DISQUS

This is certainly something that I'm personally sensitive to, and think that it'll take something of a generational shift to get towards better-design open platforms. One of the things that "open" tends towards is the "middle", since, in order to get more people to contribute, you've got to make political compromises in order to gain a wider following.

Oftentimes this means adding more and more features rather than cutting (or, in writing terms, "editing"). I think a balance between app- and plugin-based platforms is necessary, so you need to find that sweet spot between meeting the baseline needs of a wide audience (motivating developers to want to build on your platform) and providing enough surface areas for devs to hook into that they can build satisfying extensions (see Firefox, Ubiquity and/or Adium).

That said, design succeeds where there is a vision that is checked against a broad reality. I think Apple is succeeding here, and happens to provide a built-in income model as well (whereas the Mozilla community does not).

Worth considering, for sure.

"Here's to keeping the web more open and more social". What a way to end it.

Still, this makes it look mindnumbingly easy. Wow.

I think there are a couple factors here.

First, one of the problems will not be about achieving privacy; it will be about getting heard in the din of democratized technology. When everyone's publishing, how do you rise above and get your ideas heard? This is a fundamental shift -- one that's quite unintuitive for previous generations who felt that anonymity could provide protection.

Second, the web needs to invert itself from a service-centric world where you must repeat your identity on all of them to a user- or citizen-of-the-web-centric orientation. This is what technologies like OpenID are all about... can you define yourself as the primary authority about yourself without relying on a third party service? You should be able to -- but today we know people by the services they use, rather than by the multi-faceted individuals that they are (potentially with accounts across multiple services).

Third, one thing that we need to begin to cope with — or adjust our expectations about — is the concept of decay, which of course is absent from digital technology where everything is designed to persist, perhaps, indefinitely. What does it mean when you can connect with your preschool friends on Facebook after you've graduated from college? Would that be a meaningful or useful relationship? Would such connections crowd out more happenstance but possibly deeper relationships that might spawn from random associations, or by affiliating oneself with people with similar interests.

In other words, we live in a time of information and social abundance; the same assumptions that worked in a time of relative isolation and desolation should no longer apply.

I've written about these subjects previously. Might interest you:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/06/11/thoughts-...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/11/11/privacy-p...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/06/05/privacy-w...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/01/24/pry-to

Yeah, I'd second those. ;)

But I think FriendFeed deserves a mention for something.

You should check out the DiSo Project (http://diso-project.org). We're taking this basic concept, mixing in OpenID and building the components for decentralized social networking on top of projects like WordPress and Drupal.

Any reason why 2.6.2 isn't being detected by WPAU?

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/09/wordpr...

I definitely prefer 1Password. This service just feels odd to me.

I'll stick with Fluid (http://fluidapp.com) and Mailplane (http://mailplane.com)

Also take a look at Demand OpenID (http://demand.openid.net) -- a site for publicly declaring your desire for OpenID support at your favorite sites! There's a simple bookmarklet that makes it easy to add the worst (best?) offenders!

Hey David, this is a great post and I generally support your theme and premise.

I did want to clarify the point you made about my "Leave Britney Alone-esque" rant... specifically: "that a major motivating factor for his rant was an effort to bring attention to his new consulting firm".

I mean, it's okay for folks to think what they want about the comments I made. But it's another thing to re-interpret the intent of my post. I think promoting my company was the last thing on my mind -- and in fact, I hesitated to post the thing in the first place out of concern for how it might come across.

Anyway, it's no big deal, and you don't have to believe me, but it's just laughable (to me at least!) that I would waste 50 minutes at 1am decrying what I felt was Mozilla's lack of direction to somehow promote my company. I mean, I spent 9 months working on Spread Firefox for free, and then I went on to help found Flock, which was built on the Mozilla platform... I was seriously concerned about Mozilla's potential ability to preserve the freedom of the Open Web if they didn't wake up and counter proprietary technologies like Silverlight and Air...!

So that's that. Otherwise, great post. ;)

Actually, the best tool for full-page screenshots, especially with Safari, is Web Snapper. It's not free, but the shortcut key (command-shift-E in Safari) makes it worthwhile!

Check it out:

http://tastyapps.com

Good find dude! That's *really* interesting!

Ha! How did that happen? That's hilarious man -- I think you should be happy that you don't find out about these things like I do -- clearly I spend far too much time on the intertubes!

Anyway, I totally support this idea, and is definitely in line with my earlier hopes for coworking -- leading the way to a truly global network of innovators doing cool things from wherever they want to be. It's also a necessary aspect of evolution and diversity that people come from all over and work on interesting projects... hell, the customers of tomorrow's technologies are certainly not all in the Bay Area -- why constrain the problem/opportunity space to only things that concern them?

Keep me posted on outcomes from this event. I won't be able to make this one, but I'd love to have an excuse to head back East again in the next couple months!

Sweet! I hope you join in the conversation... oh, and don't forget to take the first step by installing the wp-openid plugin on your blog! ;)

These are great, Chris. I especially like "idea handles" (in loops) and considering which crops to cultivate (in farm). I also think that I could spend more time closing loops that I start since, like yourself, I seem good at getting things off the ground, but less good at keeping them in the air over sustained periods of time. ;)

And, did you miss the #themeword mini-meme? Check it out:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/01/02/kicking-o...

Heh, Mr. Tara Hunt. I love you Canadians! ;)

Srsly though, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the project; it's literally neo-natal right now, just beyond a sparkle in anyone's eye. Still, I think it raises the issue about what social networking might look like if it never *started* as a bunch of silos... I'm going mostly on a hunch that being able to have the choice between joining a big silo or rolling your own social node is something that would be good for the current state of affairs, since currently we really can't say, with any credibility, that running your own blog today really puts you in league with the social dexterity of the mega social nets.

Nice work! ...is the source available anywhere? ;)

Check it out:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/1807201...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/1806388...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/splat/1806353675/

Twitter > MSM.

No worries -- great to see that, with all the changes at Flock (including my departure some time ago) the new team has really executed on much of the promise in the original vision! ;)

@Brandon -- Flock is a web browser based on Firefox, so it's unlikely it'll ever morph into an AJAX driven website. ;)

On the contrary, the original idea and goal of Flock was to build a browser that treated people as "first class citizens" through unifying your social connections from various web services. A simple website would find this very hard to do, since you'd have to login against every remote service within the remote website; Flock OTOH is your browser, so it naturally is able to "see" every site you login to and then pull in your connections from it. It's kind of like a social proxy that then builds a smart interface on top of those connections.

As for using it everyday, Flock intends to become your regular browser, so it's even more natural than having to pick a default webpage that you visit every day.

Then again, I can't really speak to their long term objectives; I helped start the company and then lead the initial interaction design and visioning but am no longer directly involved.

From a brief glance, it almost seems like these guys implemented OAuth. Weird. It also has a significant SPOF: "It is only possible to de-centralize SlashID when the system stops relying on Javascript issued from our website. This will happen when browser plugins or core browser modifications which support our protocol are widely available. Until then, the system must remain centralized."

I'd rather stick with OpenID where it works and use 1Password in the meantime.

It doesn't touch your templates... but if the underlying WordPress software changes, you might need to update your template.

Argh, I should have read more closely. Maybe they'll do a private white-label?

Dude, use Satisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com

And you're done! ;)

Heh, I tend to agree with Mike and Lord Kook that this probably isn't the best context for Twitter... and that much of the digital life should be left behind when heading off to BM. Tara and I were more or less able to ditch our social media addiction on our trip to Hawaii and even just proving to ourselves that we could "put the mouse down and walk away slowly" was reinvigorating.

Now, upon your return from BM, I've proposed a way to handle this idea of Group for Twitter with what I'm calling Tag Channels... You can read all about it here. It is a long post, but I'd love feedback on it.