Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
Yesterday we had the FOWA roadtrip drink with Ryan Carson in café de Jaren. It was a nice gettogether for the Amsterdam based crowd.
During the raffle Maarten Lens-FitzGerald won the free ticket to FOWA. He will undoubtedly have a great time at the conference.
It’s great to have visitors in Amsterdam and showing them the Dutch scene. Amsterdam will have a PICNIC just before FOWA which is a strange event in many ways.
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
This Monday night in Amsterdam there’s going to be another road trip drink for a big Web event in Europe: The Future of Webapps. Check out the road trip site (Upcoming) there are quite some people coming out to hang out, chat about webapps and say hello to Ryan Carson.
The location for this event is set in Café de Jaren just like the last one with the O’Reilly people for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin this October. Come say hello and join us.
The Future of Webapps looks to be an event with a great lineup of speakers scheduled this October 3-5 in London. Cristiano from Four Starters is going to attend and covert this event for us.
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
The afternoon sessions of dConstruct also contained a lot of interesting stuff which I won’t cover in complete detail, but I’ll touch on some stuff (read Jeremy’s observations).
The main designer of Flickr and of Moo had a conversation about community management and design and the both sites. Not much notable stuff for anybody familiar with community management methods and the history of Flickr but interesting and pleasant enough to hear from the people directly involved nevertheless.
Matt Webb had a widely disparate presentation with a lot of notes small and large about experience design. It is my solid conviction that Webb can present pretty much anything and make it interesting because he is not only a really good presenter but also incredibly knowledgeable and erudite. A pleasure to watch and pretty impossible to recount.
The most important thing I take away from Matt Webb’s talks is that I —and the rest of us— should read more books instead of the short attention span stuff we are involved with online.
His slides and more material are up and he himself is not completely happy with how it worked out. Somebody told me that Webb’s talk lacked coherence and an overarching story and I tried to convince them that that was the exact point of the alphabet format.
A lot of stuff discussed on dConstruct was very interesting and familiar. It is good to meet like minded people and rehear the importance of the methodologies and the rationale behind them so that you too are able to explain, advocate and implement them in your own practice.
The concept of experience design may be a bit vague. Anybody who makes anything is in a way an experience designer but we don’t call them that. What do experience designers add to this? Is it possible to say stuff about experience design without referring to the iPod?
I think the idea does have merit and it is so hard to graps because it encompasses almost everything —it is radically multidisciplinary— and involves a greater than the sum of its parts outcome. Anybody knows it immediately when they get a great experience, but it is not very clear how to create one.
Friday, September 7th, 2007
I’m over at Brighton already soon to be joined by Reinier and Cristiano to cover this weekend’s events over here. dconstruct looks to be a great event. The program is filled with interesting speakers and the venue is packed.
What I am doing currently is a cross between web development and interaction design which is going towards experience desing. Most of the principles and examples are ones which are very familiar and which I am already trying to apply in daily practice. It is nice to have them retold by practical luminaries to fix these principles and strengthen the arguments to be able to advocate experience based design.
Here are some notes for the morning’s talks. The edits are quite rough, but I don’t have the time or opportunity right now to do proper writing.
Jared Spool started off by giving us some examples of succesful experience design such as Apple and Netflix. He told us the same success stories we have heard countless times before. It would have been more interesting if he had told us what we need to do to get to the same level, but of course he does not have the ready answers for that question.
One interesting observation is that these successes are getting the attention of board rooms all over the place. Board attention promises a lot of opportunities but experience design gone bad can also result in some catastrophic failures.
He then talked about how succesful experience design can be done by either research of the users and the target audience or by really thinking stuff through. There are good things to be said for either approach.
He finally said that succesful experience design is invisible and it integrates the user and the business and is incredibly multidisciplinary.
A nice talk about the importance of experience design with a lot of examples but not with that many concrete strategies to actually create a good experience. The essence of the field contains within it some elusiveness.
Then Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path started talking about how the Experience is your product for all your users care about it. No user cares about the technical details or the internals, you need to provide your users with a good experience.
There are technological innovations that make it possible to completely change the way products are made and stuff works and it revolutionizes the experience instead of playing the more features game. Talked about TiVo, the Kodak camera and the Wii.
He talk about the importance of focusing on products with great experiences. That you need an experience vision to sail for which will serve as a guideline for everything that you do.
Products are people too (The title of Matt Webb’s presentation on Reboot9 this year.) and the same things that make us like people also make us like products.
Leisa Reichelt talked a lot about how the waterfall model that is still quite pervasive throughout the software industry is bad and how a more iterative model dubbed the ‘Washing Machine’ is better attuned towards how people work.
I learnt the waterfall model for software development and project management at university. I think there now are some elective courses on agile methodologies but as we already commented in the post “The IT world moves too fast for universities”, they take some time to catch up.
Waterfalls are bad because they assume that you know what you’re doing when you start, assume that design is a discrete process step that stops at a certain point in time to be implemented and it assumes that it is a single discipline contained in a single phase. This is inherently not how people and designers function in large and complex projects.
She then talked about using agile methodologies and combining them with User Centric Design. This is still quite experimental and open and there is a lot of trying out and mixing and matching to do to find a combined methodology that works.
That’s all for now: I’ll write a wrap up of the conference at the end of the day or maybe tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
This is a delayed entry about a small session I held on Reboot about social networks. It ties in nicely to a recent series on Four Starters about trust and how friends are a solution to this.
In this article I will lay out why social networks are too important too leave in other people’s walled gardens and I will lay out a tentative way to connect the gardens and cultivate your own using microformats and other open standards.
Feedback is greatly appreciated.
Social networks and your online identity were prominent in various Reboot talks this year. I lifted Stowe Boyd’s quote: “The buddy list is the center of the universe.” (see slide). This has been true always but is ringing more so as the web matures and we are seeing the breakdown of centralized application models.
In a recent article, Dare Obasanjo wrote about the same subject and how he thinks that Facebook is going to be a big driver in this space. Maybe for America, but I don’t see this happening for Europe in the near future.
And does it seem like a good idea to have all the social information of the world under the control of one company?
But as Dare says, knowing who I know and who I trust, whether that information is in your address book or in your IM application, is usable in other contexts and can greatly improve the trust and interaction in those contexts. You apply the wisdom of crowds to a subset of people —the people you know— to circumvent the trust breakdown Reinier wrote about in current sites.
My session was after that of Willem Velthoven (write up) who talked about their anyMeta social networking application. Their angle is to reduce the duplication of effort and enable sharing of data. Willem spoke about how he got quite sick of filling in his profile on every social networking site he wanted to participate in.
I have the same feeling and that is mainly what stopped me from filling in my Facebook profile, that and the fact that nobody I know is on Facebook. I could not bring myself to fill in another profile and try to get all my friends onto a new social network just because it looks like the next big thing.
Putting your profile information into these closed social networks gives them a lot of value but you rarely get the option of retrieving that information or using it elsewhere. The facebook API is an exception and is one way of getting access to data while it stays firmly in the silo. At what terms you can get at the data and what you can use it for is firmly in the hands of Facebook.
What I propose and what we talked about during my session is the concept of Portable Social Networks enabled by microformats. A social network that is open and readable and can be with you anywhere you want. During the Mediamatic session we discussed the use cases and the issues that would crop up and I invited people to attend my session for a discussion on the technical aspects.
We had a brief chat afterwards with interested people and after a break I was joined by some people among whom Willem Velthoven and Jeremy Keith (his post) to talk further about the technical stuff. I got the impression that some of the people attending my session were happy —maybe relieved even— that there was also a technical session to be found on Reboot.
I will go into deeper technical detail in a following post but the concept is to use microformats to markup most of the information found on a typical Myspace, Facebook or Hyves (the Netherlands’ most prominent social network) profile page. This way you can either get the data out from supporting social applications or hook into the network by hosting your own identity web page with correctly formatted data.
So what can we do with technology we already have (POSH+microformats)? As it would seem, a lot:
Your hCard can contain most of your personal information including your personal details, your address and your picture. This is equivalent to the personal details and picture which are usually listed on any given social network.
Most social networks have a prominently visible list of friends and a count of your total number of friends. This is very easy to implement using XFN. You can markup the links to the people in your network with the rel=”" metadata which XFN defines. XFN allows you to hook into the network from anywhere. So an XFN link from suppose Hyves could also lead to a profile page on another social network or a self-hosted one. Or at least, that is the vision.
This way you can also differentiate between trust levels withouth using numeric values which Reinier also talked about would be necessary. I am bound to trust a friend more than a contact and you could derive more relations like that.
You could also link to other sites where you have a profile or store data such as your Flickr account, your del.icio.us bookmarks or any other site. The rel="me" value could be used for this, but it is required to be symmetric, so those other sites would have to link back using the same rel="me".
A lot of social networks also allow you to markup your current job, sometimes your previous places of employment as well and in many cases also your school history so you can get in touch with former school friends.
This information is very similar to the information you can markup using hResume. You could only present the information you want to share in a casual social network but you might want to enter a full hResume to provide all the functionality of professional social networks such as LinkedIn or Xing.
Most social networking sites and even Flickr have you keep lists of your hobbies, favorite music, movies and books. You could easily mark these up as hReviews and have the fn be an URL to a generally known catalog for that item. For books I would say something such as Librarything or Amazon (with an associate ID!), for music maybe Last.fm and for movies probably IMDb.
This also solves the problem Willem suggested could arise when we use different (language) titles for the same object. Just link them all to the same uniquely identifying resource.
The microformatted information listed above can be on any page you want, in fact it probably already is if you have a Flickr or a Twitter account. I do think that there is a case to be made for linking this to your OpenID.
OpenID solidifies the notion of identity online and creates a place for everything to come together. It gives you a URL with which you can refer to a person and you can be reasonably sure that the person and the URL belong together.
Applications that will want to use this kind of information will probably already ask for your login credentials. Those credentials could very well be an OpenID from where on you could automatically retrieve a load of information as described above.
The question is: do you host this information yourself or do you have someone else do it for you? Since I already host my own OpenID at http://alper.nl, I have already started by embedding an hCard there and I am building the MySpace-esque portal page with all my information on there (preview).
Not everybody will want to host this themselves, but it is analogous to OpenID. Anybody can self-host their OpenID but they can also use a hosted version and the same for the providers. If at any time you want to switch OpenID providers, just change the reference.
The various internet sites which host your profile information such as the social networks and the profile sites such as MyBlogLog or 30boxes need only to mark up their essential data with these standards for it to become instantly accesible and portable.
Even for those hosting this information themselves, it would be nice to have some sort of interface beyond editing the HTML yourself. For instance it would be nice to have an ‘Add as friend’ button on your own site which would ask for your permission to add somebody to your XFN list.
You can make the markup as rich as you want or you can leave stuff you don’t want to share out. Adoption and convention is completely up to you. There are advantages in adhering to a certain standard, but smart clients should be able to deal with holes in this picture.
Below are some use cases which can be realized today already and will also work if not all of the information is present.
I already talked about this in a previous article (“OpenAvatar - Combining OpenID and hCard”). This concept is just an extension which loads more data onto the page. If a page —such as an OpenID page— contains an hCard with an associated picture, you can retrieve it.
I already wrote a parser as a webservice which takes a URL and returns the associated picture. This parser can take either my OpenID or my Flickr profile (which contains an hCard). This way you can get an avatar for someone that they can manage and update to their own liking.
This concept had already been brainstormed on the microformats wiki.
A lot of information you need to fill in once during registration such as your full name, date of birth and some other stuff can be gleaned from the hCard. The site getsatisfaction.com already offers to scrape this information from an hCard supporting profile when signing up, saving you the trouble to fill it in.
Flickr lets users list their preferences in music, literature and cinema on their profile page. This listing could be marked up as an hReview with a rating of 1.0 on a worst/best scale of -1.0 to 1.0 (like is 1.0, dislike is -1.0). Then I could reuse it on all the social networking sites that want to know my favourite movies.
The stuff Dare and Reinier talked about with building trust networks and using that information can be realized by walking the XFN web.
Any site imaginable can be improved by adding the knowledge of my network. Imagine IMDb which shows you which movies your friends have recently watched. Or anything really, and all this without having to add your friends on every such network.
Wouldn’t that be a dream?
Monday, June 18th, 2007
(This post got stuck somewhere in the queue. Tomorrow my longer post about Portable Social Networks.)
Willem Velthoven was scheduled to speak about anyMeta on the second day. I was already familiar with Mediamatic and their work and Willem had already contacted me about their social networking offering but his talk provided a lot of insight anyway.
Willem on the left (picture by Julian Bleeckr)
I did not know that Mediamatic is significantly in the social networking business. They seem to implement a great number of them on top of their standard anyMeta platform. Having done this a number of times, they began to wonder if they could abstract away the commonalities to reduce the duplication of effort. Willem talked about how his personal information is duplicated on a great number of websites and how this gets tiring.
AnyMeta is also the system as it has been used for the Reboot.dk website for before, during and after the event itself. It is a structured wiki which takes some getting used to but I think is quite rich in functionality. The only thing I am missing right now is a fine grained setting to receive notifications from the system.
Willem also talked about the API which any anyMeta site exposes at a standardized URL and which provides hooks to do pretty much anything you would want to with the site.
OpenID support both ways —by which I think he means both being an OpenID, accepting OpenID logon and being an OpenID provider— is supposed to be forthcoming.
In his talk Willem outlined the use cases he envisioned a networked social networks should accommodate and what the problems would be that come up with that. He was also very curious if other people had already started doing the same so that no effort would be duplicated.
I had registered myself on the Reboot site to host a conversation about the technical aspects of implementing social networks using OpenID. I mentioned that this could be a great follow-up to Willem’s talk to first talk about the need and the use cases for an open social networking system and then talk about the technical means we already have to our disposal to realise such.
See the following post on my talk.
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Reinier and I went to the International OpenCoffee Meetup in Amsterdam today to start the conference a day early. Although this was my first Dutch OpenCoffee meeting, I did recognize a few people including Saul Klein, Conor O’Neill and Dick Hardt (who doesn’t know him). I met some new faces including some Dutch, French, British and Israeli attendees. Most of them will be present tomorrow at The Next Web conference and some of them will be presenting.
I had a nice talk with Reinier who has been extremely busy with TipIt and therefore had not that much time for Four Starters recently. TipIt has a stand tomorrow at The Next Web conference, and I will be making a short film to at their stand to see how far they have come in the last few months. They wanted to release tomorrow for the conference, but they rather (obviously) do some more beta testing. I am excited!
