The DiSo Project

Chris Messina La Cantine

May 13, 2009Paris, France

diso-project.org

what if you’re not google?not facebook?what’s in it for you?or what if don’t have or don’t want accounts with them? or if you want to keep your accounts separate?this is where the diso project came from. explain simple history.

barcamp is an example of a real-world distributed social network.

judging from barcamp.org, it’s clear that we lack the tools that we need to effectively and productively organize ourselves.

Similarly, with coworking — our effort to prop up shared workspaces for independents —

working alone sometimes really sucks!

social networking in isolation also sucks...!

as we invite technology into our lives, technology must change for us too.

this means that the space between our online and offline lives is decreasing.

and that’s a good thing.

Source: University of Winnipeg

Quickly I want to point out why BarCamp is an example of a organic rhizomatic structure.

Simply put, BarCamp encodes the instructions for creating BarCamp in the event itself. By attending the event, you learn how to run the event. There’s no magic. it’s transparent.

As each new node shoots out from the original, it could be severed from the original and reproduce more of the same, adapting to conditions as necessary, and not reliant on the parent in any way.

We see this with the many permutations of the *camp brand... WineCamp, HealthCamp, CookCamp, RailCamp, etc.

Web 2.0

I’m going to dive right in here...

the promise of Web 2.0 has yet to be realized. we still have a lot of work to do here.

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called ‘harnessing collective intelligence.’)”

— Tim O’Reilly, Grand Poobah 2.0

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”)

Emphasis mine.

“Data is the new Intel Inside.”

Photo credit: Adam Tinworth

Now, it’s not that Facebook is evil. But it’s about the context in which we find this juxtaposition. Or, as Tim O’Reilly has astutely observed, “Data in the new Intel Inside.”

•The perpetual beta becomes a process for engaging customers.

•Share and share-alike data, reusing others’ and providing APIs to your own.

•Ignore the distinction between client and server.

•On the net, open APIs and standard protocols win.

•Lock-in comes from data accrual, owning a namespace or non-standard formats.

Five rules

But Tim also had five other rules that accompanied his definition from back in Dec 2006.

(review rules)

it’s as though he really saw the future here. Hindsight tells us that he certainly called cloud computing before it happened. But it’s equally important to learn the history of your industry and understand how we got to where we are now.

VS

you could describe the current situation as a competition between facebook and google.

VS

VS

The Open Web

but you’d be missing the bigger picture, and you’d have already lost.

the battle for the future of the social web has begun

quite simply, the battle for the future of the social web has begun and players are starting to take sides.

and open source doesn’t matter like it used to.

“...We’ve moved beyond the business models that insist that every line of software be open source: they couldn’t scale and tended to treat openness as an end in and of itself, rather than as a means to an end.

Today, if you look at the most successful open-source businesses, none of them pass the ideologues’ unrealistic and counterproductive “100-percent freedom” litmus test. Not a single one of them.

And that’s OK.”

—Matt Asay, CNET

and this represents and important shift historically.

the machines are finally starting to serve us — and by “us”, I mean people who don’t live and breathe TechMeme or spend all of their time in code.

That is, I mean mere mortals.

Service-centric architecture

Service-centric value

Source: Mick Hagen (mickhagen.com)

and so we arrive at a situation where facebook has a valuation of $14B. because they’ve erected such effective walls around their garden and gathered so much information about people that companies want to do business with facebook, and not with the individual.

Source: Le Monde

this is a little dated now, but at the time it showed the preference to different social networks around the world. you see names like myspace, facebook, bebo... but there’s no mention of individual bloggers or people who run their own websites. there’s no acknowledgement of those living outside of these walled gardens... those who inhabit the “open web”.

Citizen-centric architecture

the web citizen has agency

again, when you have these things, you have a certain kind of durable freedom

Identity

this is how facebook sees me, but I can’t edit this.

zachklein.comwhat if i wanted my homepage to look like this? zachklein.com

Access & Authorization

Plaxo Pulse (importing Flickr)

access to classes of friends and contacts

Fire Eagle & Dopplr

access between services, where you can specify which service has access to what data

Brightkite

global/high level privacy, and then diving in to more specifics

it is my belief that more control over how you share leads to people wanting to and being confident about sharing MORE. help set people’s expectations about who can see what, and sharing will follow.

Contacts

portable contacts...

Activities

FriendFeed

Anatomy of an activity

Actor verb object

Cloud computing

now, the future is all about cloud computing... so there’s a question... where can you store all your stuff?

c:\

what is the c:\ drive in cloud computing?

c:\

icons by Seedling Design and Fast Icon

so you need a way to refer to these cloud-based applications like you used to...

c:\

meanwhile we have hybrid apps like these that are also being thrown into the mix with infinite storage but a native experience. and these all require identity of some sort.

icon by Seedling Design

which brings me back to openid.

as I mentioned before, with discovery, you can use your OpenID as a universal pointer to all of your services, so when a great new web applications launches, you simply sign in, provide authorization and BOOM, you can get to work.

None of this “invite your friends” and all that. Activities Streams become a passive mechanism to invite your friends, showing them what you’re up to.

“Open, Social Stack”

the open stack is a series of building blocksfor enabling cross-site social networking

using non-proprietary formats and protocols

Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) - but, where did this leave the social networks - this was how I ended in september, but we’re starting to move ahead

fin.

me -› factoryjoe.com -› @chrismessina

so that’s it. questions?