A while back I read a post by Boris about how OpenID is not really easy to use (yet). He is completely right, and if Boris can’t use it, our moms definitely do not stand a chance.

I had a conversation about this with Ted Rheingold of Dogster, who was thinking of implementing OpenID for their users so people could user their Dogster logins to log in to affiliate third party sites.

A very important issue for him is that a lot of his users are not geeks and do not really want to get into the technological side of things. In most cases people will not be familiar yet with OpenID and you want to shield them from the complexities while still offering the benefits.

Do I have a OpenID?

When confronted with an OpenID login box, this is the first question that people —like Boris— are confronted with. What is this OpenID thing and do I have one or where do I get one?

Luckily more and more sites are offering hosted OpenID identities to their users. Wordpress.com does this for their blog owners and LiveJournal does this as well. Most people will probably prefer to use one of these hosted solutions offered by a third party site instead of hosting their OpenID themselves.

This way identities will be created until most people will have multiple OpenIDs. That still does not solve the problem of knowing that you have an OpenID and knowing what it is. I will propose a solution to this problem just after the next point.

URLs for what?

The whole concept that you use an URL to login —though I think it is quite elegant— will be difficult to explain to users, who already have trouble telling their login names and e-mail addresses apart. Adding another entity that you can use to login at sites, will only add to the confusion.

Signing in with e-mail addresses is firmly settled but it did take some time to get there. We may get to the same level with OpenID (and hopefully replace e-mail based logins altogether) some day but that is too distant currently. URLs are generally perceived as user unfriendly and normal users should not have to deal with them too much (yet).

Maybe i-names will be a solution to this sometime, but I don’t see it becoming mainstream any time soon.

Solve away the URLs

Taking both previous points together: most people will use a hosted OpenID solution and people do not want to type URLs, we can just abstract away the URLs completely.

When logging into an OpenID consuming site, that site can provide a selector with a couple of well known sites providing OpenIDs. This list of OpenID providers should be attuned to the target audience so they are familiar with these sites. With a fairly small list of providers, you can probably cover a large part of your user base.

I have made an example login box that works this way. It gives users the choice between several well known sites or the possibility to fill in your own OpenID. This is just a mockup which you can adjust in any way you like. You could expand the different login options or present them anyway you like. A site which already takes such an approach is the site for the band Rooney. You could also display the generated OpenID to the user at some point to get them accustomed to the OpenID they will be using.

Using that selector and a textbox users can pick a site they have an account on and fill in their username. The consuming site can then construct an OpenID URL from the given username and use that to log the user on. So taking my Wordpress.com username illustir it would construct my OpenID http://illustir.wordpress.com/ automatically (see the example).

What site are you taking me to?

The step where you leave the site you are logging into for another site can be a bit distressing for users. The approach that sites such as Wordpress.com take by having their own identity provider which looks and feels familiar dampens this transition a lot.

Large sites using OpenID should generally have their own provider so that they can control and attune the experience for logging users in.

Dogster’s use for OpenID

Suppose Dogster wanted their users to be able to log into third party sites using ther Dogster login credentials. This seems like it is exactly the kind of problem that OpenID is meant to solve. Especially in the case where the login is more a dependent syndication —a third party site affiliating with a bigger site— than that it is a general login (though nothing stops it from working that way as well).

So in the Dogster case they should start their own OpenID provider and OpenID enable all their accounts which are both relatively easy steps. Then, third party sites could use a Dogster login to log onto their site by simply becoming an OpenID consumer and by constructing the correct OpenID from the Dogster login.
The only problem with the Dogster case is that they use e-mail addresses as usernames and you would have to construct an URL with the e-mail in it. You probably would not want to spread e-mail addresses in that fashion.

This approach can be taken by any big site which wants to enable its users logging in elsewhere with the same credentials.

Update: I updated the example to be more clear and more educational about the actual OpenID that is being constructed.
Besides that a lot of people are missing the point. I am completely in favor of browser integration rich identity homepages and everything. Go out and build them already, but should/could/would are not going to help us right here right now. Given Livejournal+Wordpress+AOL almost everybody already has an OpenID but most of them do not know it yet. This —admittedly trivial example— is meant to fix that.

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.

The buddy list is key

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.

Yet another social network

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.

Microformats to the rescue

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.

Photograph by Jeremy Keith

Photograph by Tijs Teulings

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:

hCard

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.

XFN

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".

hResume

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.

hReview

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.

OpenID

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.

Consolidating or delegating

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.

Completeness and Clients

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.

Use case: Get an Avatar for somebody

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.

My avatar retrieved from my Flickr profile page

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.

Use case: Get registration information

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.

Use case: Find out who I trust

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?

(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.

Two more short recaps of Reboot presentations.

Stephanie Booth - While we wait for the Babelfish

Another presentation for which I lost my (quite extensive) notes. Stephanie laid a finger on a sore point in online interaction. The fact that the internet is a place of linguistic islands where some multilingual travellers strike bridges across the chasm.

The problem is both on a strategic and a technical level, the first of which is already so difficult that it has precluded much work on the technical level thusfar. It is quite hard to agree upon how to let people indicate which languages they are comfortable with to what level and how to display content from multiple languages on a site.

If we figure the strategic part out, the technical implementation should come a lot easier. An interesting talk especially for those of us who are multilingual.

You should check out the talk page or her site where she has written up a lot of the talks of Reboot.

Alexander Kjerulf - Happiness

Image courtesy of Stephanie Booth.

I love Alexander’s approach to life, work and pretty much anything. I think I have not met anybody more positive than him yet. His talks usually are of a highly motivational nature, insightful and entertaining.

Next year I might skip on this though because knowing you will like a talk becomes too predictable. Being a reader of his blog and also being familiar with some TED talks on the subject of happiness and psychology, some of the material sounded a bit familiar to me, but the delivery by Alexander made up for that.

In his truly Epicurean philosophical view, Alexander lays out the meaning of life (happiness) and how best to achieve it along with practical tips and common misconceptions. It turns out that being happy is not a difficult thing at all.

All you need is:
1. Friends, family, love
2. Meaningful, fun work
3. Living a good life

He takes an uncompromising stance for happiness and against what he sees to be negative things, which is very refreshing. The two biggest threats to happiness are television and consumerism. If you see yourself indulging in any such behaviour stop it right now and read the writeup Stephanie made of this talk.

We got a small notebook on Reboot to jot down our thoughts. I made extensive notes during the first half of the first day and during lunch I then managed to lose this book. I’m writing this from memory which should still be very accurate, but might not completely capture my thoughts of the moment.

Jeremy Keith did a presentation early on the first day about Soul online which was a great combination of right and left brain. His talk about soul and provenance was a nice story with a microformat sneaked in here and there. His idea, that who you are online is defined by your presence, ties into current projects which create and combine presence streams.

Transparency

This does raise issues about privacy, authority and reputation. A quote by Gibson says that we cannot escape the power of transparency: “It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.”

People are multifaceted and are becoming more and more transparent. So this way you would be able to see a complete picture of someone and you would have increasing difficulty hiding parts of yourself from people. A big objection to be raised by this, is that by tieing together the story we tell ourselves, we lose control about the story we tell others.

One idea we had to solve this is to create a service which will disinform webservices for you. So suppose you give it your Flickr login, it will create ten more Flickr users under your name with semi-random information and pictures associated to you. This way a casual Googler will have a very difficult time to form an accurate and reliable picture of you. Increasing crap might be our best way to privacy.

Provenance

The concept of provenance —I think a very difficult word for non-native English speakers— is a nice way to check the reliability of people online and to form yourself an image of someone you ‘meet’ online. This is nice but people change their minds, ideas progress and evolve over time. Someone who held one political or religious view in the past, may have changed that.

This is not a big problem, it is in fact very human, but currently people in general do not respect that. Most people are more inclined to trust someone who looks like he is sure of what he is saying and has said the same thing for all his life. People who are not confident or who flip-flop are less trusted.

I hope the future with its unimaginable tools of transparency makes people adjust.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (organizer of The Next Web conference) has gotten into a bit of a rumble with Plazes CEO Felix Petersen. Late Thursday afternoon Felix notified Boris that he couldn’t attend The Next Web conference because of a major bug with the new Plazes and an illness of his daughter. Can you imagine how amazed Boris was when he noticed that Plazes (Felix’s own product) placed him in Kopenhagen at the Reboot conference.

TechCrunch has taken up the story, providing some more details with the title “Plazes CEO Busted By His Own Product”. I have to agree with Boris for now because cancelling to go to Reboot is regretful, but lying about it is just a shame. Let’s see if Felix will respond with his side of the story.

Sorry about the delay, my stay in Copenhagen was busy and exhausting, both of which are not very conducive to coherent writing. I will post my report of Reboot as a series of posts in the course of this week. Today part one.

I had booked Reboot blindly because my experience from the previous year had been so positive. I expected it to be a mixture between the new and the old. Getting new ideas and concepts by talking to interesting new people but also getting in touch again with the familiar faces from the previous year.

I flew into Copenhagen on Wednesday with my plane landing around five and the Preboot drinks starting in Kongens Have at six. Seeing as I had to check into my hostel first, this made for a tight schedule. I’m glad I was still a bit familiar with Copenhagen so I could find my way around easily. Like last year I was joined at Sleep in Heaven by a couple of other Rebooters.

This year’s Reboot also coincided with a major change in my life. My activities in various spheres on- and offline had dropped to near zero while I was busy graduating and I have only just begun taking them up again.

After having finally graduated in March, everything is more or less up in the air. I have started reorienting myself but I’m not in too much of a hurry. Reboot looked like it should be a nice break and a good place to refocus on what I should do next.

I had thought I would be less busy after graduating, that however proved to be false. Seeing as I still have to finish a course at university, wrap some stuff up at my graduation, do the odd web development gig, help Tipit.to make true on its promise and pursue my diverse passtimes of writing, photography and sports, I keep busy.

This mix also made the default question asked during a conference ‘What do you do?’ a bit hard to answer. I usually defaulted to Web Developer which is the easiest to explain and understand.

The Preboot drinks pretty much confirmed my feelings. In a very relaxed atmosphere in the park, preliminary introductions were made, hands were shaken and interesting conversations had. Seeing all those known faces and friendly words, was like taking a warm bath.

After some drinking, the evening ended with everybody finding a nice place to eat in town. I turned in early to be fresh for the first day of Reboot of course!