I have an idea for a really cool service that I don’t see myself developing anytime soon. Though if there are some funders and mobile hackers who want to collaborate I would be willing to go for it.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

Last weekend we had a small barcamp in Amsterdam on the subject of Federating Social Networks, XMPP and other random musings:

I got the chance to play around with Twisted/XMPP for a bit with wokkel and it is really cool and something which could be really useful. Programming Twisted is somewhat too counterintuitive to pick up in a couple of hours.

I’m going to set aside some time to read the docs (again) and then continue on the small project of bridging an XMPP endpoint to a comet web frontend. More on XMPP later.

Yesterday like I talked about, we had the Federating Social Networks meetup (Upcoming) at Mediamatic. This resulted in early mornings for those coming from outside of Amsterdam. Tijs, Mark, Pascal and myself took the early train and Blaine Cook and David Recordon had flown in from San Francisco for this meetup. Fortunately there was an espresso machine to keep us alert.

The aim of the day was to talk (see the Jaiku backchannel) about how we could use the technologies at our disposal and the data available to create better experiences for users. It looks like most of the specs are there and the conversation has been going on for most of the year. We should begin building stuff.

Mediamatic at least is dedicated to build something on top of anyMeta which needs to be ready by Q1 2008. The workshop was an effort to gather thoughts on the best way to move forward.

This week also saw the announcement of the DiSo project by Chris Messina. A way of building open social networks using Wordpress as the platform.

Problem statement

We spent quite some time on the problem statement and use cases. The discussion went all over the place both in subject matter, scope and level of detail. At this point I don’t think the philosophical considerations are very useful anymore. This is a broad subject and, yes, everybody has an opinion about it. We need to be a lot more concrete about what we want to build and steps we can take right now to get there. I thought that was clear from the event description but apparently not everybody read that.

The vision that is on the table is quite grand. By distributing and taking ownership of your own data, be it profile information, your relationships, your writing, your pictures or your videos, you get full control. Sites that want to participate in this effort will need to abide by your rules and read and write accepted standards. This means a dramatic redefinition of the way the internet works, so dramatic that it will not happen anytime soon. Also, I don’t think that we can standardize all that in an afternoon.

The problem that we need to solve and which is currently causing painful experiences is: Almost every site and application can be enhanced by adding information about the people you know. How do you do that without replicating effort both for developers and users time and time again?

Finally the list of use cases that we came up with:

• Profile Aggregator (OpenID)
• Access Privacy (profile, contacts, stuff I own, claim stuff/ publications)
• Migration of data/ ownership
• Content discovery/ finding stuff
• Set privacy (noindex, etc)
• Consolidation of data/ profiles
• Personal Messaging
• OpenId - reflection of profiles/ relations
• Referencing accross sites
• Control of representation of copy
• Pingback when your object has been used/ altered

XMPP does it all

A lot of work especially by Ralph is focused on creating a Jabber/XMPP pubsub specification which can be used to post content and updates to and making it easy for interesting parties to be notified of those publications. This is very nice and Ralph’s presentation extolls most of the virtues of XMPP.

Still it will take some time before this becomes relevant for the rest of the web. XMPP is the best thing since sliced bread and I imagine that the guys building it can make it do pretty much everything. There are two problems that hamper its adoption.
First the language and the concepts are sufficiently different that people need a lot of introducing before they are up and running with the concepts.
Secondly once you understand it, there is not much it will do for your blog running on a shared PHP host. Also if you do run XMPP on your own server, you can interface with existing services and you can do anything but there are not any well defined interactions yet.

Mediamatic is aware of this and for their own (PHP based) anyMeta sites and for the rest of the world that wants to participate they are going to provide a bridging server where websites can POST updates using HTTP and the service will publish notifications to interested parties both using XMPP and HTTP depending on the capabilities of the receivers.

HTTP may not be ideal and people fluent in XMPP describe most of the stuff it has been forced to do as hackish. Still, HTTP has a lot going for it. With Atom and REST, HTTP already drives a lot of application functionality over the internet. And with Comet style interaction starting to catch on non blocking HTTP servers will become more and more normal. This will make real time interaction and stuff that is currently not scalable easier.

Moving data

Luis Villa’s post eloquently makes the case for being able to move our data whereever we want. This is quite a big problem and not one that is going to be solved easily if at all.
Sites such as Flickr will allow you to get your data but there needs to be more incentive to open up and more standardization in container formats.

The use case that was discussed of being able to own your pictures, the permalinks pointing to them as well as the comments on those pictures and being able to move that wholesale to a different site strikes me as somewhat too utopian. A site such as Flickr offers you their hosted application and hosts your pictures for you. As it happens Flickr has an API which allows you to get your data back but you will never be able to make a 1-to-1 mapping to another service.

Owning your namespace on a server not your own is a known problem: e-mail has the same problem and it still hasn’t really been solved. A few hosts such as GMail are gracious enough to let you POP your emails off their server, but you still have a middle man that you can’t cut out. Owning your own domain and forwarding it to another service (like Google Applications) seems like the way to go.

I don’t see this issue as going to be solved any time soon. The stakes are too high, the subject is too complex and in most cases a local copy will have to suffice. I have gotten used to losing some data at every significant computer migration. You can’t have your cake and eat it. If you really want to be in control, install phpAlbum on your domain on a generic host and move that around all you want.

Concrete steps towards the future

Marc promised a documentation server with the findings and draft specifications soon. Somewhere early next year Mediamatic will publish their public HTTP to XMPP bridge. Blaine, David and Ralph were supposed to draft something of a spec, but I don’t know when it’ll be made available.

Tijs has been creating quite the list of interesting sites in this space. Like the Attribute Exchange schema supported by OpenID 2.0 which looks very interesting. And a start page for all the standards for this initiative: Data Portability.org.

Another thing would be to start implementing the wordpress plugins listed at the DiSo wiki. I have an hAvatar plugin lying around which needs some testing before release.

A Wordpress plugin that will speak to the XMPP bridge service would need to do the following:

• Add XMPP autodiscovery links to the <head> of the blog.
• Ping the bridge service using HTTP every time a post is made or updated.
• Maybe: listen to notifications from the server for stuff such as blogrolling or trackback.
• Maybe: Publish your friend list as XFN to the bridge so interested parties can subscribe to that.

This won’t be too difficult to implement but it has to wait for the pubsub bridge to become public. It’s looks like the best way to converge to each other is to create stuff.

This Saturday Mediamatic is hosting an event on Federating Social Networks (Upcoming) to further the ongoing dialogue regarding opening the social graph information.

The conversation that started earlier this year and had a big flare with the announcement of OpenSocial just before Barcamp Berlin is going on.

Ralph Meijer presented (announcement on his blog) on the subject during the Web 2.0 Expo on how to solve the problem using XMPP.

At the same time OAuth 1.0 and OpenID 2.0 are coming to fruition and Chris Messina is talking about distributing social networking applications. And Hyves —our Dutch social network— is busy opening up their API.

These are exciting times, but this technological groundwork is just the beginning. The real challenge is making understandable and usable systems using this stuff.

It looks like OpenSocial in its current form is just an app runtime to compete with the Facebook Application ecosystem. We just had a very very crowded session on Barcamp Berlin about OpenSocial with (among others) David Recordon from SixApart where we tried to create some clarification about OpenSocial and ask a lot more questions.

Big questions raised from this session include the following:

1. What does this do for the portability of social networks?
2. How are containers supposed to manage their applications?
3. What is the importance of microformats in this context?
4. How can you make your site friendly to interact with OpenSocial applications?
5. What is Google’s role in control in all of this?
6. Is this spammer’s heaven?
7. Where’s the data stored at?

There was also a lot of talk about privacy which seems to be more important to Europeans than it is to Americans and seeing as we are importing a lot of these services from the USA, we are also importing the same policies embedded in the code.

The question about what Google wants to make searchable, I think is easily answered by first people and secondly with a social graph, Google can provide users with a lot more accurately ranked search results.

Picture by bjoern

And I wondered whether you could write an OpenSocial app that retrieves your list of friends from the social network and POSTs them out to your own repository of social graph information. This way you can write a social network synch’ing tool which will extract your various social clouds from each service and provide you with added value on top of that.
The only thing you would need to do after that would be to align the various graphs by marking people in different networks as being identical.

David replied that some containers might not allow such use of their data, but the data is not theirs to begin with. My profile and friends information is mine, and social networks that do not respect that basic principle will lose me as their customer.

(And about our app, we’ve got a design and API keys, but the WiFi on the venue is proxied, so developing is a bit difficult here.)

Everybody has been completely swept away by the news of Google’s OpenSocial network launching really soon now. This is the stuff we have been eagerly awaiting.

Anyway the API is supposed to launch tonight, so we’ve got a drive to Berlin to digest the stuff and we —we have four pretty good developers in the same car— will try to make one really bomb application or presentation or both during Barcamp Berlin.

I have also contacted Yme Bosma, the guy responsible for the implementation of these APIs by the Netherlands’ leading social network: Hyves for access to their implementation.

We can make some nice stuff with this and I can’t wait.

Today I finally reached the last 10% remaining to give my profile on LinkedIn a 100% completeness rating.

LinkedIn has often been cited as an example of good interaction design because with this small piece of feedback they incentivize their users to fill in ever more complete profiles. Social networking mostly is a game even if it is for business, and with this score they have made it an even more compelling game.

But imagine my disappointment when upon reaching the 100% mark I did not get any kind of end game reward or a clue on what to do next. Usually in a video game upon reaching 100% (i.e. completing the game) you would get an end game sequence explaining the what you just achieved.
In some cases you would also get a new quest even if this only was starting the game anew while retaining your levels. Retaining your levels seems pretty relevant to LinkedIn but suppose there was some deeper meaning to the social network besides filling in my profile and making connections.

Oh wait, there is: Upon completion LinkedIn should offer a congratulatory message and state that now that you have succeeded in their social network, you have everything you need to succeed in the real world. The game goes on in real life: ‘Go out and kick some ass!’ Maybe add some practical pointers on how to actualize your LinkedIn network just as they did with filling in your profile.

So the lesson is that it is a good thing to give your users something to strive for, but also allow for a reward (however intangible) once they have reached that goal (Kars agrees with me). You may indeed make your users quite happy in the proces.

Jyri is liveblogging the meeting and Robert has promised to do a writeup after the fact.

(EDIT: Added a sixth point!)

I very often see ’sheep mentality’ - the masses following the masses. The thing is, masses are only intelligent when they make independent decisions. By and large the sheep mentality leads to a single random occurrence being repeated over and over again with the exact same justification:

The other guy did the same thing.

For example, my parents tend to look for busy restaurants as an indicator for quality. I’m fairly sure lots of people do that. I leave the conclusion of why this leads to incorrect quality assessments as an exercise to the reader.

While people on vacation may be excused for not putting too much thought into their dining decisions, (big) businesses doing the same thing is a real headscratcher to me.

One industry that has elevated repeating stupid decisions to an art form is the movie theater industry¹. The vast majority have cramped seats, huge queues, even when there’s no major premiere, an even larger queue at the concession stand, and they are all paranoid about piracy, blaming it for all their woes.

If you’re a movie theater guy, here are 5 6 free tips. You should make millions inside of a month, if people are anything like me and like watching movies in style.

1. Comfy seats

Convert all but the 2 biggest theater rooms (you need those for premieres) into comfy places with separate, somewhat adjustable seats for every viewer and place them only in positions where you can actually, you know, see the screen. Given the speed of DVD releases, HDTV, home cinema sets, bittorrent, and the iTunes Music Store, you’re the most expensive option on the market and unless it’s opening night you better damn well be worth the cost.

Getting stuffed into a corner, skeeved at a piracy ad insulting your intelligence, slowly getting a hernia is hardly worth 8 bucks. Ostensibly people show up for a relaxing night out with a screen bigger than even the best HD tv has to offer. You should probably deliver on that expectation. Given that the vast majority of your customers are repeat visitors, you’d think this was obvious, but for some reason common sense seems to be a precious commodity in your industry. At any rate, personal experience tells me that the vast majority of showings don’t sell out, which effectively means you have lots of seats taking up space anyway. All this will cost you is the price for some new seats. Big deal.

This doesn’t just make sense in general, it really makes sense: It is my understanding that the share of the movie ticket sales for the movie theater goes up the longer it’s been out. In other words, those packed seats, which are useful mostly for premieres, aren’t getting those movie theaters much income. Actually trying to cater to people who want a good experience for a movie that’s been out for a while just plain makes sense. Instead, those get stuffed in the smallest crappiest rooms in a small chair while the whole theater is empty.

The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that they’re all sheep, incapable of a single original thought.

2. Fix the queues

I know the tech savvy crowd isn’t exactly beating a path to your door, but the number of hoops you have to jump through to reserve a ticket is ludicrous, and usually you still have to stand in a long queue instead of being able to scan a card or a printed barcode or some such, or just enter a reservation code on a terminal. With 30 minute queues, people will learn to use the computers. The local megatheater in Rotterdam actually has 1 machine, and 4 out of the 5 times I’ve been there, it was broken. You could try to treat movie downloaders as murderers… Or you just make it a little easier for them to, you know, give you money. The fact that reservation systems usually expect you to show up a full hour early just to get your tickets is another interesting point. It’s a movie, not a ticket for an overseas flight!²

Concessions are another mystery. A long line for concessions automatically means people just plain skip them. Concessions are easy profit for movie theaters - the markup is large and they don’t have to share any of it with hollywood. More importantly, watching a 3 hour movie while thirsty is not a good experience at all. Unlike DVDs, you can’t pause the theater so you can’t just get up and get a drink without missing anything. This leads to…

3. Breaks are good

Only a few theaters add a break to movies. I get that a break is a logistical nightmare, but almost everyone gets more drinks which is excellent profit, and, frankly, I have deep respect for someone who doesn’t need to take a pee break for the recent rash of 3 hour movies that hollywood has been pumping out. Not every movie is 3 hours, so just break those. Or, don’t break premieres, just break showings that are unlikely to be fully booked. There should be absolutely no problem for your concession stand to handle that sort of thing. If it is, have a second stand inside and open it up just for a break. You get both profit AND create a better movie experience for your clients.

4. Some courtesy would help

In the olden days, friendly movie hosts with a lightwand would escort people from the top of the stairs to their seats if they wanted it. Now they stand at the doors doing idiotic³ ticket checks to make sure everyone that walks in has a ticket, eventhough that’s been checked multiple times already. The elderly, the injured, and the generally impaired now get to narrowly avoid tumbling down the stairs or stepping on a bunch of toes as they try to make their way to the seats in the dark. After all, with over 20 minutes of ads and trailers, hardly anyone arrives ‘on time’ when all the lights are still on.

5. Learn Human Psychology

Your average piracy ad tries to equate piracy with theft. This is just plain stupid. If there is a pirate in the crowd, apparently he likes your theater more than his computer screen. Makes sense. So why alienate the pirates in the audience? Calling someone a criminal is a bit, you know, awkard. I saw an intelligent piracy ad, exactly once, which was a recording behind the scenes of a dutch movie production, where the various cast members thanked the camera (=audience) for supporting them by visiting the cinema. More of those please, because positive messages work better - that’s psychology 101. I actually know that the budget of dutch movies is mostly tax money, but the point remains: That little piracy ad actually made me feel better for watching that movie in a theater.

NB: Half of the points in this article were actually raised by Cristiano when we discussed this in the apple store two days ago.

6. Re-run old movies

This bonus point is inspired by danw’s comment on news.ycombinator.com.

Take one of your new comfy seat theaters, find some old movie with a serious cult following (I recommend Blade Runner especially now that the real director’s cut has been released this year), set up a viewing or two, and make sure you set up a little meet and greet with fellow movie watchers either before, or during a break, and leave it there (with a bar, of course!) after the movie’s over. That way, cult fans from all over the place will go watch their favourite movie on your large screen in your comfy seats, paying you handsomely for drinks, to meet new people with similar interests. Play your cards right and you could kick off the new dating fad. And more people dating has got to be good news for the movie theaters. It’s win, win, win, and some more win.

More people on Portable Social Networks

Yesterday Pascal tipped me off about a brainstorm session by some notables about Portable Social Networks.

They’ve got the stuff on the microformats wiki page right now.

On BarcampCologne (which I’m unfortunately going to miss) there is going to be a lot of activity around this subject, seeing at least the first release of Noserub (German post) a social network aggregator.

Here in the Netherlands Robert had also whipped up an implementation of this concept and he’s planning to hold a meeting around this same subject in Amsterdam. After my talk with Willem, we had agreed that PICNIC could be a nice event in or around which to embed these kind of meetings/devhouses.

And there’s going to b a Social Network DevCamp in Richmond sometime after.

I wrote about this earlier and it’s nice to see it getting adopted all over the web.

Dutch Hyvers

On the other hand, the leading Dutch social network is hinting at opening up its information to the outside world (Dutch article). It’s one of the largest silos of presence, profile and relation information in the Netherlands and as such is incredibly valuable. For now it has been hindered by a complete lack of applications from the outside and arguably amateurish development from the inside.

Yme Bosma —the guy leading the effort— looks like a decent sort and I’m curious as to how this will work out. Things that would be nice:

1. Microformat (hCard, hReview, hResume and XFN) all content on the profile pages of Hyves members.
2. Allow people to set their presence in Hyves using an API.
3. Adopt an existing widget platform for integration in Hyves pages so the amount of widgets available will increase and developers can develop against a target.
4. A smart implementation of OpenID providership would be nice. Log onto third party sites in the Netherlands using your Hyves username.
5. Full application development inside the platform such as is possible on Facebook, judging from the current matureness level of Hyves, looks like it’s too far away to be realistic.

What’s next?

I think hResume and hReview are missing from the spec on the microformats wiki. I will add those today or tonight (I’m not completely sure what the procedure for editing is). Both should be optional but both could add much of the same information already contained on all those sites in a richer and opener fashion.

This does get my hands itching to implement some of this myself but it’s a bit of a conundrum what to implement. I know what the players already in the sphere should implement, but how do you get into the game?

(Posting has been a bit sparse lately. Summer is partly to blame for this. Expect lots of stuff from end of August onward and have a great summer.)