Spent the afternoon organizing my head on where we (the G) should go with our social efforts. What do you think?
1 year, 8 months ago.
49 comments so far
wow - that's a biggie .... please integrate contacts and presence across services (with sync) so I can share my info between gmail, grand central and jaiku for starters
Add a third vote to that. I'd like to see a bit interplay with using jaiku as a mobile connector to google's services, if you will, being a mobile life aggregator.
I wonder what parts of jaiku are already a part of the google contact api that was recently released? That api plus an plug into services such as a regional 411 and google maps (using presence awareness) would be very neat.
I know it would be a bear, but native jaiku clients for major mobile OSes will help jaiku and google best in the short term.
My thoughts: Small pieces, loosely joined - think unix model of command line software.. Open interoperability, no vendor lockin. Open APIs. Inclusive development.
Agreed, an awesome contact system that would be common across GMail, Grand Central, and Jaiku would be cool. Plus a Plaxo-like ability to share my profile to my contacts so when I change something, all my contacts have the change in their contact manager.
A big wish for that contact sharing would be the ability to control the level of access. For instance a public level, an acquaintance level, a friend level, a co-worker level and an everything open level. With a means to pick and choose which piece of contact info I can share with each level.
Of course an ability to then sync that contact list with my local address book or allow other third party services to be tied to it would be sweet!
@atmasphere When you say 'integrate contacts', are you talking about one pool of presence-enabled contacts shared across apps?
@arjw Could you elaborate what you mean by 'mobile life aggregator'? For instance, are you referring to Jaiku's ability to let users follow other people's updates or something else?
@Jyri: yes, I amm referring to that aspect of jaiku to use rss/xml to pull in streamsof information that a person wishes to receive. The extension would be associating this info with the contact, and then allowing those streams to be pushed/pulled as a ppperson desires. If you will, Jaiku being a large document of what one wants to show about their life online, and though its API and integration with RSS and/or the API of other services, connecting those streams together.
Defiinitely scary, and somethiiing tthat we need to understtand a lot more of as social awareness services become more useful and used in various schemes of working online.
Guess I should add please remember this is my personal thread here and it's public. The thoughts represented here, including my own posts, are written in the spirit of open ideation. As such they have zero to do with what G may or may not be doing. I love the ability to have these conversations, it's useful to everyone, it hinges on mutual respect i.e. no trolling or misrepresentation out of context. Thanks.
@Jyri: understood, and thanks for making that clear here.
If jaiku has the ability to embedd itself into other apps, maybe it could become like a chat/presence/microblogginng type item. More than an app or service, but like them both.
@mjohnson ok, a new topic brought up is levels of access control. It would be interesting to hear more thoughts on this, for instance where do you guys stand on the classic debate between predefined categories vs. user-defined groups?
@silversurfer terhere's another topic, embedding. Would you care to elaborate which functions of Jaiku would be worth embedding, and any particular apps where you'd use them?
user defined groups, no question, who is anyone to tell me what predefined label i should apply to my friends? also let me tag my friends so that they can be in multiple categories. always disliked the notion that there are all these services out there that let you tag bookmarks, music, pictures,videos, but what about people?
The microblogging aspect of jaiku would come in handy in anything where collaboration comes thru; but then add aggreation of other content and you have essentially a different type of living document.
I'm with @wconstantine: user-defined groups and permissions should always be something set by the user; and not by the serviice except for admin level functions.
@Jyri and mjohnson i seem to prefer user definition these days as it makes the user part of the process (customized just as you like it) and makes them responsible for the decisions they make (nobody else to blame)
@silversurfer "gtalk is in gmail", yes I often go to gtalk for a sidebar inspired by a jaiku chat for privacy etc.
what @constantine mentioned reminds me of the one thing i really like on pownce: the "Sets" feature for contacts. and you can place a person in more than one set too.
What if jaiku can push that presence issue a bit more. If you will, become a bit like Buddy Beacon, but without all the layers of work that BB has? My favorite aspect of jaiku is that one can see presence on mobile devices and online. Push that to some limits, allow one to plug into a a virtual google map, to have presence and comment within documents, all the way to just having the ability for jaiku to make the mobile calendar and addy book live with who's available. Tie this into voicemail, sms, and email so that presence determes the type of communication and boom you have another nice paradigm shift.
i always wanted a jaiku type service i nthe enterprise where you can have different levels of chatter going on, but all open to one another. example, say jim works at nokia and he is a developer working on the audio system inside s60. when jim writes a jaiku he can choose whether he wants his message to go to his team, the s60 developers, the software and services division or to everyone within the company. likewise image jim comes into work on a monday, he wants to see what other people in his team have done, he loads up jaiku and looks at all the messages which fit into that context. then one day his team has a problem integrating a feature so they blast a message to the entire s60 developers. and so on and so forth, layering your conversations in terms of the amount of people the message is relevant to.
@jyri User definable groups would be preferred. Some people are okay with their email, IM, Skype and Grand Central being public. But some re not. And I think the same concerns and differences are present at each level of sharing for each individual. A look at what people share for Information in FaceBook is a good example of how different each of us consider our shareable information.
As to the aggregation of each person's life stream, maybe that becomes separated from the micro-blogging by adding some additional features to Google Reader? Reader could provide a feed of my life stream for those who want it. I sometimes forget that Google now owns Feedburner, so clearly, everything is getting aggregated by Google already. It's just finding the best way to feed it back out for our individual uses. I notice that some of my blog posts show up in Google Reader moments after posting. If Jaiku could tap into that then the pressure of Jaiku doing the aggregator work would be off.
Not as grand as some of these great ideas but ... contacts organized alphabetically, how long you've been connected, by category (friend, work, etc) if that happens, in lots of different ways ... this could also mesh nicely with @constantine and "levels of chatter" as a visual representation/reminder ...
@jyri yes exactly what I was intending. Keep it connected and seemless across all the G services I use. Share the info so it makes sense and gives an added sense of context where that makes sense too. And of course let me take it with me to my devices and desktop (locally not just through a connection) with sync.
The best example of embedding is chat within gmail. It's visible by default and highly accessible (no need to drill down a menu tree to find it). I'd like to see wide integration, from iGoogle and gmail, to calendars to docments.Search is another interesting subject... custom social searches.
and please, pretty please, don't think for a moment that you control my identity. i don't want other services having to integrate into the google ecosystem by having to use the new contact api, that is bullshit and you know it, i own my identity, period.
well when google released the contact api i know the primary intention was to stop people making websites that asked for your username and password to scrape your contact list, but when i read the following paragraph ...
"The Contacts API allows developers to create, read, update, and delete contacts using the Google Data protocol, based on AtomPub. It also allows for incremental sync by supporting the "updated-min" and "showdeleted" parameters. Please take a look at our documentation to see all the options supported." Source
... it became clear to me that google wants to host my contact list and let people build applications that interact with this google hosted master list. thing is, what if i don't want to use google anymore? OpenID is something I've been reading about for quite a while and something I would love, more than anything, for Google to become apart of.
Then I want all the services I use to stem from that one contact list.
Think of the current way social networks work and map it to real life. Imagine you're partying in Helsinki one night and you go to a restaurant, then a bar, then a club, then a bar for a final round of drinks before heading home. The way things are setup now every time you decide to change venue you loose all your friends and you have to hope they made it to the next location where you have to find them again, now repeat that over and over again and you get to a level of anger and frustration that I'm currently experiencing.
I want my friends to come with me everywhere I go that evening, a fair request. If I bump into an old friend along the way then I want him coming to all the other places I'm going to go to as well.
yea it's a blog post that has been bubbling in my head for months, i'm not joking, months. i need to put it down on paper (keyboard), but first i need to mind map everything first to see how i can fit it together into an essay. this one master contact list, the one and only, already exists today and there are more people using it than facebook and myspace combined, it is called the phone book inside your mobile phone.
I've written similar @constatine at Brighthand and my personal website. I tend to call it a living address book. One where presence, categorization, and messaging all work as part of the same function/application - not as the seperate entities that we have now. In one of those posts, I even remarked that a presence enabled address book would be the smartest means for carriers to get more people to use data services (without taxing the network either). Jaiku is pretty much there, oneConnect from Yahoo has the same idea; but both aren't on devices by default. If address books were this user-controllable social network from the get go, then it would be kinda neat.
@constantine Regarding owning your own address book. I can only imagine a limited number of ways to actually implement it:
1- Make the API CreativeCommons licensed like the SGAPI so that other people can implement the exact same API. This would let Wordpress or some other open source project provide an implementation that you could choose to self-host.
2-Provide an open source implementation of the API across many platforms and let people choose when and where to run it. This would also have to allow the import, export and synchronisation of this data.
like @constantine this has been floating round in my head for a while now.
I "third" the @malach idea.
I fall on the side of user-defined but having some existing "default objects" that make sense is alos needed (things like everyone, Family etc).
Looking at how i view Jaiku, extending the idea of channels could be one way to make this work (subscibe model, make private, multiple administrators...)
One other thing would be some way to make/indicate some sort of hiererarcy an example of what i was thinking of was something like; Groups called Family, Friends, DrinkingFriends, JaikuFriends... Then for example i could define that something for Friends also should always go to DrinkingFriends.
I would also suggest that the user can choose if they expose their grouping strategy (and grouping names!). The names that sound/look good in our head, can go wrong horribly quickly :)
regarding @constantine bar hopping, that's an excellent analogy - but don't forget that sometimes you might leave a place to move away from something/one.
Hope that all made sense (at least it did to me when i was typing it)
Great read folks. Nothing to add from me that hasn't been covered off already.. But yeah. Fantastic conversation. I <3 this community too. That's a blog post in itself..
@ymb: fantastic point, let me use a different analogy. say bob lives with sara and one day bob finds out she is cheating on him, what is the fastest way bob can get back at sara? change the locks to the apartment/house. with that in mind i strongly believe in the future that we will have control to each and every stream of data we produce, in both directions. right now in jaiku if i don't want your photos integrated into my home page i can choose to unsubscribe to them, that is me in control of what information i consume from you. on the flip side if you don't want anyone but your closest friends to see photos of a loved one then you have control at your end to allow who sees those images, you have control over who consumes your information.
this can be done with private keys, like PGP, but that is a field i'm not familiar with and will not touch on in this discussion, instead i refer you to this pdf about how "agents" will act our behalf in the future thanks to the semantic web.
@constantine you are perilously close to diving into the quagmire that is identity and privacy. Having a ‘Contact’ service that can manage rich social Context a.k.a. Bar Hopping will eventually come. Pownce’s notion of sets and it’s richer set of privacy settings is a start in that direction. Twitter’s direct messages is another. In terms of owning your contacts: ownership is a right to control or use, or more specifically in this case the right to move/delete something. So it doesn’t matter that an online service helps you manage your contacts as long as 1. You can easily move them and 2. when you do move them from a service (or individual for that matter) they are truly deleted. For 1. To be achieved, as @adewale points out, we need Open API(s) and Data Formats. Data formats being more powerful. Hence Google’s contact API is a good thing especially since it is based on ATOM. Although without having looked at it, I suspect the Contact API extends the ATOM format as the other APIs do rather than use it as neutral envelop. Extending ATOM is an act no different to M$’s embrace and extend strategy unfortunately.
Overall OpenID doesn’t have anything to do with a rich contextually aware contact service or privacy control for that matter. It is up to the OpenID Providers to innovate in this area although the use of Directed Identity and OAuth will help a lot. Nor would PGP solve the problem you describe – ‘you have control over who consumes your information’. Interestingly a few things were announced last week that all point in the direction of solving this in various ways. Google’s Contact API is an attempt at making Google the centre of your contacts. Yahoo!’s FireEagle is more interesting because it is a small specialised component that manages your location and controls access to it. This is a very good example of @malach Unix Pipe+Filter description…small pieces loosely joined. I just wish they had done the API based on ATOM. And Finally M$ acquired Credentica for their U-Prove technology; Zero-knowledge proof technology that may solve the privacy/control scenario.
So back to the question @jyri posed: Rich contextual control of our contact’s and the posts would be a start. But, and a very big BUT, doing this may actually change the types of discussions that occur on Jaiku. Next would be then portability of our contacts and posts would be another engendering the notion of ownership. I guess being a OpenId provider would not hurt, but being an OpenID Relying Party would be fantastic for me. And it would be cool if Jaiku also used, update or provided a similar service and API to Fireeagle - all three should be done :)
I remember your "Decentralized Me" blog post, thoroughly enjoyed it, nice to see you on Jaiku. One word of advice, don't refer to Microsoft as M$, you immediately loose credibility, in my eyes at least. Now pretending like I never said that, I know OpenID doesn't have anything to do with a universal contact list, but it is one of those bits needed to achieve the larger goal at the end of the tunnel. Imagine everyone on the planet had a server in their pocket which would hose that universal contact list? Ping me if you want to continue this chat off Jaiku, look forward to hearing from you.
Oh shoot. I thought the moniker of M$ was rather fitting for the Context ;-) Control and ownership and all. Relationships and openness verses underhanded tricks. That is not to say that "embrace and extend" is intentionally used for either $ or control. Nor always true of MS or others. Actually in the Identity space it is really nice to see the lead taken by MS.
On the "server" in a pocket...that is why I really like [http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/ Nokia's Mobile Web Server] project...
regarding the mobile web server: definitely, i've met with some of the members of the team responsible for that project several times, they're at the Nokia campus 15 minutes away from where I live.
Just got back on Jaiku after a long day of other things to find all the good stuff in this thread. Just for context, in this role they call here PM I shepherd the Social Graph API (Brad Fitzpatrick sits there on my right) and the team that created the Contacts API. It's good to see you guys bringing up the issues that are on your mind. And it's good that you treat Jaiku as part of that ecosystem. This channel rocks.
no problem mate, ask and you shall receive, after all you're one of the few people who got together and built this awesome tool for us to enhance the friendships we already have and to build new ones with people we enjoy engaging with in discussion. for that, we are, at least i am, eternally grateful.
here is something to wrap your head around, more philosophical than practical: there are roughly 6.5 billion people on the planet today, the same number of operating systems should exist.
when you're born, like a fresh install of windows, you can't do much, but as you get older you begin seeing the world in terms of correlated sets of data which acquired knowledge and tools, like programs for said operating system, help you decipher. say you're 16 years old and you're walking through a shopping mall and happen to smell the same perfume your girlfriend wears, you begin thinking about her, laying next to her in bed in the morning after a wonderful night together. the data set that is the scent of the perfume triggered a reaction unique to you and only you.
different analogy. you're in a restaurant and decide to order meatballs. after your first bite you begin thinking about your grandmother who lived in italy and as a child you used to watch her make those meatballs by hand while you played domino with your father and grandfather.
what do memories have to do with services? websites today that host images, while another hosts video, while another hosts documents, while another hosts calender information, while another hosts your list of friends, are unaware of each other.
the smell of the perfume is just another smell if it doesn't have that context that it is the same one your girlfriend wears. likewise flickr doesn't know that the picture of the meatballs you took at the restaurant remind you of your grandmother, summers in italy as a child and the game of domino.
back to being born and like an operating system after a fresh install being totally useless, the data you build over time, like memories, should be yours to keep and the services created, like programs, need to plug into your sources of information in order to be useful.
you asked: where should google go with their social efforts?
why not look at nokia and what they're trying to do with ovi. it isn't about creating a youtube competitor, a flickr competitor, a google maps competitor, all of the competitors on the market that mimc those services stand alone. the key to their differentiation is the integration, the flow of data between them.
data by itself is useless. why does the number 42 make geeks smirk? without the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy it [42] means nothing. the data around data is more important than the data itself, but the mentality that anyone other than the creator of that metadata should own said information is inherently flawed.
the quicker google, microsoft, yahoo, facebook, nokia and the other people trying to make a quick buck off every click i make, every item i tag and every memory i try to remember, realize that i am at the center of my universe, not them, the better.
And a really good starting point for building the foundations for @constantine scenarios would be for Google to start accepting OpenIds, as a relying party to selected services beyond blog commenting. Jaiku being one of the best potential services for this. The aim: starting to build out normative rules for OpenId Providers...reputation potentially based on the G's knowledge of all the various OpenId enabled sites, blog comment usage etc and more...a page rank for OPs. Helping to avoid an Internet that Jonathan Zittrain warns of. Now that would really kick butt IMHO.
I see presence & relevance as being key to the next step change in personal communications. Jaiku has an opportunity to build the first presence enabled communication world that works. Being able to automatically or manually manage both my presence & availability, depending on who's trying to contact me, would be great.
I also think there should be possibility to have different access levels for different groups of people. There could be some default groups like "Family", "Friends", "Other" but it would be great if user could have possibility to modify those for his/her own. Whatever you do, please remember to keep User Interface easy to use.
49 comments so far
wow - that's a biggie .... please integrate contacts and presence across services (with sync) so I can share my info between gmail, grand central and jaiku for starters
1 year, 8 months ago by atmasphere
second that. I use most of Google's 'social' applications, but it's slightly frustrating that they don't all interconnect.
1 year, 8 months ago by rcadden
Add a third vote to that. I'd like to see a bit interplay with using jaiku as a mobile connector to google's services, if you will, being a mobile life aggregator.
I wonder what parts of jaiku are already a part of the google contact api that was recently released? That api plus an plug into services such as a regional 411 and google maps (using presence awareness) would be very neat.
I know it would be a bear, but native jaiku clients for major mobile OSes will help jaiku and google best in the short term.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
very cool indeed ...
1 year, 8 months ago by atmasphere
My thoughts: Small pieces, loosely joined - think unix model of command line software.. Open interoperability, no vendor lockin. Open APIs. Inclusive development.
1 year, 8 months ago by malach
Agreed, an awesome contact system that would be common across GMail, Grand Central, and Jaiku would be cool. Plus a Plaxo-like ability to share my profile to my contacts so when I change something, all my contacts have the change in their contact manager.
A big wish for that contact sharing would be the ability to control the level of access. For instance a public level, an acquaintance level, a friend level, a co-worker level and an everything open level. With a means to pick and choose which piece of contact info I can share with each level.
Of course an ability to then sync that contact list with my local address book or allow other third party services to be tied to it would be sweet!
1 year, 8 months ago by mjohnson
The common theme here is jaiku becoming the documentation to our life's OS so to speak.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
@atmasphere When you say 'integrate contacts', are you talking about one pool of presence-enabled contacts shared across apps?
@arjw Could you elaborate what you mean by 'mobile life aggregator'? For instance, are you referring to Jaiku's ability to let users follow other people's updates or something else?
1 year, 8 months ago by jyri
Solid ideas here. I like the point about Open interoperability. Look at all the interesting thing. developed outside the box.
1 year, 8 months ago by jpblogger
@arjw Which disturbs me a bit. I'm careful about what I post elsewhere but I'm more open here. I really should be more careful here.
1 year, 8 months ago by FyreFiend
@Jyri: yes, I amm referring to that aspect of jaiku to use rss/xml to pull in streamsof information that a person wishes to receive. The extension would be associating this info with the contact, and then allowing those streams to be pushed/pulled as a ppperson desires. If you will, Jaiku being a large document of what one wants to show about their life online, and though its API and integration with RSS and/or the API of other services, connecting those streams together.
Defiinitely scary, and somethiiing tthat we need to understtand a lot more of as social awareness services become more useful and used in various schemes of working online.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
Guess I should add please remember this is my personal thread here and it's public. The thoughts represented here, including my own posts, are written in the spirit of open ideation. As such they have zero to do with what G may or may not be doing. I love the ability to have these conversations, it's useful to everyone, it hinges on mutual respect i.e. no trolling or misrepresentation out of context. Thanks.
1 year, 8 months ago by jyri
@Jyri: understood, and thanks for making that clear here. If jaiku has the ability to embedd itself into other apps, maybe it could become like a chat/presence/microblogginng type item. More than an app or service, but like them both.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
I simply would like to see jaiku integrated into other G software, like how gtalk is in gmail...
1 year, 8 months ago by silversurfer
@mjohnson ok, a new topic brought up is levels of access control. It would be interesting to hear more thoughts on this, for instance where do you guys stand on the classic debate between predefined categories vs. user-defined groups?
1 year, 8 months ago by jyri
@silversurfer terhere's another topic, embedding. Would you care to elaborate which functions of Jaiku would be worth embedding, and any particular apps where you'd use them?
1 year, 8 months ago by jyri
user defined groups, no question, who is anyone to tell me what predefined label i should apply to my friends? also let me tag my friends so that they can be in multiple categories. always disliked the notion that there are all these services out there that let you tag bookmarks, music, pictures,videos, but what about people?
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
The microblogging aspect of jaiku would come in handy in anything where collaboration comes thru; but then add aggreation of other content and you have essentially a different type of living document.
I'm with @wconstantine: user-defined groups and permissions should always be something set by the user; and not by the serviice except for admin level functions.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
@Jyri and mjohnson i seem to prefer user definition these days as it makes the user part of the process (customized just as you like it) and makes them responsible for the decisions they make (nobody else to blame)
@silversurfer "gtalk is in gmail", yes I often go to gtalk for a sidebar inspired by a jaiku chat for privacy etc.
1 year, 8 months ago by jpblogger
what @constantine mentioned reminds me of the one thing i really like on pownce: the "Sets" feature for contacts. and you can place a person in more than one set too.
1 year, 8 months ago by cybette
What if jaiku can push that presence issue a bit more. If you will, become a bit like Buddy Beacon, but without all the layers of work that BB has? My favorite aspect of jaiku is that one can see presence on mobile devices and online. Push that to some limits, allow one to plug into a a virtual google map, to have presence and comment within documents, all the way to just having the ability for jaiku to make the mobile calendar and addy book live with who's available. Tie this into voicemail, sms, and email so that presence determes the type of communication and boom you have another nice paradigm shift.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
i always wanted a jaiku type service i nthe enterprise where you can have different levels of chatter going on, but all open to one another. example, say jim works at nokia and he is a developer working on the audio system inside s60. when jim writes a jaiku he can choose whether he wants his message to go to his team, the s60 developers, the software and services division or to everyone within the company. likewise image jim comes into work on a monday, he wants to see what other people in his team have done, he loads up jaiku and looks at all the messages which fit into that context. then one day his team has a problem integrating a feature so they blast a message to the entire s60 developers. and so on and so forth, layering your conversations in terms of the amount of people the message is relevant to.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
@jyri User definable groups would be preferred. Some people are okay with their email, IM, Skype and Grand Central being public. But some re not. And I think the same concerns and differences are present at each level of sharing for each individual. A look at what people share for Information in FaceBook is a good example of how different each of us consider our shareable information.
As to the aggregation of each person's life stream, maybe that becomes separated from the micro-blogging by adding some additional features to Google Reader? Reader could provide a feed of my life stream for those who want it. I sometimes forget that Google now owns Feedburner, so clearly, everything is getting aggregated by Google already. It's just finding the best way to feed it back out for our individual uses. I notice that some of my blog posts show up in Google Reader moments after posting. If Jaiku could tap into that then the pressure of Jaiku doing the aggregator work would be off.
1 year, 8 months ago by mjohnson
Not as grand as some of these great ideas but ... contacts organized alphabetically, how long you've been connected, by category (friend, work, etc) if that happens, in lots of different ways ... this could also mesh nicely with @constantine and "levels of chatter" as a visual representation/reminder ...
1 year, 8 months ago by jpblogger
@jyri yes exactly what I was intending. Keep it connected and seemless across all the G services I use. Share the info so it makes sense and gives an added sense of context where that makes sense too. And of course let me take it with me to my devices and desktop (locally not just through a connection) with sync.
1 year, 8 months ago by atmasphere
and regarding how this can be used across all the google service, let every "social object" be "jaikuable"
let there be a conversation around a document i created, let there be a conversation around a calender entry or video or picture or whatever
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
The best example of embedding is chat within gmail. It's visible by default and highly accessible (no need to drill down a menu tree to find it). I'd like to see wide integration, from iGoogle and gmail, to calendars to docments.Search is another interesting subject... custom social searches.
1 year, 8 months ago by silversurfer
and please, pretty please, don't think for a moment that you control my identity. i don't want other services having to integrate into the google ecosystem by having to use the new contact api, that is bullshit and you know it, i own my identity, period.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
@constantine Care to elaborate on what kind of arrangements comply with your point about 'I own my identity'?
1 year, 8 months ago by jyri
well when google released the contact api i know the primary intention was to stop people making websites that asked for your username and password to scrape your contact list, but when i read the following paragraph ...
"The Contacts API allows developers to create, read, update, and delete contacts using the Google Data protocol, based on AtomPub. It also allows for incremental sync by supporting the "updated-min" and "showdeleted" parameters. Please take a look at our documentation to see all the options supported." Source
... it became clear to me that google wants to host my contact list and let people build applications that interact with this google hosted master list. thing is, what if i don't want to use google anymore? OpenID is something I've been reading about for quite a while and something I would love, more than anything, for Google to become apart of.
I want to have one list of contacts, just one, I'm sure you've read this blog post talking about social networks as air.
Then I want all the services I use to stem from that one contact list.
Think of the current way social networks work and map it to real life. Imagine you're partying in Helsinki one night and you go to a restaurant, then a bar, then a club, then a bar for a final round of drinks before heading home. The way things are setup now every time you decide to change venue you loose all your friends and you have to hope they made it to the next location where you have to find them again, now repeat that over and over again and you get to a level of anger and frustration that I'm currently experiencing.
I want my friends to come with me everywhere I go that evening, a fair request. If I bump into an old friend along the way then I want him coming to all the other places I'm going to go to as well.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
@Constantine killer comparison, with the bar hopping. Spot on.
1 year, 8 months ago by rcadden
yea it's a blog post that has been bubbling in my head for months, i'm not joking, months. i need to put it down on paper (keyboard), but first i need to mind map everything first to see how i can fit it together into an essay. this one master contact list, the one and only, already exists today and there are more people using it than facebook and myspace combined, it is called the phone book inside your mobile phone.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
I've written similar @constatine at Brighthand and my personal website. I tend to call it a living address book. One where presence, categorization, and messaging all work as part of the same function/application - not as the seperate entities that we have now. In one of those posts, I even remarked that a presence enabled address book would be the smartest means for carriers to get more people to use data services (without taxing the network either). Jaiku is pretty much there, oneConnect from Yahoo has the same idea; but both aren't on devices by default. If address books were this user-controllable social network from the get go, then it would be kinda neat.
1 year, 8 months ago by arjw
@malach second on 'small pieces loosely joined'.
@constantine re: master contact list, check @stoweboyd's musings on the buddy list as the 'centre of the universe'
1 year, 8 months ago by cervus
as a side note.. I <3 this community :)
1 year, 8 months ago by malach
@constantine Regarding owning your own address book. I can only imagine a limited number of ways to actually implement it: 1- Make the API CreativeCommons licensed like the SGAPI so that other people can implement the exact same API. This would let Wordpress or some other open source project provide an implementation that you could choose to self-host. 2-Provide an open source implementation of the API across many platforms and let people choose when and where to run it. This would also have to allow the import, export and synchronisation of this data.
1 year, 8 months ago by adewale
like @constantine this has been floating round in my head for a while now. I "third" the @malach idea.
I fall on the side of user-defined but having some existing "default objects" that make sense is alos needed (things like everyone, Family etc). Looking at how i view Jaiku, extending the idea of channels could be one way to make this work (subscibe model, make private, multiple administrators...)
One other thing would be some way to make/indicate some sort of hiererarcy an example of what i was thinking of was something like; Groups called Family, Friends, DrinkingFriends, JaikuFriends... Then for example i could define that something for Friends also should always go to DrinkingFriends. I would also suggest that the user can choose if they expose their grouping strategy (and grouping names!). The names that sound/look good in our head, can go wrong horribly quickly :)
regarding @constantine bar hopping, that's an excellent analogy - but don't forget that sometimes you might leave a place to move away from something/one.
Hope that all made sense (at least it did to me when i was typing it)
1 year, 8 months ago by ymb
Great read folks. Nothing to add from me that hasn't been covered off already.. But yeah. Fantastic conversation. I <3 this community too. That's a blog post in itself..
1 year, 8 months ago by whatleydude
@ymb: fantastic point, let me use a different analogy. say bob lives with sara and one day bob finds out she is cheating on him, what is the fastest way bob can get back at sara? change the locks to the apartment/house. with that in mind i strongly believe in the future that we will have control to each and every stream of data we produce, in both directions. right now in jaiku if i don't want your photos integrated into my home page i can choose to unsubscribe to them, that is me in control of what information i consume from you. on the flip side if you don't want anyone but your closest friends to see photos of a loved one then you have control at your end to allow who sees those images, you have control over who consumes your information.
this can be done with private keys, like PGP, but that is a field i'm not familiar with and will not touch on in this discussion, instead i refer you to this pdf about how "agents" will act our behalf in the future thanks to the semantic web.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
@constantine you are perilously close to diving into the quagmire that is identity and privacy. Having a ‘Contact’ service that can manage rich social Context a.k.a. Bar Hopping will eventually come. Pownce’s notion of sets and it’s richer set of privacy settings is a start in that direction. Twitter’s direct messages is another. In terms of owning your contacts: ownership is a right to control or use, or more specifically in this case the right to move/delete something. So it doesn’t matter that an online service helps you manage your contacts as long as 1. You can easily move them and 2. when you do move them from a service (or individual for that matter) they are truly deleted. For 1. To be achieved, as @adewale points out, we need Open API(s) and Data Formats. Data formats being more powerful. Hence Google’s contact API is a good thing especially since it is based on ATOM. Although without having looked at it, I suspect the Contact API extends the ATOM format as the other APIs do rather than use it as neutral envelop. Extending ATOM is an act no different to M$’s embrace and extend strategy unfortunately.
Overall OpenID doesn’t have anything to do with a rich contextually aware contact service or privacy control for that matter. It is up to the OpenID Providers to innovate in this area although the use of Directed Identity and OAuth will help a lot. Nor would PGP solve the problem you describe – ‘you have control over who consumes your information’. Interestingly a few things were announced last week that all point in the direction of solving this in various ways. Google’s Contact API is an attempt at making Google the centre of your contacts. Yahoo!’s FireEagle is more interesting because it is a small specialised component that manages your location and controls access to it. This is a very good example of @malach Unix Pipe+Filter description…small pieces loosely joined. I just wish they had done the API based on ATOM. And Finally M$ acquired Credentica for their U-Prove technology; Zero-knowledge proof technology that may solve the privacy/control scenario.
So back to the question @jyri posed: Rich contextual control of our contact’s and the posts would be a start. But, and a very big BUT, doing this may actually change the types of discussions that occur on Jaiku. Next would be then portability of our contacts and posts would be another engendering the notion of ownership. I guess being a OpenId provider would not hurt, but being an OpenID Relying Party would be fantastic for me. And it would be cool if Jaiku also used, update or provided a similar service and API to Fireeagle - all three should be done :)
1 year, 8 months ago by fin
I remember your "Decentralized Me" blog post, thoroughly enjoyed it, nice to see you on Jaiku. One word of advice, don't refer to Microsoft as M$, you immediately loose credibility, in my eyes at least. Now pretending like I never said that, I know OpenID doesn't have anything to do with a universal contact list, but it is one of those bits needed to achieve the larger goal at the end of the tunnel. Imagine everyone on the planet had a server in their pocket which would hose that universal contact list? Ping me if you want to continue this chat off Jaiku, look forward to hearing from you.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
Oh shoot. I thought the moniker of M$ was rather fitting for the Context ;-) Control and ownership and all. Relationships and openness verses underhanded tricks. That is not to say that "embrace and extend" is intentionally used for either $ or control. Nor always true of MS or others. Actually in the Identity space it is really nice to see the lead taken by MS.
On the "server" in a pocket...that is why I really like [http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/ Nokia's Mobile Web Server] project...
1 year, 8 months ago by fin
regarding the mobile web server: definitely, i've met with some of the members of the team responsible for that project several times, they're at the Nokia campus 15 minutes away from where I live.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
Just got back on Jaiku after a long day of other things to find all the good stuff in this thread. Just for context, in this role they call here PM I shepherd the Social Graph API (Brad Fitzpatrick sits there on my right) and the team that created the Contacts API. It's good to see you guys bringing up the issues that are on your mind. And it's good that you treat Jaiku as part of that ecosystem. This channel rocks.
1 year, 8 months ago by jyri
no problem mate, ask and you shall receive, after all you're one of the few people who got together and built this awesome tool for us to enhance the friendships we already have and to build new ones with people we enjoy engaging with in discussion. for that, we are, at least i am, eternally grateful.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
here is something to wrap your head around, more philosophical than practical: there are roughly 6.5 billion people on the planet today, the same number of operating systems should exist.
when you're born, like a fresh install of windows, you can't do much, but as you get older you begin seeing the world in terms of correlated sets of data which acquired knowledge and tools, like programs for said operating system, help you decipher. say you're 16 years old and you're walking through a shopping mall and happen to smell the same perfume your girlfriend wears, you begin thinking about her, laying next to her in bed in the morning after a wonderful night together. the data set that is the scent of the perfume triggered a reaction unique to you and only you.
different analogy. you're in a restaurant and decide to order meatballs. after your first bite you begin thinking about your grandmother who lived in italy and as a child you used to watch her make those meatballs by hand while you played domino with your father and grandfather.
what do memories have to do with services? websites today that host images, while another hosts video, while another hosts documents, while another hosts calender information, while another hosts your list of friends, are unaware of each other.
the smell of the perfume is just another smell if it doesn't have that context that it is the same one your girlfriend wears. likewise flickr doesn't know that the picture of the meatballs you took at the restaurant remind you of your grandmother, summers in italy as a child and the game of domino.
back to being born and like an operating system after a fresh install being totally useless, the data you build over time, like memories, should be yours to keep and the services created, like programs, need to plug into your sources of information in order to be useful.
you asked: where should google go with their social efforts?
why not look at nokia and what they're trying to do with ovi. it isn't about creating a youtube competitor, a flickr competitor, a google maps competitor, all of the competitors on the market that mimc those services stand alone. the key to their differentiation is the integration, the flow of data between them.
data by itself is useless. why does the number 42 make geeks smirk? without the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy it [42] means nothing. the data around data is more important than the data itself, but the mentality that anyone other than the creator of that metadata should own said information is inherently flawed.
the quicker google, microsoft, yahoo, facebook, nokia and the other people trying to make a quick buck off every click i make, every item i tag and every memory i try to remember, realize that i am at the center of my universe, not them, the better.
1 year, 8 months ago by constantine
And a really good starting point for building the foundations for @constantine scenarios would be for Google to start accepting OpenIds, as a relying party to selected services beyond blog commenting. Jaiku being one of the best potential services for this. The aim: starting to build out normative rules for OpenId Providers...reputation potentially based on the G's knowledge of all the various OpenId enabled sites, blog comment usage etc and more...a page rank for OPs. Helping to avoid an Internet that Jonathan Zittrain warns of. Now that would really kick butt IMHO.
1 year, 8 months ago by fin
I see presence & relevance as being key to the next step change in personal communications. Jaiku has an opportunity to build the first presence enabled communication world that works. Being able to automatically or manually manage both my presence & availability, depending on who's trying to contact me, would be great.
1 year, 8 months ago by sevendotzero
I also think there should be possibility to have different access levels for different groups of people. There could be some default groups like "Family", "Friends", "Other" but it would be great if user could have possibility to modify those for his/her own. Whatever you do, please remember to keep User Interface easy to use.
1 year, 8 months ago by autiomaa