How to build the Open Mesh

Emerce eDay 08

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My name is Marc….

•Happy to be back in Holland

•Our platform is called PeopleAggregator

•I’ve written this book “How to build the Open Mesh”

•And I’m here to talk about the future

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My backyard fence

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Children are our eyes into the future

•DJ Mimi’s first experience

•Just walked up to the turntables and took over

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Integrate my family life

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Two constituents for this treatise

•Practitioners build systems, portals, web sites, applications, dashboards, web services•Creating their own solution

•Want to be a compatible puzzle piece in the mesh

•Marketers need to describe what’s going on•Educate, facilitate conversations, proselytize

•Digitize their brand, market their product or services

•Form alliances, find revenue streams

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Chaos of a distributed nature

•Battle of the behemoths

•Constantly changing world

•All software is about people, needs social features

•Where’s the business model?

•With each new trend, comes another upset applecart

•Many many ecosystems, in each region

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Open is the New Black

•Do you think MySpace would have opened up – if Facebook didn’t do it first?

•Who would have thought that Microsoft would open up – or produce Live Mesh?

•Y! OS is actually very well architected, now they just have to execute!

•Google needs the web to stay open

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Act pragmatic, but dream like a visionary

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All of life is a compromise

•Who’d have thought we’d be this far along?

•Proprietary formats versus Open standards

•Centralized versus Distributed

•Keeping up with the Joneses

•BigCos versus small Independents

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We’ll be living in a distributed world

•Widgets, OpenSocial and Facebook apps

•International, not just English

•Everything is in the Cloud

•Long Tail publishing and sales

•Work at Home, virtual offices, outsourcing

•Global economy

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Everything is a URL in the Cloud

•A Person is a URL (domain address)

•A Group is a URL (http://ABC.com/abc)

•A Conversation is a URL

•A Media item is a URL

•An Event is a URL

•A Post (of every kind) is a URL

•Meta-data and structured content make things smart

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Two-way APIs are key

•Take data out as easy as put it back in

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Access controls and privacy

•What if I don’t WANT to be part of the mesh?

•Control who sees:•My profile

•My social graph

•My content

•What I am doing

•Where I am

•Establish trust

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Open Standards are our Infrastructure

• RSS = subscription format• Atom = subscription and publishing

protocols• XMPP = real-time transport• OpenID = who I am• oAuth = who gets access to what I have• OpenSocial = lots of social functions• Portable Contacts = accessing contact lists• Microformats = reviews, ID, events,

friends, place• FOAF = rdf schema

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Our Infrastructure

•Pipes, wiring and clouds for all to use

•Redundant – rely upon no one vendor

•Underlying ID layer

•Show Context and State

•Shared Knowledge Bases

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Look for common, and standardize

• LiveWeb = real-time communication

(Converse, Presence, Microblogging, Streaming):• Twitter, Meebo, IM, Vid Conf, VoIP, Seesmic, Qik

• Watch = your friends and content sources (Activities, Subscriptions):

• Newsfeed, FriendFeed, RSS Readers• Express = yourself via text, media, links

(Publish, Upload, Comment, Rate, Bookmark, Review):

• blog, podcast and vlogging tools, IPTV channels• Media Gallery = your media stored ‘somewhere’

(Upload, Share, Tag):• Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, Picassa, blip.tv,

Metacafe

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What every social app needs

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Must display

•Who’s here now and what they’re doing

•Comments and Ratings in this place

•The Content of this place and My Content

•The Activities of this place and My Activities

•My Profile

•My Social Graph

•My Media

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Open: Source, Data, Standards, Ideas

•Open Source: make it your own

•Open Data: use the data yourself

•Open Standards: agreeing to work together

•Open Ideas: give it away and benefit in many ways

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NEA

•Nobody owns it

•Everybody can use it

•Anyone can improve it

•We stand on the shoulders of others

Doc SearlsDave Weinberger

Doug Engelbart and Mimi

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Work with others, form alliances

•We need to show that open can benefit vendors – as well as end-users

•Alliances of non-overlapping agendi

•Competition means something different – when we live in the shadows of behemoths

•We must live off the crumbs they leave behind, while keeping our heads up high

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Figuring out how it’ll unfold

•Pure chaos

•We’ll be explaining and translating for years to come

•No one set of standards or approach

•Lots of different kinds of platforms

•Early adopters will lead the way

•Adhere to our principles:•“Bill of Rights for Users of Social Media”

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My back yard fence

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The Open Mesh Architecture

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#1 – ID, Persona, Groups, Social Graphs

•It’s all about me, the decentralized me•And my Friends•And the Groups I’m a member of•And the Personas which I go under•ID Hub - your own underlying ID layer•Utilize:

Personal

Contacts logo here

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•When all Content is in the Cloud

•Paid, Free and YOUR stuff - too

#2 – Persistent Ubiquitous Content

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•By adding meta-data (tags and info) with content, it makes it smarter

•By storing this content on shared public servers with two-way APIs we can bake this stuff into our apps and services

•The “Our Data Server” effort is an example of this idea

•Just think “semantic web”

#3 – Structured Content

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Collective “We” is constantly evolving

• Buzzword du jours:

•Social Networking

•Citizen Journalism

•Shared Galleries

• Crowdsourcing

• UGC

• Twittering

• IPTV channels

• Narrowcast shows

•That’s why we need to invite our friends into new services

•Cause we want to try out these new things

•Be part of the Community Commons

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We can all be web celebs

•Share your profile, social graph, content•Be part of a shared social graph

•Voice your opinion; post, comment, rate

•Try out new services, move your data around

•Participate in Groups, Communities, Social Media apps, Message boards, Conversations

• Folks like Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis

• Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Leo LaPorte

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So I’m proposing….

• The “Our Data Server” effort

• Our Data will be a simple service that stores and aggregates one’s social graph in a public place and allows fans to sign up, rate, leave comments, etc.

• Our Data will be used by Celebs to ‘invite’ their social graph into new services

• NOT controlled by a particular platform

• Early example of how the open mesh can evolve and prosper

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•The real-time is becoming infrastructure for persistent conversations, on-going communication and a real-time transport

•IM, micro-blogging, video confs, streaming

•Presence, context, fun

•XMPP is a standard in place to unite the LiveWeb together

#4 – Live Web

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•Tools + Community + Commerce fosters new kinds of creativity and control

•Normalize disparate data from multiple sites

•Reach out to your peers for Help from within the Tool

•Share assets and buy/sell in a marketplace

•Pricing can adjust to context and time

#5 – New kinds of Tools

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•Dashboard + modules

•ID baked in

•4 Inter-changeable tools (multi-vendor):

•Standard UI toolbox ‘components’

•Customizable environments

•Tied into CMS, LiveWeb and web services

#6 – Reusable User Interface objects

•Gallery

•Express• Watch

• LiveWeb client

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•Standard Social Networking verbs

•Two-way APIs, Activity feeds

•Constructs like Events, Places and People

•Persistent, re-entrant Conversations

#7 – Infrastructure

•Send a Message

•ADD as a Friend

•Synchronize

•Bookmark

• Join or Create Group

• Comment or Rate

• Tag or Categorize

• Follow, Subscribe to

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#8 – Underlying Constructs

• People: ID Hub, profile pages (public/private), aggregated Social Graphs, privacy controls

• Media items, Content Posts, Permalinks• Messages, Persistent Conversations• Events, Places and Items• Groups, Entities, Collections and Directories• Tags and Categories• Lots of kinds of Pages, with any kind of module• Widgets: both going out and coming in• External Accounts: synchronize, point to, update

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•Everybody has to make a living, so we need APIs and infrastructure to monetize

•Buying and selling all sorts of things

•Matching user profiles to……

•Auctions, Listings, Transactions

•Monetize our attention

•VRM – vendor relationship marketing

#9 – Marketplace

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•Identity oriented

•Content oriented

•Leverage real-time transport

•Mesh architecture

•Microcontent publish/subscribe

•Route posts to your preferred tool

•Master list of destinations and services

#10 – Standards

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Data Sharing Summits

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How can we all contribute to help build?

•Each platform should mesh with all the other meshed platforms (eco-systems)

•The chaos of multiple markets, dimensions and platforms necessitates the open mesh

•We’re all the glue between the colliding BigCo tectonic plates

•This strategy plays well around the world•Each personal mesh will mesh into all

other meshes, have their own knowledge base(s)

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Conclusion

•Compelling User experiences is what it’s all about

•Our Data is for web celebs

•Underlying ID layers is where to connect to

•Persistent Conversations will arise

•Social features will be in all software

•The Cloud, persistent and structured content will enable new experiences

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PeopleAggregator is the reference design

•Source code available•Free to non-profits and government

agencies•Enterprise license available (with support)•Also available via a ‘PayAsYouGo’ license

•Starting at $2,500•No support

•We also offer SaaS packages•Can move to a license deal at any time

•Consulting, custom work available

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BBM is an International company