two, rather than have to manually input your info. In addition, many new sorts of mashups become possible.

Somewhat skeptical coverage by Stowe Boyd here and also over at ZD Net.

A nice piece over at ReadWriteWeb. Makes an interesting aside that Facebook at present not very interested in Semantic Web stuff.

For more perspective on how this fits in with the Semantic Web, see Twine’s blog or TrendSpotting.

How soon will we see this stuff in action, I wonder? 

I’ll add more clips a bit later, but here’s a taste of what was one of the best panels at SXSW. Great moderator, great panel.

Here’s Joseph Smarr on getting beyond current practices and moving toward an API-based approach to data portability: