Spent the afternoon organizing my head on where we (the G) should go with our social efforts. What do you think?
4 months, 2 weeks ago in Mission, San Francisco, USA.
52 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.
Yes integration into gmail, contacts, calendar, grand central,
gtalk. All these services are great but they are still completely
seperate. One login for everything. Its pointless for google to own
all these services and for them to not be interconnected.
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.
With all the integration grouping if for no other reason is a
privacy issue. I may not mind some people knowing some information
but it should be controllable. As it stands now its all or nothing.
Your jaikus are either public or private but if integration becomes
to such a level additional privacy settings would also be need.
Good or bad when people are added to gtalk they are added into
gmail contacts and vice versa. This kind of link with jaiku would
be good to see. As someone else mentioned presence in jaiku could
be linked to gtalk and maps. It would be quite impressive to see
green, yellow oe red dots all over my google map showing my jaiku
contacts.
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.
52 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
4 months, 2 weeks ago by atmasphere.
second that. I use most of Google's 'social' applications, but it's slightly frustrating that they don't all interconnect.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by arjw.
very cool indeed ...
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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!
4 months, 2 weeks ago by mjohnson.
The common theme here is jaiku becoming the documentation to our life's OS so to speak.
4 months, 2 weeks 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?
4 months, 2 weeks ago by jyri.
Solid ideas here. I like the point about Open interoperability. Look at all the interesting thing. developed outside the box.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by arjw.
I simply would like to see jaiku integrated into other G software, like how gtalk is in gmail...
4 months, 2 weeks 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?
4 months, 2 weeks 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?
4 months, 2 weeks 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?
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by cybette.
Yes integration into gmail, contacts, calendar, grand central, gtalk. All these services are great but they are still completely seperate. One login for everything. Its pointless for google to own all these services and for them to not be interconnected.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by krazykritter.
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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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 ...
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by constantine.
With all the integration grouping if for no other reason is a privacy issue. I may not mind some people knowing some information but it should be controllable. As it stands now its all or nothing. Your jaikus are either public or private but if integration becomes to such a level additional privacy settings would also be need. Good or bad when people are added to gtalk they are added into gmail contacts and vice versa. This kind of link with jaiku would be good to see. As someone else mentioned presence in jaiku could be linked to gtalk and maps. It would be quite impressive to see green, yellow oe red dots all over my google map showing my jaiku contacts.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by krazykritter.
@constantine Care to elaborate on what kind of arrangements comply with your point about 'I own my identity'?
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by constantine.
@Constantine killer comparison, with the bar hopping. Spot on.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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'
4 months, 2 weeks ago by cervus.
as a side note.. I <3 this community :)
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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)
4 months, 2 weeks 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..
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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 :)
4 months, 2 weeks 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$, you immediately loose credibility, in my eyes at least. Now pretending like I never said that, I know OpenID doesn't have anything to do with a universal contact list, but it is one of those bits needed to achieve the larger goal at the end of the tunnel. Imagine everyone on the planet had a server in their pocket which would hose that universal contact list? Ping me if you want to continue this chat off Jaiku, look forward to hearing from you.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by constantine.
Oh shoot. I thought the moniker of M$ 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...
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks 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.
4 months, 2 weeks ago by sevendotzero.
focus on enabling the portability, distribution and aggregation of social networking data, ie. contacts and relationships.
4 months, 1 week ago by viilee.
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.
3 months, 4 weeks ago by autiomaa.