Vacation over - blogging - end of Aug. ‘08.
We spent time at Lopez Lake - where I caught this hawk.
Does the blog get social or do we blog inside our social networks? Or both? That is certainly the question. each to his/her own I guess. Wordpress buying BuddyPress and SixApart expanding Moveable Type’s social features - combined with the DiSO project - is advancing the notion that the blog is #1 - and that “bringing social to software” is the next wave. But I believe that commenting on Twitter, commenting on Facebook NewsFeeds and other new forms of expressions have expanded the blogosphere in a good way. But ultimately - it’s gonna be different for each user.
The Guardian continues to beef up on techies.
The best thing about web platforms - is that there are so many of them -a nd there will continue to be more. That’s a major basis of the open mesh. That between the BigCos and all these OTHER platforms - new kinds of UI environments, tools, standards and shared constructs will energe which will enable users to ‘mesh in’ - in their own way.
I’ll be speaking at eDay in Rotterdam - Sept. 18th
I actually really like the way TechCrunch links to it’s own CruchBase. And they provide APIs to it - as well. I think that Tim OP’Reilly is pissed cause TechCrunch ain’t using wikipedia - which is part of O’Reilly’s insider’s mafia.
I’ve been doing all sorts of Gillmor Gang shows
Congrats and good luck to Mike Jones and his new venture
Yah - I’ve been ignoring Friendfeed - and Twitter.
Yahoo and Intel are bringing widgets to the living room. I wonder if it’s compatible or competitive with Windows Home Media Center.
OpenSocial is getting allot of traction. Including Friendster
The reason I’m not at Gnomedex is that I don’t think I’ve EVER seen Chris Pirillo anywhere else. He’s got to get out and participate in OTHER communities then himself.
Tribler, SportsFanLive, Verizon PIP, Open Sim, CrowdSound, Storrz, 12seconds, digital nomads, RoyaltyShare, Nesting, LivePlace, Open Salon, UserVoice, SocialGo, Ipoki,
What does Google’s Open Mesh look like?.
I’m finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and Mary Hodder suggested that I add some Appendices on how various BigCos are building THEIR versions of the open mesh.
So here is Appendix - A.
Most of the infrastructure, services and applications that Google offers work all by themselves and are not dependent upon anything else. Google has launched OpenSocial and built Google Friend Connect.
Google is a leader in OpenAPIs and keeping the data to themselves. So they have been very careful when providing APIs into social graphs or their Friend Connect service. We have a long way to go before OpenSocial’s APIs are done. They will eventually enable any software product to embed ’social features’ into any container, legacy app or content.
Imagine maps that know where your friends are, search that knows what your friends are searching for, Calendar, Reader and Gmail that use social features to organize your life.
Google’s grid, apps platform, iGoogle, YouTube and many other elements of it’s ‘platform’ will all become important pieces of the open mesh. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that they don’t have some over arching approach, as long as all the elements work fine by themselves.
How is Yahoo building the Open Mesh?.
I’m finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and Mary Hodder suggested that I add some Appendices on how various BigCos are building THEIR versions of the open mesh.
So here is Appendix - B.
Yahoo probably has the most comprehensive, well architected approach towards building their own open mesh. They’ve left lots of room for us without getting in our way. Now they just have to execute those plans!
Enabling OpenSocial gadgets (or any other kind of widget) inside of any Yahoo property and providing a rich set of APIs into an underlying ID layer is pretty dam coolio. Any ID system, social networking platform or web app should be able to seamlesslly mesh into the 150M Yahoo strong. What Flickr did for photos, so will Y! OS do for the open mesh.
As a modern day media entity Yahoo can show the world how content + technology + open can mean monetization for all. What I especially like is their leadership in supporting structured content and making sure that its all standards based.
Yahoo is poised to come back in a big way if they can execute this architecture correctly.
Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh?.
I’m finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and Mary Hodder suggested that I add some Appendices on how various BigCos are building THEIR versions of the open mesh. The full title of this Appendix is “Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh and what about the rest of Microsoft?”
So here is Appendix - C
Live Mesh totally rocks and it’ll probably become a key element of our open mesh. It’ll gateway us to mobile, car, living room, game machines.
Dare Obasanjo and Angus Logan are proving that a smart, focused MS can play open just as good as the rest of them. From the Live.com world MS is setting standards for what mainstream open will look like. Game kids, parents in cars, kiosks in malls, churches, local government and the family in the living room are MS’s users. We need to mesh into them.
Kim Cameron delivered what he promised and Ray Ozzie is five years out ahead.
Live Mesh’s greatest dangers are MS itself. What’s not clear is how the Live Mesh will connect into Facebook, but the power of a $50B warchest will keep MS in this game.
Watching MS play open is fun - cause it’s been a long time coming.
Aren’t Facebook and MySpace really Closed Meshes?.
I’m finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and Mary Hodder suggested that I add some Appendices on how various BigCos are building THEIR versions of the open mesh. The full title of this Appendix is “Aren’t Facebook and MySpace really Closed Meshes and how can we connect to them?”
So here is Appendix - D
Sending out tentacles or satellites isn’t the same as being open.
The tentacles of Facebook and the satellites of MySpace don’t fool us. They don’t REALLY want to mesh in with us, but they have to. So they put limitations and control over their user’s data, keeping them locked into their platforms. That’s their business model.
Both Facebook and MySpace have come up with architectures to allow for tight coupling of their user’s profile data, social graphs and content to the outside world. That will have to be good enough for us to mesh into - for now. Hopefully by the time this book is read - things will be better and we’ll be able to gain access to their user’s emails - which is the holey grail.
But our relentless pressure and insistance upon full freedom of our data - will win the day!
4 Appendices that conclude “How to build the Open Mesh”.
I’ve been finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and I wanted to post the four Appendices that conclude the book.
Here they are:
Appendix - A =
“What does Google’s Open Mesh look like?”
Most of the infrastructure, services and applications that Google offers work all by themselves and are not dependent upon anything else. Google has launched OpenSocial and built Google Friend Connect.
Appendix - B =
“How is Yahoo building the open mesh?
Yahoo probably has the most comprehensive, well architected approach towards building their own open mesh. They’ve left lots of room for us without getting in our way. Now they just have to execute those plans!
Appendix - C =
“Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh? …[and what about the rest of Microsoft?]
Live Mesh totally rocks and it’ll probably become a key element of our open mesh. It’ll gateway us to mobile, car, living room, game machines.
Appendix - D =
“Aren’t Facebook and MySpace really Closed Meshes?” … [ and how can we connect to them?]
Sending out tentacles or satellites isn’t the same as being open.
Watch for the full book - soon.
Last day of the summer - blogging ‘08.
There’s a moment in the Snag Films’ documentary “Africa Unite” where Ziggy Marley is talking about his father Bob’s efforts when Zimbabwe was freed. Ziggy talks about a father listening to his son’s pleas, and they showed footage of a 9 year old Ziggy dancing on stage at the Zimbabwe liberated concert. Classic footage. Lots of great Haile Sellasie footage, including his speeches at the League of Nations and the UN. Conquering Lion, Lion of Judah - direct descendant from the Queen of Sheeba. Great Rastafarian history and the loop is closed when a 70 year old rasta comes back to Ethiopia - and visit’s Haile Sellasie’s church. Wonderful documentary - highly recommended.
Congrats to Eran Hammer-Lahav and the rest of the oAuth team. Their standard has now received full indemnified clearance (called ’sanctioned for release) so no BigCo or contributor need fear of adopting said standard - in case somebody tries to sue. This is a crucial step towards uptake and the reason why the OWF (OpenWeb Foundation) was formed. Eran is one of the leaders of the oAuth effort as well as a founder of the OWF.
Natural language has always been a holey grail of our industry. 25 years ago HAL tried to bring it to Lotus 1-2-3. Ubiquity is trying to do it - now. Its a brilliant move on Mozilla’s behalf to extend what the browser is - and differentiate from IE! Scoble’s right, no one but a passionate user would ever bother with the steep learning curve.
Angus Logan points to an answer to my question “How will Microsoft Live Mesh connect to our Open Mesh?”
I don’t go to voting contests or things like TechCrunch50 - but I’ll be at the party!
Not sure if anyone cares about WidgetLaboratory and Ning - but it’s sure fun for me to watch.
Great collected tips for Flickr
Best wishes to Ton and his birthday BBQ I should be at.
Core Performance, Africa Unite, Redux, Dizzywood, Xiha, Husbands&Dads, GMDEsk
How to build the Open Mesh presentation.
This is what I’ll be presenting on Sept. 18th in Rotterdam for eday.
One year Anniversary of the “Bill of Rights for users of Social Media”.
Episode 8 of theSocialWeb.tv show was on the Bill of Rights that Joseph Smarr and myself authored - exactly a year ago on Sept. 4th, 2007.
As a coincidence it was also David Recordon’s birthday as well, so we had a great episode - talking about why the Bil of Rights happened in the first place, what has transpired in the past year and how “open is the new black“.
I also got a chance to tell my ‘Jonathan Abrams story’ - which always gets a good laugh. I guess Jonathan understands what I was trying to tell him now - five years later.
Several VCs have told me they would never invest in a white label company. Though I’m not losing sleep over that one, it did strike me as weird as there are so MANY VC funded white label social networking companies, yet the otehr love to talk shit about white labeling.
What they see is a competative market, with long enterprise sales cycle. Â They’d much rather invest in a crap shoot and hit 1-100 times, then invest in sound business practices, revenues and slow steady growth.
We get allot of tire kickers who are out comparing prices, features and terms from the various competitors we have - and it’s become clear that we offer something pretty different from what our competitors offer.
On the outside, we all are offering a “social network-in-a-box“. Â This includes the standard feature set of personal pages, groups, media uploading and sharing and private messaging. Â And that’s where most of the “others” stop. Â Most of them DON’T offer widgets, import from Facebook and MySpace, fancy blogging, groups with blogging, blogging routing, media blogging, event blogging, etc. Â Most of them DON’T offerÂ
sexy themes and UI control, support OpenID or give a shit about what end-users want.
But it’s not just a feature battle that differentiates us from the pack.
It’s also business models.
All of our competitors offer a SaaS deal, where they host and provide a full turn-key model to their customers. Â We do that too - but for different reasons. Â All of these SaaS deals come with terms that lock their customers into set term contracts. Â They then eek out monthly fees - and hope to sign up LOTS of these deals, to amortize their costs over 10-20 customers.
But what we do is license our source code to customers. Â That’s really the bsuienss we want to be in. Â And to get there we often have to do custom work to build out the network to our clients exact specifications - AND - we often host and do a SaaS deal for these customers - to get them up and running and out there.
Then after some period of time (6-18 months) they can license the code from us, own it and take their destiny in their own hands. This flexibility has turned out to be exactly what our customers want. Â It gets them out quickly, and allows them time to organically develop an in-house staff to take over the code - when they’re ready.
But features and models are not the ONLY way we’re different. Â We’re also heavily into “widgetization” - where we send social features “over the fence” and plop comments, reveiws, ratings, ”I’m a fan of’ modules into the pages of - say BellVideoStore.ca - Bell Canada’s movie downloading service.
But what I’ve been starting to realize lately - is that social networking is just ONE set of features which we offer. Â What we’re really doing is building white labeled platforms. Â Sure they initially look like social networks - at the outset, but most of our customers plan to flow commerce, content, communication, interface to external services - basically a next generation portal. Â Or “digital lifestyle aggregator” as I like to say.
We built a system for RadioOne which combined an integrated CMS, with an aggregation engine, a pages publishing system (with direct manipulative layout) with our social networking platform. Thus RadioOne was handed an entire platform. Â This is not your mother’s social network. hese are large, complex platforms - designed and built for you - by Broadband Mechanics.
Couple these platforms to open standards and thus you have a business that doesn’t look at all like selling cookie cutter templates to enterprise.
It’s white labeled platforms.
Refresh.