What does this mean for blogging? Is this a bad portent for blogs? Is it wise to use a surrogate platform owned and controlled by a third party for your content creation and sharing platform?

Long-form Versus Short-from Content

Personally, I do not believe that G+ is the proper venue for long-form articles. The thin-columnar design would make it tedious to read posts longer than a few hundred words. It is also not currently possible to place inline graphics within a G+ posts nor “a” tagged referenced HTML links. That makes it impractical to use G+ for the creation and sharing of any long-form content.

As an example, these following major thought pieces of mine would not be practical to post on Google+:

• My five-part Smartup series, Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
• A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging
• Flowing Your Identity Through the Social Web
• The Web is Not (yet) Social
• It’s Time for Blogging to Evolve

The Web of Content Versus Content Islands

Another issue with redirecting a personal URL, a blog for instance, to G+ is that you lose your Google juice. Whereas it might not be a big issue to people like Kevin Rose and Bill Gross who have significant audiences on most (all?) social networks, to a lesser-known entrepreneur such as myself, the loss of PageRank would be a significant blow to my reach.

But there is a more salient issue with redirecting a blog to G+. The draining of your Google juice may not be as bad as the orphaning of all your past content.

With a redirected site, links to your blog posts in old tweets and on other people’s sites would no longer work. This means that people would not have a way to read your past posts and articles. As even some of the largest social-media sites have closed down after awhile, what happens to your content and all your nice, newly minted links if Google decides that G+ is (once again) not the killer app they were hoping for and shuts it down like Google Wave?

But the biggest issue in my opinion is that of giving up control over your content. Although Google+ does have some facility for data portability, as an open source advocate and W3C invited expert on Social Media Federation, I do not relish the idea of giving up control over my content to a 3rd party. The Web-based Internet was created with a grand vision in mind. Concentrating the majority of social activity into a select few social-media nightclubs was not the vision of its founders.

The Web thrives on interconnectedness. If most of the content is created, shared, and discussed on a few social networking islands, then the Web’s potential to become truly social is in jeopardy. In my article Flock of Twitters (linked above), I discuss the difference between the Social Web versus social networks.

Are There Any Upsides?

Those are the downsides to relegating your blog to the back burner. The upside is this. The benefit of social networks over blogs is that an individual can follow many people at once, thus subscribing to numerous content pipes without having to visit numerous, disconnected sites (i.e. blogs). With blogging, each visitor has the option to subscribe to your feed but it is only one feed. That makes it less likely that you’ll have return visitors. RSS is (was?) a fantastic tool, but I have not had any new subscribers to my blog in many, many months.

Perhaps using G+ for shorter-form posts could noticeably increase your reach. It might even motivate people to visit your blog more frequently.

Whereas short-form content may be at home in a venue like G+, I still believe longer-form articles need a better place than G+. But, in the past, I would have posted these thoughts on my blog but instead I have written them in G+ as well. So maybe the times they are a changing.

The Future of Content on the Web

Even if the current trend is toward concentrating content into a few mega silos, the creation and sharing of content will continue to occur in some form and fashion outside of the walled-gardens du jour. Communication paradigms evolve over time, offering new content containers in which to package the same type of content.

For instance, books are still books it’s just that their containers are evolving from ridged one purpose, write once, read many treeware containers, to malleable multi purpose, write many, read many hardware containers. It may be true that what used to be primarily shared via blog posts is now being shared more in the confines of social-media silos, but this will lead to an evolution in the decades-old blogging paradigm.

Whether or not most people are aware of the original intent of the Web’s creators, or for that matter even care, remains to be seen. But as long as there are open source, open Web advocates pushing the boundaries of technology, the prospects for a real Web of Content, a linked Web of Data remain bright.

Note: A short version of these thoughts was original published just on my G+ account. But after thinking about it awhile, I decided to post these thoughts in my blog as well. It is interesting to note that even though I tweeted links to both posts, my G+ post on this topic has received eight comments (not including my replies), whereas this long-form post has so far received zero comments. If engagement is more important than control, then the social media silos will win more converts. It is clear that the current blogging paradigms are quickly becoming outdated. Perhaps this issue will spur innovation in the blogging platforms.

Over the next few hours it became clear that some people in the Semantic Web and Open Web Standards world had some initial misgivings about the Schema.org initiative. Although what I had tweeted was accurate–I am a big proponent of structured data on the Web and I believe efforts to make it more mainstream are necessary and historically have usually been worthwhile–I obviously had not done my homework and perhaps had replied too hastily.

Since much has already be said and written about why Schema.org is or is not good for the Web I will not be rehashing those debates (although I have linked to a few resources below that are in line with my views). Instead, I want to focus on the higher-level concepts of the Open Web and Open Web Standards.

Open Web and Open Web Standards

First, it is important to see the differences between these two concepts. To help understand the differences, let’s look at an example. The WordPress Blogging platform is an Open Source project. As such it can squarely be placed in the Open Web camp. Its codebase is freely available for anyone to see, utilize, adapt, and expand upon. The project is also open and very supportive of new people who wish to pitch in and help evolve the platform.

However, neither the WordPress project nor its core codebase can be classified as fitting into the Open Web Standards community. Whereas WordPress utilizes a number of Open Web Standards in its products, the project itself does not create standards for the Web.

Who then creates standards? On the Web, standards are not promulgated via for-profit corporations (i.e., Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!). They are also not promulgated by open source projects. Instead they are promulgated through standards bodies, like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Whereas it is true that much of the W3C member base is comprised of people who are representing corporations, there is a big difference between representatives from corporations participating on standards committees and corporations getting together to push their own set of standards.

In my view, this latter point is the big issue with Schema.org. It is an attempt by three large companies, who each have significant influence on the Web, to promulgate their joint vision of how structured data on the Web should be modeled. It is not an effort by a recognized standards body whose focus is clearly to further the Open Web.

How Open is Schema.org?

Just by reading the linked-to announcement by Google in the first paragraph of this article, it is clear that the joint venture has decided to bypass much of the standards work hashed out by various Semantic Web working groups and that they are making a move to control how machine-readable data is structured—at least within their search-engine world. In particular, this paragraph makes a strong statement:

That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas…With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future

Further on down Google’s announcement, you’ll find this point that should raise concern:

One caveat to watch out for: while it’s OK to use the new schema.org markup or continue to use existing microformats or RDFa markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers

How should one interpret this language? To me, it sounds like this is what they are saying:

This is how Google, Bing, and Yahoo! prefer and recommend structured data be represented on the Web. In fact, if you use Schema.org’s structured-data format, your content will get preferential treatment (or at least experience unique benefits) in our search results. However, do not mix markup formats as it will confuse our parsers and hurt your page rankings in our search-engine algorithms. It is best if you simply stick with Schema.org’s markup format.

With the power and influence these three search behemoths exert on the success of Web properties, webmasters, designers, and developers might be foolish to ignore this new initiative. More importantly, if they choose to ignore schema.org, for instance by using some other format with which to represent machine-readable data, it could be to the detriment of their clients and projects.

Note: If you read the official documentation on the Schema.org site and the Terms and Conditions section, it becomes clear why observant developers have additional concerns with the trios power play.

By creating a completely new set of markup types, they are in essence subverting the Open Web as only those people associated with Schema.org (select employees of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) have access to alter and add new data model types. Thus, although they claim that their goal is to “continue making the open web richer and more useful,” the Schema.org’s schema is not truly open. How does pushing a currently-closed data schema support the Open Web?

The Best Way to Support the Open Web is by Adopting Existing Standards

With the launch of Schema.org, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are thumbing their collective noses at not only the Open Web but also the Open Web Standards community. There have been literally tens of thousands of hours over the past decade volunteered by hundreds of people across the globe to develop a myriad of Open Web Standards—standards that have helped Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! become successful at what they do. With respect to this issue, prodigious efforts and solid progress have been made at developing Open Web Standards for structured data.

If Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! truly wish to make the “open web richer and more useful,” they should adopt, support, promote, and help evolve existing Open Web Standards for the representation of machine-readable data. That would be in keeping with the true spirit of the Open Web.

Outside Resources

The False Choice of Schema.org

TummelVision 67: Tantek Çelik explains open web standards for poets

As I began to compose a response to Nova’s query, it soon became clear that I had too much to say for a blog comment and decided that it was more fitting to write an article for my own site and then simply point Nova to it.

The Rights of the Internet and of its Users

If I were to attend the e-G8 Forum, what is the one big question that I think needs to be answered? Simple. Who owns the Internet?

If I were to attend the e-G8 Forum, what big issues would I push? Simple. I would stress two things: Global Internet democracy and Internet user rights.

What do I mean by global Internet democracy?

I’m not talking about a political movement to ensure that all peoples of the world are granted freedoms that those of use who are fortunate to live in real democracies experience—although that is of course vital to our survival as a species. Instead, I’m talking about the Internet being granted its own rights and freedoms—freedoms to grow, to prosper, to evolve unencumbered by corporate or governmental red tape as if it were its own emerging metaphysical entity.

The Internet has become our global data ecosystem. It is an evolutionary force in the speciation of humanities’ communication and computation infrastructure. As a result of the ease with which data of all types flows around the global, and with the increasing connections made to this data on a daily basis, our species is on the verge of seismic and profound changes.

In just a few decades, the Internet has grown like a developing nervous system, transcending national boundaries, shrinking geographic distances, dissolving geopolitical barriers, and binding many of us together into a single, global network. If allowed to continue its course unshackled by shortsighted power players, then it may become humankind’s most powerful, liberating, unifying, and transformational force.

What do I mean by Internet user rights?

With the recent net neutrality setbacks, discussions of the United States creating its own Internet kill switch, and the Commerce Department’s National ID initiative, informed netizens are right to be concerned about the future of their Internet freedoms.

In a free society, we should strive toward letting individuals, not governments or corporations, be in control of their personal data—an issue made painfully clear by the lack of real data portability among the Web-2.0-styled closed social nightclubs. We should advocate for the Internet rights of user-centric identity control, data ownership, and net equality for our data packets. These should be considered sacrosanct rights for all the Earth’s netizens.

There are a few promising projects in the works that address these issues. For example, the Freedom Box Project is working to create small, cheap, open-sourced personal servers that will return “power to the users over their networks and machines, returning the Internet to its intended peer-to-peer architecture”; the Diaspora Project offers users a distributed version of a Facebook-like social network; and the WebID protocol is creating an open distributed identity standard. These projects, and others in this space, need to be nurtured and given the liberty to proceed without regulation.

Collective and Connective Intelligence versus Myopic Dissonance

In my article, The HyperWeb: it’s All About Connections, I make an important point about the dangerous possibility that the Internet’s full potential might be purposely curtailed as a result of the myopic desires of a few power players:

Just like natural speciation, the continued evolution of the HyperWeb is not guaranteed. As with all evolutionary processes, advancements (innovations) may stop at a certain point.

The Web is a democratizing force that can help redistribute wealth and power. That is antithetical to most large companies interests—and a number of countries as well. Apple, Twitter, Facebook–and of course the phone and cable companies–want as much control as possible. They are fighting for control of the Web, not for the health of the Web.

It’s possible that for political, societal, or economic reasons–or some combination thereof–that the HyperWeb’s evolution may be curtailed. For instance, due to myopic business leaders, scared political leaders, or an uneducated, apathetic citizenry, humanity’s journey on the HyperWeb may not progress past Web 2.0 or Web 3.0.

The emergence of a truly Social Web will require not only policies that guarantee and protect the Internet’s freedom to grow, but also an informed netizenry that fights for its rights and freedoms. To date, neither of these prerequisites have been met.

The key message to communicate to the G8 leaders is that the world is struggling to become a global community and that a healthy, unfettered Internet may be our best insurance policy toward bringing that vision to fruition.

It is crucial that governments and corporations establish programs and invest in infrastructure that enable and ensure distributed services from identity, to micropayments, to unfettered mesh networks. It is critical that governments propose policies and enact laws that ensure user-centric ownership and control of personally-created and contributed data.

Let the people’s voices and data be freely heard and transmitted across the Internet. Let no one nation or corporation put up barriers to the Internet’s evolution no matter what the consequences may be to outdated notions of sovereignty.

Who should own the Internet? No corporation, no government, no organization, no individual. Instead, like the Earth, it should own itself.

My Related Articles

1. How the Death of Net Neutrality Effects You
2. Goodbye Google Old Friend: It’s time for the Open-Source Internet
3. Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
4. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual

YASP…is that somewhat exciting but ultimately frustrating realization that there is yet another social networking, microblogging, curated, real-time, threaded-conversation service that you might have to join so that you don’t get left behind.

In essence, every week we are bombarded with the newest, hottest, social networking startup that is touted as being the next big thing. A number of us rush to sign up, hoping to get in on the closed beta.

Too much Flow, Too Little Signal

Over the course of the past six years or so, I have rushed to grab accounts at many socially-focused websites. A number of them are no longer in existence. I must have over 50 user accounts most of which I have never used after signing up. I created new accounts for two reasons: I wanted to preserve my real name so that no one else could register it as their username; and if a given site became a huge success, I would already be a member.

The fact of the matter is that there are many Web-2.0 startups vying for a piece of the real-time, curated Stream race. And that race is only heating up. Some Stream-based startups are already running, some are about to launch, and many are just at the initial stages of building their vision of the Stream. They all desperately want your attention. They all desperately want for you to put your kayak in their Stream. They all desperately want for you to help them become the next big Internet-startup success.

In fact, in the recent few months, I have created accounts at a number of new social startups including Diaspora, Connect.me, Namesake, and Quora. More on Quora in a bit.

The number of Stream options has grown to an unmanageable level for any one user to participate in a majority of the offerings. The signal is increasing at a decreasing rate while the noise is increasing at a increasing rate. The ratio is moving in the wrong direction.

Social has Many Forms

Not all of the sites on which I’ve registered are technically Stream channels. But they all are social media sites designed to facilitate networking–in some form and fashion–across the Web.

For instance, WordPress.com is not a social network per se. It is a blogging platform and blogging is a social activity. You write a post to share your thoughts with the rest of the world via the Web. Others network with you by commenting on your post, linking to your post, or writing their own post on their blog in response to your post.

I have an account at WordPress.com primarily for the purpose of grabbing my name. As I have my own WordPress.org self-hosted blog (you’re on it right now), I have little reason to use the Automattic-hosted version of WordPress. But I felt the need to preserve my name (in the form of a unique username) so that no one else would take it.

Blogging is a Web 1.5 relic. Whereas it still has a solid foothold in the Web 2.0-space, it has not changed with the times. I make the case for the need for blogging to change in my article, It’s Time for Blogging to Evolve.

I’ve Signed up for Quora. What?

Yes, I know. After all my blog posts and tweets about the open, Social Web, Why did I sign up for yet-another-stream phenomenon? After reading this post you might ask doubly so.

To be honest, I had been thinking about the utility of joining Quora for sometime. This interesting Quora post by Philip Hotchkiss was the final straw in my decision to join Quora, Why do conversations with influencers matter?

I’m going to give Quora a try for three reasons:

1. As an occasional alternative to posting multiple-related tweets in rapid succession. Instead, I can use Quora as an intermediate format between a series of short tweets and a long-form blog post.
2. As a more appropriate place to pose questions that can generate real, meaningful debate. Posing questions on twitter seems to fail, by and large. Asking questions on my blog seems to result in the same failure, unless I first tweet about it and even then it seems that interest in the topic is lost too quickly.
3. To see if I receive more exposure. It will be interesting to see if my thoughts and ideas gain more traction on Quora than they currently do on my blog.

However, just because I have joined YASP does not mean that I have tossed in the towel, that I have given up on helping to bring the distributed Social Web to fruition. It is simply a nod to the times, a practical acknowledgment of the current state of the Web.

Please, Not Another Stream

Whereas I am giving Quora a try, the premise of my year-old query still stands. I believe that people are beginning to get tired with having to create new accounts on the next-greatest-social-networking-site du jour.

I end my Flocking to the Stream article with this thought:

As the number of streams continue to increase and as the flow rate of each stream picks up, people will grow tired of having to subscribe to, having to join yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP).

So, I ask you here (and I’ve asked this on Quora as well), How many streams can you kayak? How much of your time and attention can you split between multiple (maybe even many) Stream services each day? How much signal are you receiving versus noise? Why should you have to rebuild your social graph each time you join a new siloed social network?

The Web is about distributed communications channels, not about cloistered communications silos. The Web offers netizens the ability to create their own communication channel. I want to subscribe to you, not to you at some social network here and then also to you at another social network there, etcetera.

How many Streams can we efficiently and effectively manage at once? How many channels can we navigate in a meaningful way. How many new social networks do we have to join to keep track of the activities of all our friends, family members, and colleagues?

My Related Articles

• A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging
• The Web is Not (yet) Social

The issue is that the major blogging platforms do not offer the means with which users can connect their sites in a distributed, decentralized, real-time social network. Thus, Twitter and Facebook continue to dominate the social networking space.

The vision of blogging needs to change. Right now it is an old-school vision, where a blog is a little island of content that is for most purposes unintegrated into the real-time social web.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

What needs to change? For starters, I believe that blogging and microblogging should not occur via distinct, separate platforms. I think these concepts need to be combined. I think that a blog needs to be re-envisioned as a multipurpose communications platform.

It would work like this. People could blab in 140-character (or so) snippets all day long if they wanted. But if they had more to say, they could easily do so without having to fracture the Stream by sending interested parties to their blog, to Facebook, or to another site.

In essence, you would summarize your basic idea on your own blog in 140 characters (maybe make it 200) and let each of your followers decide if they cared to see more. If they did, they could click a little icon to reveal your additional content—that is if you decided to post more content.

What would happen when a user wished to leave a comment? This would not be done via blogging business as usual. User contributions would not be via comments left on your blog, they would not be via the old-school capturing of others’ thoughts onto your database.

Instead, a user would “post” a comment on their blog and then their ideas, their rebuttals, their comments would appear in real time on your personal Stream on your blog. The user, however, would still control their content as it was posted via their site and they did not have to physically visit your site to make the comment. They could delete, edit, or augment their content whenever they wanted and any changes would be pushed to your Stream on your blog.

Think of it this way. On your blog, you should be able to broadcast any idea that you would like to engage others in discussing. If your followers wanted to say a few words about your idea, great, if they wanted to provide detailed rebuttals or contributions, they would be able to do that as well. But for each user involved in the conversation, their contribution would be made via their own communications channel, in other words via their own blog.

Why would this be of benefit? The important point is that each user’s Stream stays concisely organized in short tweet-like excerpts and that users do not have to leave their own Stream to continue more detailed conversations somewhere else. Users would not need to travel to Twitter to make pithy comments, then go to Facebook to check up on friends and view their photos, then go back to their own blog to check if anyone had posted a comment.

All Stream activity for each user would be managed in a single place, would be owned and controlled by that user, and would be located on that user’s personal communications channel.

It is Time for the Next Social Communications Evolution

Why should a user have to have a Twitter, Facebook, Quora, LinkedIN, or other social-networking account? Why can’t their blog be their personal communications channel to which others can follow in real time? Why can’t their blog have a real-time Stream dashboard that shows the updates of all those they are currently following? Why can’t their blog be their plug into the Social Web, instead of having to rely on multiple social-networking islands?

A WordPress or Drupal (or pick-your-favorite CMS) platform should offer real networking capabilities. Currently a WordPress network, as an example, is really a site that is controlled by a single entity—often existing on a single server. It is not a disparate connection of WordPress sites linked up across the InterWebs. It is just another closed data silo, not much different than Facebook.

I think the tools are already available to begin to make this vision come to fruition. With technologies like PubSubHubBub, some creative developers could take the popular blogging platforms and turn them into the next generation social network, into truly user-centric, user-controlled, globally linked, real-time distributed communications channels.

Blogging 1.0 Has Reached its Limits

Whereas I believe blogging is still a powerful, relevant technological paradigm in our socially-connected world (I am a consistent and regular user of a blog platform after all), I also believe that the current model of the blog is becoming less relevant as people migrate en mass to newer forms of communication. WordPress, Drupal, and other platforms, continue to do admirable jobs improving the tools and options available to their users. But Blogging 1.0 can only go so far. I’m afraid that it may have reached its limits.

The irony is that to announce this new article (or post) of mine, I will have to leave my blog, I will have to leave my communications channel, the channel that I truly control, and head on over to someone else’s channel and tweet about it. This is why blogging is losing some of its steam. This is why many of my colleagues who used to post frequently to their blogs have not done so in a noticeably long time. The attention has been drawn away from our personal communications channels. The eyeballs are focused elsewhere. The closed-siloed, mega-social nightclubs are winning the battle.

It is time to change that; it is time to once again leverage the power of the Web, regaining control and rebuilding the power of our personal communications channels. It is time for blogging to evolve once more, for the next stage of the blogging revolution to begin.

Update

July 9, 2011: With the recent unveiling of Google+, a few prominent tech bloggers have decided to redirect their blogs to their G+ stream instead. This has created great debate. To learn more about this issue, read my article, Is Surrogate Blogging via Google Plus a Good Idea?

My Related Articles

1. The Web is Not (yet) Social
2. My original detailed article on the need for decentralized microblogging, the benefits, and some of the basic technological underpinnings that would be required, A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Outside Resources

1. A short, interesting post on using BuddyPress, a WordPress social-networking plugin suite, to build your own open source microblogging platform.
2. More than 2-years ago, Matt Mullenweg introduced the Prologue Theme, a theme used at Automattic to bring Twitter-like, microblogging functionality to WordPress. The theme has been revamped and is now called P2 (also see the theme’s official site). These three links introduce the possibility of using the P2 theme to create a super blog that could meld a regular blog with a microblog, offering a “pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.” To date, no one has done that.

Whereas Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and other ventures are social platforms, they are not the Web. These entities are only part of the Web—although it’s looking more and more “like” Facebook wants you to think that the Web equals Facebook.

The Web is currently not social. The social-media-driven Web is the metaspace analogy of meatspace nightclubs.

Each of these internally-focused social networks might have a globally-distributed data center, but all the activity occurs within the walls of their private social clubs. The activity in one social club is predominately isolated from the others. The activity does not freely spread throughout the Web. The conversations do not flow throughout the Web. They flow within each proprietary network with a very limited trickle of “conversation” allowed to the outside Web. Of course, this trickle is allowed out to encourage more people to come in to their closed clubs.

There is a monumental difference between social networking occurring on the Web and the Web being Social. Social creatures frequenting social networks does not make the Web inherently social. Why is this the case?

In my article, A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging, I state:

With their closely-guarded data silos, social networks are not full participants in the Web, they are not participants in the interconnected data ecosystem. So, unlike an ecological web (think of a food web), the Web-based Internet is not as much of an intact web as it is a land of social network islands that punctuate an ocean of truly connected websites.

The Social Web, on the other hand, is a fully functioning and healthy ecosystem were all data are globally connected.

There is no disputing the fact that social is a big part of the current Web. Web 2.0 is the realm of social media, but it is also the web of exclusive, social clubs. Web 2.0 is about companies “doing” social media via cloistered social islands (called “networks”) more than it is about making the Web itself a social space.

The Web is currently not social. It’s the metaspace analogy of meatspace nightclubs. It’s filled with private social silos, which are antithetical to the Web’s vision. Each private social island is an internal network consisting of tightly-controlled infrastructure that offers its own vision of how humans should connect and interact.

Web-2.0-style closed social nightclubs are not the epitome of the Social Web. Their existence is a indication of how much further the Web has to go before it will become a Social space.

Metaville: a Non-social City of Social Stadiums

To better understand some of the points presented above, let’s look at the fictitious city of Metaville. In this analogy, the city of Metaville represents the current state of the not-social Web.

Metaville is a city with millions of residents. From the outside, it might look like a regular, American city. People regularly gather in a number of the city’s stadiums. In those stadiums, they socialize, sharing stories, pictures, minutiae of their daily lives.

The owners of each stadium are furiously growing the size of their stadium to make room for more people to join the conversations occurring inside of their stadium. Membership is often free but the two requirements are that the vast majority of your conversation must remain inside the walled colosseum and that you have little control over what the stadium owners do with your conversations.

There are a few upstart, niche arenas struggling to grab people’s attention, but even these smaller gathering spaces mimic the rules of the big stadiums.

Is the city of Metaville social? Well, there are pockets of social activity spread throughout the city but all of that activity occurs in stadiums with each stadium primarily isolated from the others.

Learn more about the differences between the Social Web Versus Social Networks

It is true that social activity occurs within Metaville. But when people leave one stadium and go to work, to home, or even to a different stadium (some of the residents of Metaville are members of more than one stadium), they leave their friends and conversations behind. Yes, sometimes they will check back in with their friends in a given stadium and sometimes they’ll get a ping from a friend within a stadium, but they don’t take their friends and conversations out of the stadiums. When they join a new stadium, they have to assemble a new set of friends, start a new conversation history.

Conversations do not happen in the streets of Metaville, or at cozy little cafes and diners. Conversations do not happen between a resident currently in his house with another resident currently in her condo. Practically all of the conversations occur within the exclusive domain of the stadiums. Sure, a resident at home can chat with one currently located in a private stadium, but the totality of that conversation is made possible by the propriety infrastructure that each stadium offers its members—and even then the conversation still takes place within the stadium’s system.

So the city of Metaville is actually not social. It is a place that has many stadiums within whose walls friends gather and conversations occur. But when a person leaves the stadium, their friends do not and cannot follow them. When a member leaves a stadium, a security guard inspects their belongings to make sure that very little is removed from the stadium.

In the realworld, in our meatspace, this is not the way life works. Our friends can come with us and even join us outside of the stadiums. Our friends can come over to our house, or we can chat with them in cafes, or on the streets, or in parks. We are not prevented from being social where ever we go.

Metaville is the model of the current Web. It has some very large pockets of social activity but the conversations and friendships do not readily travel outside of the stadiums.

This metaphor could be expanded further. Instead of Metaville being populated with a bunch of closed stadiums, it could be Metastate populated with closed cities whose citizens rarely leave to visit other cities, or Metacountry whose closed states have tight boarder-crossing restrictions, or Metaworld with closed countries tightly controlling and limiting the flow of information from its citizens into neighboring countries.

When you look at life in Metaville, you will see that the current Web is no more social than one stadium full of people, that the cafes and diners of the Web are ghost towns, that the stadiums of Metaville are more like dictatorial countries.

But All is Not Dark in the Streets of Metaville

There are a few glimmers of light shinning through the streets of Metaville, a few efforts that are counter to the Web-2.0-styled stadium construction. These efforts are focused on helping to create a truly Social Web, at allowing conversation to happen in the cafes and diners of Metaville, and allowing users to take their conversations and friends with them no matter to what unchartered locations of the city they may wish to travel.

Companies like Status.net, the startup Diaspora, and the research project SMOB all are diligently working at bringing federated services to the Web. There are also some of us that are working on innovating new, foundational technologies that will allow for distributed social interactions across the Web and offer truly user-centric identity control. For instance, instead of the limitations and non-user-centric aspect of OpenID, there is a group of us working at offering a truly user-centric identity protocol called WebID.

The Not-so Fine Line

You might think there’s a fine line between calling the Web a space filled with private social clubs and a Social space itself. You might think that it is not a big deal to call the current Web social. But for Social Web Architects, such as myself, the differences and distinctions are large, not small.

Social Web Architects are fighting for the rights of individuals to own and control their data, to have powerful yet easy to use identity and privacy tools, to freely and easily carry on conversations throughout the Web—not just within the walled sanctums of a few snooty nightclubs. We are building technologies that will link data and allow for the serendipitous discovery of new connections with other datasets and with fellow human beings—no matter where on the Web those connections and people may lay.

The Social Web is the metaspace actualization of a user-centric controlled, globally-connected conversation space across the Web. In essence, the mission of Social Web Architects is to bring the Web’s vision to fruition.

For a vision of the Web’s evolutionary epochs, and humanity’s race toward a Social Web, see my HyperWeb article.

Fortunately, the Web is constantly evolving. What it is experiencing now are the natural growing pains of an adolescent platform. Many of the current social-media nightclubs will eventually give way to a more open, user-centric ecosystem. I believe that they will have little choice as humanity inexorably races toward a truly Social Web.

Outside Resources

For two additional (one differing) perspectives on this issue, see Dave Winer’s, What I mean by “the open web” and and Stowe Boyd’s, Messiness At Scale.

My Related Articles About the Social Web

1. It’s Time for Blogging to Evolve
2. Flowing Your Identity Through the Social Web
3. My five-part series, Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
4. Apple’s Ping Versus the Social Web
5. How the Death of Net Neutrality Effects You
6. Goodbye Google Old Friend: It’s time for the Open-Source Internet
7. Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
8. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual

But there are two issues that I wish to address. First, only one of the six listed most influential topics on my Klout profile make sense. Second, without connecting my Facebook account, I’m significantly penalized.

These two issues have big ramifications for those of use trying to build the Social Web.

Luke, Use the Foci

About three or four months ago, I tweeted the same observation concerning the most influential topics list on my Klout profile. Someone from Klout promptly @replied to my tweet stating that with continued use, the algorithms would more accurately determine my most influential topics. But this list has remained unchanged.

I have not bothered to check this assertion, but I believe that sixty percent of my time tweeting and ninety percent of my time writing is spent on the topic of a user-centric, distributed Social Web. This is divided between generic categories of Internet freedoms (GPL, open source in general, net neutrality, data portability, privacy, identity, BuddyPress) and Web 3.0 (Semantic Web/Linked Data, smartups, WebID, FOAF, RDFa).

Yet my Klout profile does not reflect any of that. In fact, “Indiana” is one of my listed most influential topics when I would guess that fewer than 1% of my tweets have used that word.

Of course, I could be wrong. Klout can scour my backtweets a lot more efficiently and effectively than I can. It may be that fewer of my tweets are about those topics than I realize, that few people retweet any of my tweets that are about my primary foci. Perhaps I engage in conversational chatter on Twitter more often than I think.

Whatever the actual truth held within my Twitter data, I’d be very surprised if “Indiana, SEO, Design, Influence, Google” are my most popular topics. I rarely use any of those words in my Tweets or hashtags.

I do not spend my time within the dungeons of Mordor, I mean Facebook.

But it could quite possibly be that Klout is accurate, that those are my most influential topics. If so, that means that the vast majority of my time has been wasted, that I shouldn’t bother tweeting about #privacy, #identity, #opensource, #Web30, #BuddyPress, #SemanticWeb, #WebID…etcetera.

I’m of course being somewhat facetious. The reality is that I already know for which issues most people retweet and @mention me—and it is not the topics that Klout claims I’m most influential on. However, when the vast majority of my tweeting and blogging foci aren’t reflected in the self-proclaimed “Standard for Influence”, I have to wonder whether Klout’s algorithms need some tweaking, or whether I’ve got a clot in my Klout.

Interestingly, and on a side note, influence is one of my most influential topics! In my mind that evokes the image of a self-referential, infinite-looping, circular-referencing maelstrom.

An Audience with Sauron

Without connecting my Facebook profile to my Klout profile, I’m penalized forty percent—whatever that means, I don’t like the sound of it.

Although I do have a Facebook account, I do not use Facebook. I think I have four or so people whose friendship I’ve accepted and who are obviously waiting with baited breath to see what I’m going to say. To date, I have not made a single wall post. So, they will be waiting for a lot longer as I plan to never post any content in Facebook.

In fact, I think in 2010, I may have bothered to login to Facebook three times and that was only to checkout one or two aspects of its interface.

Why don’t I use Facebook? If you’ve been following my tweets and reading my articles posted to my site, you will already understand why. Facebook is antithetical to most of what I believe the Social Web is about. I’m professionally working on helping to bring the concept and infrastructure of the Social Web to fruition. Thus, I do not spend my time within the dungeons of Mordor, I mean Facebook.

Since I don’t use Facebook, some of you may ask why I use Twitter then, as it too is just another private data island. Simple. Although Twitter is a participant in the closed-silo wars, my posted content is accessible to anyone who wants to see it. In other words, they do not have to be logged in to access my Stream. With Facebook, you must not only have an account but also be logged in and be a friend of that person to see their Stream.

As I’m trying to promote the concepts of an open, distributed, user-centric Social Web, Twitter lets me get the message out to everyone—whether they follow me or not, whether they’re logged in or not, whether they have a Twitter account or not.

An Island of Misfit Toys

If Klout is to become the true measure, source, authority, standard for influence across the online world, then it needs to stop living exclusively within the social-networking private clubs. Why? Because influence occurs across the Web-based and mobile-based Internet. It isn’t restricted to closed social-media silos.

What about all of my online activity that occurs within my various blogs? Many people comment on my articles. What about the activity that occurs on forums, like the BuddyPress support forum where I’m a moderator (albeit a very inactive one lately)? What about on identica, or Diaspora, or the various niche BuddyPress sites that are beginning to pop up?

Conversations and influence flow beyond closed private data islands. Much activity occurs across the decentralized Web. In fact, for those of us fighting for the Social Web, we envision a day when most of the social activity will occur across a user-centric, decentralized, distributed architecture. The exclusive walled gardens of the Web will become a relic of the bygone, archaic Web-2.0 days.

Right now, a Klout score may best be summarized as a subjective measure of influence within a few select groups of data clubs. If a Klout score is to become the “standard measure of online influence” as proclaimed on their Twitter profile, then a user’s influence across the entire Social Web must be objectively calculated.

Shouldn’t my activity across the entire Internet be factored into my influence? Shouldn’t the activity of all of those who spend their time outside the Islands of Misfit Toys count for something? Of course.

Does this really matter? Yes.

As companies are beginning to use Klout scores to assess a potential candidate’s job application, to determine if a particular person has sufficient influence to be awarded a consulting contract, and for other inevitably unknown purposes, the accuracy and integrity of that score becomes paramount to all the Web’s citizens. Presently, too much importance is being placed on a Klout store, most likely to the unfair detriment of some.

As some company is going to win the influence-measurement war, if you care about your clout and how it is determined on Klout, provide them with feedback and the ways in which you think they could improve their service.

Update

December 22, 2010: Less than 12 hours after posting this article, my Klout Most Influential Topics list has changed since the first time I can remember. It’s still very inaccurate, but notice that the topic “Google” has been replaced with “Open Source”. A coincidence? I sure hope so. Otherwise I’m going to have to keep writing articles to get this all straightened out.

December 22, 2010 (Update 2): Joe Fernandez, the Cofounder and CEO of Klout, contacted me via Twitter this afternoon asking if I’d like to talk. We chatted for awhile about the issues I brought up in this article and some of the directions in which Klout will be heading in the near future. After talking with Joe–a very nice guy by the way–it is clear to me that they are thinking about the larger ramifications of their service and what it truly means to be the standard measure of online influence. Their task is very challenging indeed. It’s nice to know that Joe cares enough about their users to take the time to listen to feedback and communicate their dedication to continually evolving and improving their platform.

Related Outside Articles

The Read Write Web article that has brought some visitors to the post and triggered a small discussion, 4 Ways Klout Can Evolve.

An interesting though piece by Justin Goldsborough, Why Klout scares me; Hint: It’s not the tool itself

Data portability is defined as the ability to “bring your identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with you, without having to manually add them to each new service.”

Does this really solve the most important issue that users face when spelunking the depths of the social networking space?

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks.

While it’s great that a user has the flexibility, the freedom, even the right to take their data with them, in effect they are not taking anything with them. Users are not actually porting anything from one site to another. Porting implies the moving of an entity from one location to another, the transferring of data from one machine to another.

In reality, data portability is about giving users the freedom and ability to grab a copy of their current dataset and paste it into yet another data silo. They are not actually moving their data as much as copying it from one silo to another. So, their data is now duplicated across multiple locations.

The data silo (the social network) from which the data was copied (“moved”), does not delete the content—often even after a user requests the deletion of their account. Why? Because a member’s data, the content, is one of the most important business assets the social network owns. It is their key competitive advantage.

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks makes it even harder for a given user to control their identity, privacy, and Web presence.

What most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

I don’t want my personal data exported, copied, replicated throughout the Web. I am for data redundancy where it’s efficient and necessary, but exporting a copy of my dataset (or subset) from one social graph to another does not make sense. You are duplicating your effort. You are splitting up–or more accurately duplicating part of–your identity graph into little pieces and then strewing them into different locations, placing them in multiple, closed data silos.

Don’t get me wrong. I am for true data portability. I’m just not in favor of the way it is currently implemented by the few participating social networks.

What I am proposing is a step beyond data portability that is even more user centric, that could make the Internet a truly open space, that would help usher in the Social Web.

What is Identity on the Web?

Before introducing my concept, it’s important to understand a key difference between my views of Web identity and the mainstream definition.

The commonly-accepted definition of a Web identity is a digital representation of a user. It is one of many possible personae that an individual may have on the same social network or among all the networks in which a given person participates. But I believe this definition discounts the individual in the equation.

In my article, Thinking Outside the Privacy Box, I discuss my philosophical views about identity on the Web. In short, what most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

Enter Identity Flowability

In our service-centric Web-2.0 world of social networks where each new service is in effect a closed data silo, data portability is an important issue. What I’m suggesting is that the next focus of the Social Web should be to obviate the need for data portability.

Instead of data portability, the Social Web needs to champion the concept of Identity Flowability. Identity Flowablility is the easy movement of and control over a given identity graph by a given user.

Identity Flowablility enables a user to store any part of their identity graph in the places that they choose and then allow other sites to reference that data from those places—not copy the data from those places. Data would be semantically marked up to facilitate their auto discoverability for sharing between other sites. Access rights could easily be assigned.

WebIDs could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

Thus the concept of Identity Flowablility is to provide each user with an easier, more efficient, and effective mechanism with which to control their entire IdentitySpace. It creates a user-centric container through which data content and privacy rights could be better managed and controlled.

How would this concept change the Social Web? Instead of the quantity of users a site has being its most valuable, monetizable asset, the true value proposition of each Web 3.0-enabled company would be the quality and uniqueness of their service. No longer would a large membership base necessarily equal a big asset as smaller, more nimble niche-market players could compete by offering superior services.

WebID: Helping to Flow and Control Identity

There is a very promising identification protocol that goes a long way toward creating the foundation of a flowable identity. It’s called WebID—in particular, a FOAF+SSL WebID. If you are interested in identity flowability, I encouraged you to learn more about WebIDs and how they could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

My Related Articles

1. The Web is Not (yet) Social
2. Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
3. Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
4. Repackaging the Promise of the Social Semantic Web
5. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual
6. A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Also See

An interesting six-minute video presentation graphically discussing the issues with OpenID: OpenID: Identity Service or Identity Platform

For an interesting, possible alternative to today’s closed-siloed Web, visit the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. Their task is challenging but in tune with my sentiment expressed above.

Since posting my article, I have read a number of other observers’ opinions about Ping. Although many of these articles show great insight and erudition with respect to why Ping, in its current incarnation, falls short in offering a truly social platform on which to discuss music, I have not seen a single article about the most ominous portent of Ping.

A Private Social Club

A big part of my professional day is spent thinking about issues surrounding the Social Web and working on solutions. I do this via debating and evangelizing approaches to making the Web a better place for users and by actively participating in the development of open source social media projects like BuddyPress.

What’s interesting to note is Ping will be an instantly-large social network that is not part of what we have traditionally termed the Social Web. Since iTunes is not a Web-based platform, instead running on a proprietary application that ties into the Internet, the software infrastructure that enabled the success of Web-2.0 startups like Facebook and Twitter is removed from the equation. With Apple’s successful line of products and large install base, more social-networking attention will shift away from the Web.

Ping is another closed data silo, but one that does not live on the Web. It is a closed data silo on a private, exclusive island. It’s a private social club. Will large companies follow Apple’s lead and migrate their social networks off the Web and onto proprietary platforms as well? An increasing percentage of Twitter traffic, for instance, is generated off Web, with input and output instead happening via proprietary applications (TweetDeck as an example, or via one of Twitter’s mobile apps). Fortunately, Twitter provides Web APIs that allow for a subset of their data to be discovered and shared via URIs.

But Ping is different. Its data are not Web-discoverable. Although you can share a Ping URI with friends via the Web, the link redirects from the browser to iTunes—Apple’s proprietary platform. This allows people into Ping’s private club but does not free Ping’s data to the Web. Ping operates in the Internet, not the Web.

This is an issue as the Social Web already struggles with identity and privacy management and still has not lived up to the promise of user-centric data control. Closed data silos snub their nose at the full potential of the Web but closed social islands, like Ping, simple refuse to accept the vision of the Web altogether.

If companies do migrate their networks to propritary platforms, then the issue of data portability and semantic discovery via the power and promise of the Web of linked data will become moot. What will happen to the Social Web? It will become a cobweb on a rundown offramp of the Internet.

Speak Out

What impact do you think Ping will have on social networking, in particular the Social Web? Do you see social networking moving away from the Web, and if so, what are the impacts to users? Do we need to rethink the meaning and use of the term Social Web to encompass social platforms that exist off Web?

Music is a big aspect of social sharing. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and even Twitter have launched the careers of fledgling artists, have helped promote established artists, and have been important platforms from which fans can interact with each other and sometimes even their favorite artists. Music and entertainment are one of the major activity hubs in these social spaces.

Now with Ping, Apple has shifted the calculus. Ping will allow all iTunes’ users, whether on a PC or Apple device, to follow other users, to meet new people, and make new friends. Users can see what their followers (friends) are listening to and have recently purchased. They can post comments and participate in any part of the realtime activity stream. They can discover new music and find out when their favorite artists are coming to a town and which of their friends plan to attend the show. They can even purchase tickets to the show all from iTunes.

One of the most compelling features of Ping, however, is that artists will have their own page that allows them to keep fans up to date and to interact with them. I believe that unlike Facebook and twitter, the vast majority of artists will choose to actively participate in Ping as they derive a noticeable percentage of their revenue from iTunes. This one feature alone could make Ping a phenomenal success.

Does this mean Facebook and Twitter are in trouble?

Of course Ping has just launched. So should Facebook and Twitter be concerned? With a userbase of 160-million music and entertainment lovers, iTunes offers Ping an instant userbase that is almost one third the size of Facebook’s user network. That is a substantial foundation from which to launch a new social networking destination.

But a massive userbase does not equal an instant community. A community can only germinate if Ping allows its users the freedom to control the experience, and the tools to interact in a truly social way. If managed properly, Ping could very well encourage a large number of music fans to move their discussions about music away from Facebook, Twitter, and more music-centric networks like last.fm. After all, iTunes is a platform that has always been dedicated to music; iTunes is a platform they already know and love to use—at least for purchasing music.

By fracturing their users’ attention, Apple is seeking to chip away at Facebook’s and Twitter’s success. Jobs even alluded to Facebook’s crummy privacy controls, saying that Ping has easy to use, easy to understand privacy controls. The impact may be small at first, but as Ping builds momentum and the word gets out–via Facebook and Twitter of course–the shift could be seismic. Facebook and Twitter will survive as they are not just about music, but they will not be unaffected. Why is this?

Whereas music is the first target for Ping, it would not be unrealistic to see Ping expand to encompass all of iTune’s digital content genres—movies, TV, books, apps, classroom lectures, etcetera. Ping could become the de facto social network for all media discussion.

What impact will this have on Facebook’s and Twitter’s business model? It could be huge. Since iTunes is already a widely-successful platform for selling and distributing digital media, the addition of a social-networking layer could divert tens of millions of dollars away from those networks. Ping’s success will depend upon whether Apple understands social sharing, whether it can envision a way for its users to have more control over the experience—something Apple rarely grants on its platforms.

But Ping has bigger implications for the Social Web. That is the topic of my next article.

Speak Out

What impact do you think Ping will have on Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general?

However, there is one comment that Robert makes at the end of his piece that demonstrates that we in the Social Semantic Web space have a ways to go to get our message across. He states that:

If Facebook wants to be trusted it must make a privacy contract with its users that will have real consequences if Zuckerberg throws it under the bus. I don’t know what that looks like. This is why the alternatives to Facebook just don’t matter either. They all could break their privacy contract with us. Even Google or Microsoft could and we all know it. So, we’re just going to have to live in this new world where privacy is a myth.

As someone who is tapped into the pulse of the InterWebs, Scoble’s statement was somewhat of a shock. How can Robert Scoble not have heard about the promise of distributed social networks powered by the Semantic Web? How can he not understand some of the virtues of a fully-actualized Social Semantic Web?

What he states is true only for Facebook alternatives that offer more of the same—the closed data silos that remain under the control of an entity other than its users. What he fails to mention are those proposals that will put each user back in control of their own identity, privacy, and data. The only way that a privacy contract could be broken in that scenario is if a user breaks it with him or herself.

There are a number of us Semantic Web / Linked Data folks who are working on bringing this ideal to fruition. As an example of one such proposal, see my article, A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging. Another recent proposal that has received significant attention is diaspora.

User-centric, distributed platforms like these will remove the issue of who owns our data and who decides its fate as it will be each individual who controls, who owns their data. These platforms will be the next evolution of the Web. As I conclude in my article, A Flock of Twitters:

It’s time to return to the original concept of the Web-based Internet—an interconnected, decentralized and distributed, open and independent cacophony of individuals who control their own Webspace, operate their own communication channel, and freely communicate with others without having to worry about a central point of failure…The only way [for that to happen] is by leveraging the power of the Semantic Web.

The promise of a fully-actualized Social Semantic Web is to firmly place the control of one’s identity and privacy back into the hands of the Web’s citizens. If our work in making that dream come to reality is going to succeed, we must better craft our message, we must better communicate the virtues of a user-centric, user-controlled Social Semantic Web.

Related Articles

The Semantics of the Semantic Web: Don’t Confuse the Concept with the Movement
Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual
Privacy in the Facebook Era
Flocking To the Stream

Personal freedoms, control over one’s privacy, and the ability to manage one’s identity on the Web have never been in more jeopardy. With Facebook’s continued war on personal privacy, the day when a user no longer has any rights to control their own data is closer at hand. The question is, How should society respond?

Of course, Facebook–or any other corporation–is free to offer services and manage their user base in anyway that benefits their stakeholders—as long as they do not break the laws under which they are obligated to operate. Individuals have the freedom to decide whether or not they agree with Facebook’s policies, in particular as they pertain to privacy and the use of their personal data. They can choose not to use Facebook, Twitter, or any other Social Web network.

I have no issue with corporations making a profit, I am a businessman myself. My argument is that society should not feel comfortable when a few individuals (or in this case a single person) make broad, sweeping decisions about how an individual’s data is managed.

Society should not be complacent or apathetic when a large corporation like Facebook continues to assail personal privacy on one front while purporting to be the de facto provider of Web-based identity on the other. Free societies should strive toward assisting individuals to gain control over their personal data.

Currently, there are inherent barriers to providing users with an easy-to-use mechanism that grants fine, granular control over personal data on the Internet and Web. Most users have their personal data strewn throughout myriad, disparate data silos, across different closed social networks. This makes it difficult to create tools that offer users an efficient and effective way to manage their data, to manage their on-line identity.

Some of the initiatives that open a user’s data up to other applications and networks–the Open Stack, for instance–begin to address this issue. But, as long as users’ personal data remains effectively siloed in government and corporate databases, this vision will not be obtainable.

As the Web matures and new technologies such as Semantic Web protocols and tools become available, solutions to the proverbial Privacy 2.0 and Identity 2.0 debate are possible. Whether corporate adoption rates of those solutions will be sufficient to make them viable is unclear. This is were the wishes and desires of a free society come into play. If there is a sufficient cry to adopt new identity-management protocols, then perhaps we can effect change.

In my article, “A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging”, I offer one such path to a user-driven, user-centric identity management and privacy solution. It does not rely on corporate adoption but instead puts the power back in the hands of individuals.

But there are other solutions that offer great business opportunities to companies that truly listen to users’ concerns over the usurpation of their personal privacy and identity. In the coming decade, those companies that build new interfaces and provide new services that facilitate user-centric identity and privacy management will find their visions rewarded. There is plenty of room for both open source and proprietary solutions in this space.

Whereas Facebook has shown great acumen at growing their small business into a global behemoth, it has lost sight as to the roots of its success—their users’ trust. If the Web’s citizens take a stand and demand that their personal privacy and identity remain their domain, and not the domain of corporations or governments, then companies like Facebook could very well end up being a relic of a Wild-west Web, a bygone time where anything and everything was acceptable in the name of profit.

It is up to society, to the Web’s citizens, to decide how the issue of privacy and identity will turn out. If only a few voice their opinions, if only a few are cognizant of this crisis and its negative ramifications, then Facebook and other corporations will decide how privacy and identity are managed.

If you think privacy and identity are too important to let the few decide how they are managed, then it’s time for you to act. Write about it on your blog, tweet about it, retweet my article, do whatever it takes to get those who trust you in your various social networks to take note, to listen, to understand, and to ultimately act.

UPDATE: April 20, 2011: With Facebook being credited with facilitating the Middle East uprisings and their desires to move in to China, it appears that they may be bowing to pressure to curb free speech in certain parts of the world.

UPDATE: May 8, 2010: Jeff Jarvis published an interesting article on this topic. See Confusing *a* public with *the* public.

…as the number of streams continue to increase and as the flow rate of each stream picks up, people will grow tired of having to subscribe to, having to join yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP). Does the Web truly need additional stream providers each with their own data silos? Is there a user-centric solution to this rapidly growing, overflowing-stream issue that puts YASP to rest once and for all?

This article answers these two questions in great detail but the succinct preview version is as follows:

1. The Web does not need additional stream providers each who exert significant control over a vast number of individuals, each who require their users to have a separate new user account (a new digital identity)
2. The Web does not need additional closed data islands (data silos)
3. The Web does need a means with which each individual can create, maintain, and control their own identity, efficiently and effectively manage stream conversations, and therefore not be beholden to a few, large data-silo stream providers
4. The only way to accomplish point three is for the emergence of a distributed, decentralized, Open Source microblogging ecosystem that leverages the power of the Semantic Web

Table of Contents

Since some of the following may be too generic for more advanced readers, I’m providing this Table of Contents to help readers navigate to those parts with which they may have the most interest. The first four sections are a general review of the problem and solution. The rest of the article provides my detailed thoughts on this issue.

• A Web of Damned Streams
• A Flock of Twitters
• Why Decentralized?
• Why Semantic?
• Evolving Nova’s Stream Concept
• A Drop of An Idea
• Channeling Your Stream, Seining Your River
• The MicroBlogOcean
• Social Web Versus Social Network
• Anatomy of a Drop
• Some Technical Thoughts
• Some Early Players in This Space
• Conclusion

Although you should feel free to skip ahead, doing so might result in missing a crucial connection.

A Drop of An Idea

In keeping with the metaphor of a flowing body of water, I envisioned a water-cycle like flow from a single idea to an ocean of open discussion. Therefore, I call my model of a decentralized microblogging ecosystem the Meta-Hydrological Model.

With that concept in mind, you can think of a single idea posted by a user as a drop. Just as a user of Twitter adds to a conversation by posting a tweet, and a user of FriendFeed or Facebook makes what is generically called a micropost, a user in this new conversation ecosystem posts a drop. So a drop is equal to a tweet is equal to a micropost.

Here is a simplified, graphical representation of the Meta-Hydrological Model (also called the Meta-Flow for short).

Click to see full size

The aggregation of all of a given user’s Drops is that user’s Stream. Viewed in this way, if a Stream is what a single user produces, then the River is the confluence of disparate users’ Streams. I’ll describe this in more detail later.

Within each user’s Stream, ideas might coalesce into specific topics. I call these Channels (Stream Channels). Channels are Drops that are grouped under a specific topic to form substream categories.

The final part of the Meta-Hydrological Model is what I call the MicroBlogOcean (MBO). The MBO is the sum total of all microblogging activity in the global conversation ecosystem. It is all the conversations, represented by all the Rivers.

Below is a natural, visual representation of this model as seen from space.

Satellite image of the Amazon River delta from NASA's Landsat GeoCover Program

The MicroBlogOcean

As mentioned above, the totality of all microblogging activity is called the MicroBlogOcean (MBO). In this global conversation ecosystem, Drops are constantly being pushed to and pulled from the MBO cloud.

To provide and manage the myriad MBO services, a new type of SaaS model needs to be created. I call this software-based service a Confluence Hub. A confluence is the point where two or more bodies of water meet. Therefore, a Confluence Hub is the place where Drops sent by various users meet up, are processed, and wait for further action.

Notice User has only subscribed to User 3's Channel. Click for full size

This is how the process works. A user’s client sends a Drop to the closest Confluence Hub where an amalgamator combines them for transmittal to all that user’s subscribers. The Drops are organized by Channels, if any, and cached. If a Confluence Hub (CH) is down, then the Drop is automatically rerouted to the next closest hub.

An aggregate is a collection of items that are gathered together from different sources. The role of the client-side aggregator then, is to poll, to query the primary Confluence Hub Server (CHS) of each user Stream to which a user is subscribed, pulling the resultant dataset into their River on a predefined, regular interval.

Only the content the User wants gets through. Click for full size

So, whereas a user’s Drop is pushed to the closest, active Confluence Hub, the Drops of each user that they follow are pulled into their River from the MBO cloud.

Using our hydrological-based metaphor, Drops are created and stored on each owners’ site. This means any Drops that are de facto responses to someone else’s Drop are contained within disparate sites across the Web. Whereas the user’s client would cache all incoming Drops (in their River) and the application might even have an option to save a discussion to disk, the original Drop remains located in the owner’s Stream.

The Meta-Flow concept is not a perfect analogy to a natural hydrological flow. Whereas Drops do travel to Confluence Hubs, copies of those Drops are pulled into each subscribing-user’s client to form their unique River. The MicroBlogOcean therefore contains multiple references to the same original Drop and the Rivers actually flow out of the MBO rather than into it.

Although I personally believe this hydrological-based metaphor does a sufficient job of breaking down and describing the component parts of the overall decentralized microblogging ecosystem, for purposes of user understandability, the terms may need to be replaced with a more generic, globally-recognized nomenclature. Although, what is more globally recognizable than the water cycle?

Social Web Versus Social Network

When talking about the Semantic Web, it’s important to differentiate between social networks and the Social Web. These terms are not synonyms. In fact, the Social Web is not even the sum of all social networks.

Why is this the case?

Today’s social networks are nothing more than the famous walled gardens of the Web—as was previously discussed.

With their closely-guarded data silos, social networks are not full participants in the Web, they are not participants in the interconnected data ecosystem. So, unlike an ecological web (think of a food web), the Web-based Internet is not as much of an intact web as it is a land of social network islands that punctuate an ocean of truly connected websites.

The Social Web, on the other hand, is a fully functioning and healthy ecosystem were all data are globally connected. In my view, the only way to bring to fruition the promise of the Social Web is to embrace the Semantic Web.

The term Social Semantic Web is often used to differentiate between the current social-network based Web and a truly connected Web of Data. Since I believe that the Social Web requires the Semantic Web, I view the two terms as synonyms.

What might a truly connected Social Web look like?

I use this image as a graphical representation of what an open, fully linked, global Social Web would look like (see the caption for the actual description of the image). Imagine that each end point is a user creating their Drops that freely flow down their Stream, into their River, finally ending up in the MBO cloud. Each node, the point were multiple Streams converge, would be a Confluence Hub Server.

This image is a tracing of all the Internet traffic circa late 2006. It is licensed under a Creative Commons License (by-nc-sa/1.0) and created by http://opte.org/

Where would the big social networks appear on this graph?

Twitter would be a single point in this image with a few tenuous tendrils extending out representing the limited access that Twitter allows to their data silos via their proprietary APIs. There would be no lines representing conversations between users as the totality of conversation all occurs within the walled-off Twitter space.

The same holds true for Facebook, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and many of the other social networks. The lines connecting these services would be nothing more than gossamer strands representing the brute-force pushing of limited duplicate content between these data silos.

You might be thinking that conversations regularly occur between users of these platforms. For instance, I can choose to show my latest tweets on Facebook or LinkedIn, I can choose to display my latest Facebook or LinkedIn status updates on Twitter, and so forth. But these are not conversations. They are just snapshots of conversation that are occurring within other data silos.

Anatomy of a Drop

A Drop contains more than just the visible content, more than just the human-readable layer. A Drop is a packet composed of several layers, each providing additional metadata that makes the management and discovery of data more feasible.

Click to see full size

Content Layer: that part of the Drop that is actually intended to be seen by humans; also referred to as the droplet

Metadata Condensate: when the Drop is being assembled, different metadata layers are aggregated together, which are then deposited into a super-metadata layer. This layer encodes all the supporting data that makes extensibility, management, delivery, and discovery of the user’s Drop possible.

The Metadata Condensate layer is composed of five sub layers:

Rich-media Layer: pointers to associated audio, video, or picture files

Semantic Layer: the machine-readable, semantically-marked up metadata

Rights Layer: the granted usage rights for the Drop

Using the proposed Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data as a model, Drops, Channels, and even entire Streams could be marked with usage rights

Security Layer: WebID to tag Drop to specific user; whether Drop is public, private

Stream Management Layer: unique Drop ID; time stamp; GIS metadata (location-based tagging for mobile microblogging); Channel tag for grouping Drop content (allows filtering by other users); whether Drop is to be broadcast to all, a specific user group, or to one specific user; Drop broadcast delay; Drop time decay (a finite lifespan for Drop if desired); client metadata (whether Drop was sent via Web client, desktop client, via a CHS service, etc.)

Semantifying the Drop addressees several key issues that hinder current microblogging platforms. First, by providing a mechanism where machine-readable metadata can be effectively and efficiently associated with Drops, this unlocks each micro data silo, opening it up to outside services to access via query. Second, organizing, grouping, classifying Drops into Channels allows for meaningful filtering of users content. Third, by using a FOAF+SSL backed WebID, privacy and identity management across the MBO becomes possible.

Whereas users can still add tags (via micro and nanoformats) when composing each Drop–and maybe even some basic html markup, like the “a” link tag–the real benefit accrues from the automatic encoding of semantic metadata into the Drop.

Additional ontological encoding could occur on each Drop via a Semantic Interface Options box on the Drop composition panel.

It’s important to note that although each individual user will have the right to determine how much of their microblogging content is shareable across the Web and even with whom it can be shared, in concept, if a user is wishing to participate in the global microblogging community, it is assumed that they will wish others to see what they have to say.

This is just an initial concept of the structure of a Drop. It may be that one or more of the Metadata Condensate layers (or parts of a given layer) should be included under the Semantic Layer.

Since I’m basically working through Nova’s article archive in reverse chronological order, it may very well be that in the future, I’ll scribe thoughts on some of his even older ruminations. So, if that occurs, please pardon this information time dilation.

The Stream

I read Nova’s article, Welcome to the Stream – Next Phase of the Web, with great interest. With all the buzz about Google Buzz over the past eight days or so, this article made me think about the yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP). *1

What is YASP? It is that somewhat exciting but ultimately frustrating realization that there is yet another social networking, microblogging, curated, real-time, threaded-conversation service that you might have to join so that you don’t get left behind.

The idea of user streams is interesting. As I read Nova’s article, the imagery of a kayaker navigating down world-class rapids came to mind.

There is a qualitative difference in streams. Some streams may drizzle like a gentle shower, while others furiously flow like class-5 rapids.

Unfortunately, a higher flow rate does not necessarily equal higher quality. In my experience, there is a noticeable decrease in the signal versus noise ratio as the flow of each stream increases. This is why it is crucial to follow only those people with whom you are genuinely interested in hearing their thoughts. Simply following someone (or following them back) to build your follower numbers is a sure-fired way to increase the noise in your stream.

High Flow Is Not Always Healthy Flow

As users begin to tap into more streams, those streams usually start flowing faster. As Nova states, we need to create filters, or gates, that can discriminately select the signal from the noise, that can help to slow the flood of information.

Look at Twitter. As you follow more and more people, the rate of flow increases. In turn, you must work harder to fish the nutritious data from the swollen data stream. Eventually, the stream can become too treacherous to navigate. So, you either drop a number of people, thereby reducing the flow and hopefully increasing the signal to noise ratio, or you portage on over to another stream with more gently moving data.

This is exactly what some people did last year when they tried an experiment, switching from primarily using Twitter to only using FriendFeed. Of course, that stream quickly became a fast moving torrent as well. So, what’s next? Will these users jump ship once again, looking for the next, best, newest, and maybe calmer body of data to sail?

Well, we already have a new test underway with the introduction of Google Buzz. Many Twitterers have Gmail accounts and many of them activated their new Buzz stream. However, the early consensus from Buzz users is that Buzz is a Twitter-FriendFeed hybrid.

I tried using Buzz for several days but found that it was too much information being shared by too few people. It was a lot of noise and not enough signal.

Of course, my impression could also be the inevitable result of information overload. When you have too many concurrent streams to navigate–Twitter, Facebook, Skype, iChat, an IRC channel or two, email, and Buzz–it becomes a little too much to take in. So, what’s the answer?

Taking a Break From and Portaging Your Streams

The key to navigating successfully and safely in any fast moving, constantly changing environment is to get out of the flow every so often to rest and reassess the situation. Let the flow pass you by and take a break. The stream will continue to flow without you.

Even the best world-class paddlers have to get out of the rapids periodically and take a break. When they return to the stream, they concentrate only on what is ahead and never worry about what has already passed them by.

Sometimes, though, you have to take your kayak out of the water and portage to another stream. That’s an important lesson to us all. You cannot successfully navigate every stream at the same time. Pick a few streams to monitor at a time. Then portage on over to another stream or two for awhile, taking a break from the others.

What does this mean for Google Buzz’s future? What does this mean for other microblogging service providers that inevitably will come to the party, trying to get you to put another kayak into their stream?

Well, as the number of streams continue to increase and as the flow rate of each stream picks up, people will grow tired of having to subscribe to, having to join yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP). Does the Web truly need additional stream providers each with their own data silos? Is there a user-centric solution to this rapidly growing, overflowing-stream issue that puts YASP to rest once and for all?

There is, which is the subject of my next post—A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging.

NOTE

1. YASP: Yes, I just made this phrase and acronym up. Feel free to spread it around the Web, turning it into yet-another-disgusting buzzword (YADB).