The scene: 1905, Henry Ford is looking over plans in his factory as the sounds of vehicles being put together clang around him. An assistant interrupts:

Asst: ‘Boss, I hate to break it to you but we’ve got a problem.’

Ford: ‘What now? Are the mirrors making objects seem closer than they really are?’

Asst: ‘No, boss. We’ve been doing some user research on this whole automobile thing and the news isn’t great.’

Ford: ‘What do you mean? The automobile is going to revolutionize travel for everyone!’

Asst: ‘You know that and I know that boss, it’s just proving hard to get people to understand that. Using horses is all they know and the user testing suggests that getting people to switch to something so foreign as an automobile will be near impossible. Maybe we could make some changes so that adoption is easier?’

Ford: ‘What are the specific problems and what do you want to do about it?’

Asst: ‘Well, for one, users just don’t get this whole steering wheel idea. They think it’s a spare in case one of the others falls off. Would it be possible to put in some reins instead?’

Ford: ‘Go on’

Asst: ‘Also this whole one pedal to go and another to stop. It’s alien and counter intuitive. Users are used to using both feet in concert. Can they just kick the sides to go and then pull on the reins to stop?’

Ford: ‘This is ridiculous. Major changes in technology have always had adoption issues and the going is tough. The key is for us to improve and show that we can create greater value for our users rather than shackling new technology to old in a short-termist bid to encourage adoption. It sounds as though if you had your way we’d just strap an internal combustion engine to a damn horse!’

Asst: ‘Oh, have they already told you about plan B?’

Ford: ‘you’re fired.’

One of the problems with existing social networks is that if you’re not in the network, you are invisible. For example, if I’m in Flickr, Facebook, or LinkedIn and I want to get in touch with my friend Tony, I have to first figure out if I’m “connected” with him in that network. It turns out that I’m connected with Tony in Flickr and Facebook, but not LinkedIn. LinkedIn therefore don’t know that we know each other.

So when I’m in LinkedIn, I can’t connect with Tony. I have to get out of the application and contact him from elsewhere. This makes each site’s social graph only as valuable as it fully describes your real social graph.

At first glance this seems like a real drag…why can’t we communicate with everyone from every site? Then we wouldn’t have to care about which site we happen to be on…we would simply communicate from anywhere.

Then we would have to ask: which social network is going to be that fully-realized social graph? By their own admission, this is what Facebook is trying to do. They are trying to map the entire social graph so that they become the network of choice, the one place that people connect through. If Facebook can accomplish that, then they will have some serious lock-in to their walled garden. People would simply stay on Facebook because that’s where their friends are, not necessarily because it offers a better user experience otherwise. This is the network effect we hear so much about.

But let’s ask this question: is there a offline complement to a complete social graph? Is there an existing place that maps the entire social graph in the way I’ve described above…in the way that Facebook is trying to do?

No, there really isn’t. I suppose you could argue that census information or family tree services might get close, but this information isn’t relied upon in a day to day way in order to make connections. It’s there for reference, but not frequent use.

We tend to keep all this information in our brains. We keep track of all of our connection information there, and we don’t offload it to a third party. But why?

Well, our brains are good at it, for one. Evolution has equipped us with socially-adapted brains that allow us to easily keep track of our human connections (although some of us would probably appreciate being able to remember names and faces a bit better).

But I also think it has to do with how human groups work. People group together for many different reasons: common interests, close location, shared religious views, etc. I presume that new reasons are created all the time…people group in countless different ways.

The mere fact that most individuals have always belonged to multiple groups at the same time suggests that it might be beneficial to have connections in different places that don’t overlap. So, my local web geek friends will probably never meet my family, and my school buddies don’t hang out with my indoor rock climbing buddies. While there are some overlaps, for the most part these different facets of my life exist in harmony as separated concerns. I daresay that if they weren’t separate, then they wouldn’t work as well.

So one of the principles we’ve thought about at chi.mp is to go with the flow, so to speak, and honor the existing diversity of people’s connections. So in the online world this means that your Flickr connections can stay separate and different from your LinkedIn connections, and that’s OK. Those two parts of your life can co-exist peacefully over time and possibly never overlap. This is what we have always done…why should we change things to suit the needs of software?

To this end, we’re building a contact-management system that honors existing connections. When you use your chi.mp contact tools, you’ll notice that you can “import” contacts from various services across the web. But this import doesn’t mean that you forget the site afterward and manage everything from chi.mp, we’ve created it to periodically check on those connections so that when you add or change them in the remote site, then chi.mp recognizes that and makes the adjustment. We’re also hoping that data sharing efforts make this sort of thing common…we believe that honoring existing connections and allowing people to share what they want is the right thing to do.

Here’s an example of it in action. Over time I’ve connected to several services from my chi.mp domain, importing my contacts from each service. In some cases, where there is overlap, friends have been imported more than once. In the following screen I’m using the “manage multiple contacts” screen to consolidate 5 entries I have for my friend Christine. (you’ll note that as the result of a funky Gmail API issue I have two Gmail entries for her):

After I merge all of these separate contact entries, the contact entry looks like this:

Notice that the new contact entry for Christine recognizes that I’m connected with her on several different sites (and we’ve also gotten rid of the redundant Gmail entry). This is important because it allows me to connect with her easily, but also keeps existing connections intact. While Christine does have a chi.mp account, it’s not necessary for me to connect with her, since I’m already connected with her on Flickr, Facebook, and Gmail. A single existing connection is all that is necessary, and all that should be necessary for simple communication tasks.

Productivity and saving time have become powerful memes on the web. There are sites like 43 Folders and Lifehacker, there are applications like iGTD and Omnifocus. However, if you really want to save yourself a lot of time and become far more productive, just go to the Internet Identity Workshop on November 10-12 in Mountain View. You’ll learn more in three days, meet and exchange ideas with more of the web’s thoughtleaders and get more done than at a year’s worth of normal conferences. This is the place where the people who speak at other conferences come to learn and if you aren’t there, you’re behind the curve.

IIW follows the unconference process. Instead of preset talks and speakers, anyone can nominate a topic and groups form and coalesce around the topics that really matter to them. If you aren’t learning or contributing you are free to leave a group and move to another.

The conference is focused on “user-centric identity” - considering how end-users, regular people, can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with.

The community will be exploring these kinds of questions:

• How are social networking sites and social media tools applying user-centric identity?
• What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
• What are technical implementations of those standards?
• How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
• What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
• What tools are needed to make it usably secure for end-users?
• What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?

Cost
The event is VERY affordable for a 2.5 day high quality conference with the leading professionals in the industry.

• Students - $50
• Independents (small startups, nonprofits)- $200
• Corporate - $350

If you have any interest in this area, the IIW is where you need to be this November.

http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2008b/announcement.shtml

Via Kottke comes this embarrassing faux pas for Facebook over on Dave McClure’s blog:

“my former PayPal colleague Yishan Wong, now an ass-kicking, name-taking engineer at Facebook, lays the “Walled Garden” rebuttal smackdown on Kottke, Arrington, et al. you go, Yishan… you just go.”

Problem is, the rebuttal is only visible to certain Facebook users! Here’s what I got when I tried to read the post (and I have a Facebook account and was logged in at the time)

Now, the irony of this is almost too much to bear. Getting a permissions wall when attempting to read a rebuttal about not being a walled garden is just, well, something you can’t make up.

But this is a very real problem in identity ownership and it raises a larger question: Do you know who can see what you’re publishing?

It’s doubtful that Wong doesn’t know what walled-garden means. My guess is that Wong is so steeped in the Facebook culture that he’s starting to think that if it doesn’t happen on Facebook, it doesn’t happen. (of course, I cannot read his rebuttal to hear his side of the story) Facebook has millions of people on its service, and a lot does happen there. But it’s still a drop in the bucket of what happens on the Web. The fact is that billions of people outside of Facebook cannot read his writing.

A worse scenario would be if Wong thought he was publishing to the rest of the world but didn’t anticipate the wall that Facebook was erecting. So not only is he playing in a walled-garden, but its possible that he doesn’t have the ownership over his identity that he assumed he did. I wonder what Wong expected would happen when he published?

This faux pas, while humorous, isn’t really that funny in the big picture. Publishing rights are certainly an important part of identity…who can see what you’re doing and writing is a major issue, not just in social networks but in the Web at large. There are system-level policies and tool options that dictate who can see what, and in this case there was an obvious mismatch between what the owner thought and what the system thought. Too bad.

Facebook often claims that they don’t want to open up because they want their users to know exactly what sort of control (and privacy rights) they have over their data, but in this case even their own engineer doesn’t seem to know the details of the system he’s publishing on. If this sort of thing can happen to a Facebook engineer, imagine how inaccurate the views of us regular folks are.

A scary story out of the L.A. Times: Social networking site divulges child’s personal data

“Jane Yang, a 30-year-old marketing coordinator, was curious the other day to see what would turn up if she searched for herself on Reunion.com, a Los Angeles-based social networking site.

Sure enough, there was her name, which didn’t bother the Oregon resident all that much. Nor was she particularly troubled that her husband’s name was included under her “Friends & Family.”

What did startle Yang was seeing the name of her 4-year-old son.”

There are several scary things about this story, the least of which is the fact that a 4-year old’s identity information somehow found its way onto the reunion.com’s servers and into public view.

One is that Yang found this information by chance, which suggests that this is only a single case of a much larger problem. Another is that reunion.com’s CEO has absolutely no clue about how or where his company gets information.

“He (the CEO) said he can’t explain how the name of Yang’s 4-year-old son made it online, or where it came from in the first place. In fact, Tinsley said he doesn’t know where much of the data on his site originated.

The information, it seems, was purchased from a “data broker”, who apparently sold as many as 260 million records (almost the entire population of the United States!) to the site this spring while promising that nobody under 18 would be included.

Whoops.

Allen Hurff (of MySpace) talks privacy & portability from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

I did a quick interview with Allen Hurff, MySpace technical lead, while we were at Graphing Social Patterns.

John McCrea of Plaxo talks portability & privacy from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Talked a bit with Plaxo’s John McCrea at Graphing Social Patterns, just before our panel on portability and privacy. You should check out the new show John and Joseph Smarr are doing at TheSocialWeb.tv.

Jon Udell, in a return visit to the Gillmor Gang, shares his vision for a future in which we control our own identity and digital content:

“What I ultimately want is for people to be born and to be given a social security number and to also be given control over some chunk of space in the cloud, some chunk of name space. And for all the stuff that they care about throughout their life to be there, controlled by them, and for the access to that stuff to be syndicated out in a controlled fashion so that…

Just for example, right now we expect people to manage their photos on Flickr and manage their health records on Health Vault or Google Health. And manage this, that and the other on this, that or the other service in the cloud. Right?

And the notion is that each of these things is kind of like this vault that you put your stuff into. And I really would love to flip that model around, and I would love the model to be that I’m me and this is sort of the cloud extension of me. And it has this stuff in it that I put there.

And then I define who has access to it and where that information flows or syndicates to and on what terms. And what that means is, that when I decide that I want to share something to my friends and family, I say one time what my definition of friends and family is. It’s not my Flickr definition of friends and family versus my Live Mesh definition of Friends and Family versus yadda, yadda, yadda.

I have a policy which I assert over my stuff that I control, which is this protected zone in the cloud. And I have some real control over how I define policies over that thing and who gets access to it and on what terms. And I get to audit that access in a coherent way.”

Udell then points out that there are two types of data here:

“So…why…does Flickr bundle together the notion of storage and archiving with the notion of social interaction with my photos?

Those are actually, in my view, separable concerns. I actually should be able to outsource the storage and archiving to some other provider. And in fact, there should be a range of providers that are making offers to me and there should be a sort of tiered set of offering there. Because right now, my digital photos, the stuff I’ve taken on digicams the last 10 years, I feel are less likely to be available to my grandkids than the shoebox that I have on the floor next to me which has photos from my grandparents era.”

While Jon’s statement seems silly on the face of it, given that you (in theory) can have as many copies of digital content as you want…he has a point. If you’ve cultivated your photos and access controls in a single service over many years…you really don’t have many copies…you have only one. And without the ability to easily get a copy, combined with the current volatility of Yahoo (Flickr’s co-founders just announced they’re leaving Yahoo), Jon turns what should be a silly notion into a very real concern going forward.

Mozilla’s Brendan Eich responds that to reach Jon’s vision it’s going to “require standardization of things like identity and secure JavaScriptable social network mashups”. This would allow people to use their identity data securely in various contexts, so they can keep their privacy and control intact across services.

Of course, decoupling identity and picture data isn’t necessary to make sure they’re saved for the long term, but it would make them much more easy to control and delegate, which would help. If we had standardization for identity data we could at least create backups (or sync) across services, storing copies for the day that our primary service provider goes black so we can switch to another one.

But an even simpler way to help get this started, one that we could implement right now as standards mature, would be for all services that store identity data to merely let their users export it freely in already-existing formats. That rainy-day copy might not work with other services yet, but at least we would be able to print it out and store it in a shoebox for safe keeping.

One of the more controversial words in the identity space is the word that adorns this blog: own. Some pretty heavy hitters think that the idea of owning your identity is absurd. After some fantastic debates with far greater thinkers than me like Jeff Hodges and Gabe Wachob I can certainly see their point. If to own something is to have exclusive control over it, then, particularly in a online world, the word ‘own’ becomes meaningless. However, it also largely renders the word meaningless in most of the senses in which we are happy to use it.

Probably the clearest example of this is homeownership. If we apply the same rigorous standards one could say that I have purchased a house but not that I own it. The mortgage provider does and if I am unable to keep up with my payments, that house can be taken from me. I don’t own my house without the consent of my mortgage provider. Moreover, even if I have fully paid off my house I need planning permission before I can make significant changes to it. My home could be seized in any number of scenarios and I could be turfed out on the street. Yet despite all this, we are happy to say that we own our home, President Bush declared this month to be National Homeowner’s month and appositely talked about how hard his administration was working to help people keep the homes they own.

It’s clear that when we talk about home ownership we aren’t using the level of rigor that we see in the identity space. Instead own becomes shorthand for a set of rights that while unable to live up to the perfect conception of what own means in reality acts as a common point of understanding. ‘I have partnered with a mortgage provider to purchase property, and as long as I keep up my payments am unlikely to lose it in the near future. I have certain rights over reselling and with the appropriate permissions can make significant modifications to it’ becomes ‘I am a homeowner’.

To use another example, nebulous words such as freedom can also prove to be a useful shorthand for a far more complex idea that does not necessarily bear that much relation to the word. Mel Gibson did not ride up and down the field in Braveheart calling for his men to fight for more localised government of the prevailing feudal system, he asked them to fight for freedom. Nor did he take the time to distinguish between positive and negative freedom as undoubtedly this might have had some limiting effect on tactical options with regard to the English cavalry bearing down on them. Almost any usage of the word freedom wiIl be flawed because of the inherent contradictions within. However, that does not mean it is worthless. It can be a rallying cry, a placeholder for a change or a set of rights that might fall far short of true freedom but nevertheless represents a significant step forward. We understand that there is an emotional understanding of the word that has utility, no matter how far it may be from its idealised form.

I think this is where I come out with on ‘own’. I respect the viewpoint of those who shy away from using it and I think that among certain audiences they are right. However, if we wish to engage, inform and unite a wider range of people around the idea that they should have control over certain achievable components of their online identity, then ‘own’ has value as emotional shorthand for getting from here to there. That’s why I’ll continue to tell people that they should own their identity.

Over subsequent posts I want to unpack what ‘own’ might mean in this context and get closer to a bill of rights for those whose primary online identities are currently locked up in walled gardens. We shall see how much trouble I can get into.

Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Today Chris Messina, David Recordon & I took a break while at Graphing Social Patterns, East and chatted about one of our favorite topics:  what to do about all this social data we are generating like crazy.