Free is just too high a price to pay

Robert Scoble seems to be on a roll at the moment. His commentary on the the Twitter ecosystem are fascinating. Last week he discovered that the Auto-follow had made him dumber. Now he is being more selective and as a result the quality of his feed has risen dramatically. His latest post is about the demise of tr.im from Nambu and the shortcomings of the Twitter platform. It is well worth a read.

The took two things from Scoble's post:

1. The Network Effects keep pulling us back
2. Put your stuff in more than one place.

When Twitter has a bad day, like the Denial Of Service attacks last week, we just wait. Just like how Scoble can't get thousands of his followers to meet him on FriendFeed, each of us is daunted at the prospect of persuading our tens, or hundreds, of followers to move with us to another platform.

Facebook and Twitter probably both recognize this fact. It is not just the followers but how about all the ecosystem components I have connected to my Twitter account. Brightkite, TwitPic, Bit.ly, Delicious. The list goes on. Every application adopted makes a user more "Sticky." The adoption of OAuth by Twitter and Facebook's Connect feature make the respective networks more essential to us.

The need to put our information in more than one place has been driven home to me when Twitter Search "Broke". It is more likely that Twitter deliberately hobbled search in order to manage their resources more cost effectively. We now have access to only a couple of weeks of tweets. This means that the collective thoughts from numerous conferences, camps and meetups have vanished.

This tells us Twitter may have stumbled on yet another business model option. They could choose to charge us for access to that collective hive mind. Would you pay? I would certainly think about - but only if Twitter let me pick up those searches as an RSS feed and republish them freely on my blog, or other sites I use.

The actions of Twitter warn us that "Free" is often too high a price to pay for services from a startup. It may be too high a price to pay from even established companies, like Google.

Free services on the Internet are a wonderful thing. But be wary. You always need an alternative. Put your information in more than one place.

It also means that, if you are serious about your personal brand on the Internet, you need to invest in a domain and look at the tools you depend upon and purchase or use Open Source code on servers in your domain. There are examples of open source URL shorteners.

I think I need to look at my blog here on blogger and how I can reduce my dependence on bit.ly. I may also have to revisit implementing identi.ca (laconi.ca) on my own platform.

  

SocialWeb at Web 2.0 Expo

What has been happening with Data Portability on the Social Web. ie. OpenID, OAuth, etc.

The workshop is being run by @chrismessina, @daveman692 and @jsmarr

I will twitter comments from this session using the tag #w2e_sw

If you want to build new and innovative services you don't want to frustrate your users by asking for a bunch of account related data. If the data is out there go and get it. Don't Re-Key!

You need standards to enable mashups. Alternatively, you need consistent formats.

If standards exist - use them!

http://www.oxyweb.co.uk/blog produced a world map of popular social networks. This struck me as a great parallel to the HealthCare world with incompatible/competing health care players.

Functional sites, like Friendfeed, Twitter, last.fm and Dopplr represent specialist services. They have the opportunity to create combined value but they need a social graph to create this.

Facebook solved this for many, as long as developers were prepared to live inside facebook.

Activity streams are an emerging standard. No logo yet.

XMPP is not that popular yet, although it is one of the pipes that Twitter implemented and search.twitter.com leveraged.

Partuza is an Open Social - social Network site that uses Apache Shindig.

Pinax is a platform for rapidly developing websites using social tools such as IM, chat,

The emerging theme is "Connect"

Facebook Connect, OpenSocial Connect.

New building blocks:

• Who you are
• Who you know
• What's going on

These are aspects of the social ecosystem. These create the virtual circle of sharing/knowing.

The anatomy of "Connect":

• Profile (id, accounts profiles)
• Relationships (friends, followers)
• Content
• Activity
• Goal (search and discovery)

Most sites are building on the Open Stack:

• MySpace
• Yahoo
• Google
• Plaxo
• Microsoft

Supporting:

• OpenID
• XRDS-Simple
• OAuth
• PortableContacts
• OpenSocial

Facebook is different but is matching these standards.

Why do this?:

- Why do people have to:

• Create a new account on every service
• Re-create their profile
• Give away their password to every site that asks
• Re-discover their friends
• re-friend their friends
• Learn new ways to share and communicate

Why do developers have to?:

• Deal with forgotten passwords
• create another profile form
• Support every new service API that emerges
• Force members to invite everyone they know
• Implement and unsafe method to import contacts
• Create widgets for incompatible social networks
• Manually interpret feeds for activity streams

Industry trends:

• User control of data
• User centric web services
• Locatin based services
• Real time content delivery ubiquitous connectivity
• Interoperable app platforms
• content aggregation and syndication
• increasing quantities of data to work with
• democratization of digital media creation tools

How do customers benefit:

MySpace has built login with OpenID and OAuth to compete with Facebook Connect.

OpenID popup extension is being developed to simplify the user interface, ala facebook connect.

The emerging issue is that once an item has been made "public" on a social network it can't be withdrawn. If you withdraw an item it may still exist in other places that were connected to the original publishing location.

Demos:

• Eventbox

Now for the technical stuff:

OpenID Demo:

Mapquest (owned by AOL). You can sign in to mapquest with OpenID.

In 2009 there are over 30,000 sites that let you login with OpenID (Relying sites). Growth from 20,000 in August 2008 and 10,000 in Jan 2008. (source: http://blog.janrain.com)

Implementing OpenID as a relying party (ie. accept OpenID)

Internally you need to map one or more openIDs to an internal account.

The OpenID User experience

Directed Identity is emerging as one solution to avoid need for users to know URLs.

At least there aren't too many major providers so the button option is still feasible.

Once people have become known to a site it is possible to tailor re-sign in based upon where a user has come from. eg. If they arrive from Gmail then assume a gmail account.

Personal Discovery standard is emerging, driven by EU demands.

The browser knows who you are so this may be a way to simplify login. This moves away from web sites trying to guess which accounts you use.

The Popup extension is emerging as a technique. The challenge is to avoid spoofing. People don't look at the URL bar.

Remember - you can use email address as an indicator of which OpenId providers to support.

Different sites have different account preferences. This leads to sites supporting multiple standards. eg. OpenID + facebook. At least supporting OpenId means you automatically support Yahoo, AOL, Google, MySpace and other popular sites.

Microformats are also important.

Microformats enable webpages to be an API.

Semantic information can be embedded in a page. Some of the oldest standards are hCard (vCard in HTML)

Use CSS classes to markup and style the data. Very simple way to markup information in existing web pages.

This is ideal for database driven sites because you can edit one output web page and apply a microformat to every database record that is displayed through that web page.

Twitter supports hCard and includes the rel=me setting. If you want your blog to be the top search result on your name in Google then add this value to your blog. Simply add rel="me" to a relevant link on your blog.

Discovery

The more you publish the more you need a way to identify what you are publishing as yours. Our desktop is moving out in to the cloud.

Identity enables discovery. XRDS-Simple "the name is more complex than the concept"

XRDS - defines services.

eg. OpenID, PortableContacts

eg. OpenID points to one service. PortableContacts points to Plaxo.

WordPress OpenID plugin supports creating XRDS file.

XRDS-Simple can be used for a personal discovery or for sites to publish their service endpoints

LRDD - Link-based Resource Descriptor Discovery (emerging work)

Authorization

Authorization is important so you don't have to make data public to make it portable.

Will OAuth work in a mobile mode? Yes!

iPhone example is FlightTrack Pro works with Tripit. The iPhone app uses OAuth and Safari to authorize the app on Tripit.com.

OAuth is a protocol for developing password-less APIs.

Plaxo was recently bought by Comcast. Comcast saw a 92% success rate with login using OpenID in collaboration with Google.

The Plaxo-Google connection uses a hybrid. They do the OpenID dance and also handle the OAuth token acquisition at the same time. They also collect and notify user on the basic information that will be used. eg. name and email address.

The Comcast-Google test worked so well that the business folks at Comcast wouldn't let them turn the experiment off!

OAuth can be used asynchronously to allow one user to give permission to someone else to gain access to their information. eg. Dave allows Chris to see his phone number in his contact record.

Relationships and Contacts

Rather than have to support writing to address book APIs for each major service they instead implement a standard protocol. That is PortableContacts. This builds on OAuth and vCard standards.

GMail now supports Portable Contacts. ie. No Google specific code is required to use information from the Google Addressbook.

OpenSocial REST People Protocol is now PortableContact compatible.

vCardDav compatibility is coming with IETF.

Linking Accounts

The XFN Microformat is being used to link accounts and services.

Add a Rel=Me link to connect pages on services..

You can also use Rel=Contact to identify friends.

Google's Social Graph API does this in a simple form. A demo is available.

Activity Streams

Activity Streams are in the realm of "LifeStreaming"

Friendfeed support approximately 59 services. Each was hand coded by Friendfeed.

Activity Streams is about creating a protocol that can be leveraged across sites.

Social Discovery. eg. Plaxo Pulse, LinkedIn network updates, Facebook status updates.

Messaging: Twitter, Yammer, Eventbox (desktop app)

Brand/Personal Monitoring: GetSatisfaction's Overheard searching Twitter.

Primitives: Active, Verb, Object

Actor, Verb Object (context)

Build on Standards

Use ATOM for lists. (aka feeds)

Activity Stream is using a derivation of ATOM to share streams.

Activity Streams is targeted to go in to OpenSocial.

Check out http://activitystrea.ms for the latest info.

Gadgets and OpenSocial

Allow applications to be added tomultiple sites. Write a gadget once and allow in to run on multiple sites. Over 700M users acorss multiple sites support OpenSocial from Myspace to Plaxo to Ning oor Orkut etc.

Shindig is an Apache incubator project for gadgets in OpenSocial.

You can also build OpenSocial apps in the Google AppEngine.

This standard simplifies Engineering integratin and allows developers to focus on PRODUCT integration - ie. How to fit in to the target environment. eg. Ning is different from MySpace.

Next Steps - Homework:

1. Markup existing Data

2. Stop leaking passwords

3. Support OpenID and OAuth

These tools are mature enough to enable simple integration across sites and business partners.

Check out theSocialWeb.tv for the latest news in the space.

A Mini HealthCampPA - Engaging consumers in HealthCare, DataPortability and all that

The discussion on HealthCamp related issues such as DataPortability was very stimulating. It took place at 11:00am in Room 1215. The issue was how we, as consumer, can drive the re-construction of the HealthCare system in a way that finally gives us access to the information about us - Our Personal Health Record.

Once again, just like last week at SocialDevCampEast, a good audience of highly engaged people participated. One of the most telling quotes came from one of the participants, geoff dimasi :

"I didn't realize I had so much to say on the subject [of healthcare]"

I need to reflect on those discussions but hope some of the attendees will add their comments to this blog. More later.

Reflecting on a new world of Consumer-driven Health Care

I have been back from the Health 2.0 Conference and HealthCampSf for a week now. I also attended SocialDevCampEast this weekend and presented a session on Data Portability. That session was given from the perspective of how Data Portability can be applied to Health Care. I was encouraged by the turnout to the session. Microsoft's announcement this week of OpenID support, that helped push the number of compatible accounts over the 900 Million mark, certainly didn't hurt to put DataPortability in the spotlight!

This week we also enter in to a momentous election here in the USA. Whatever the result we are set to see major changes in Health Care in this country.

When I reflect back on the past couple of weeks and the transformation of Health Care it is becoming clear that the industry is set to switch from being a business-to-business market place to not just a business-to-consumer market place but potentially to a point where there is a complete inversion of the market place - becoming a Consumer-to-Business market place. There are two factors that seem to be driving this transformation:

Information is becoming more readily available to consumers. We are already seeing "invested" consumers embracing this. They are not only consuming information but generating their own content to add to the growth in knowledge and resources. Just look at innovative sites like PatientsLikeMe for an example of this. We are also seeing the next generation of systems for health care from companies like AmericanWell that will capture and share consumer ranking information as a by product of the transactions that they enable.

Making information available is just one aspect. The invested Health Consumer to date has typically been someone with a health condition that is not being adequately serviced by the traditional health care system. These consumers have embraced email lists, social networking, blogs, wikis and other simple tools to find each other and create ad hoc support groups.

The industry has tried to ignore these emerging patient support resources but that is becoming harder to do. These support groups are now being enabled by startups and we are seeing situations where these groups are able to organize and conduct clinical trials that are bigger than anything even major players have been able to organize.

Like it or not the industry is going to have to recognize the power of the invested consumer and the ranks of the invested consumer will continue to grow. The cost of health care is continuing to rise with no moderation in sight for the rate of increase. Employers and Health Plans are reacting to this by offering new products like Consumer Directed Health Plans. The impact of these plans is that the consumer can find themselves shouldering a greater share of health costs. This is triggering two things:

• A greater focus on Health and Wellness. It is more cost effective to encourage healthy lifestyles that aim to avoid consumers becoming patients.
• Consumers are moving from apathetic to engaged.

The rise in out of pocket expenses for consumers is set to drive changing behaviors where consumers will leverage the information available to them to take a more active role in managing their health because failing to do so can have a major impact upon their financial health.

Health Plans will be increasingly supportive of this transition. The current system focuses on managing claims. If Health Plans continue to focus on the point at which their members have become patients then they have lost the battle and must become resigned to continually rising costs. Switching to helping members lead a health life can avoid unnecessary claims and provide an opportunity to contain medical costs.

One of the themes that has kept surfacing through out the election period has been the idea that we, the people can make change happen. It is that idea that is behind the HealthCamp initiative. We don't have to wait for the industry to organize itself to solve some of the challenges. We can push for change. If we get the new wave of startups in the Health industry to adopt open standards, to leverage the interoperability work that is being done in the Social Networking world, then we create a platform for change.

Let's build on the shoulders of the great work that is being done in the Data Portability world. The Health Industry doesn't need to invent its own mechanisms for secure authentication and information sharing. It can leverage the de facto standards like OpenID and OAuth. If information exchange standards are not established let's build on the great work being done by people around microformats.

The message I present to anyone that will listen at CareFirst, where I work, or any other Health Insurance Provider, Hospital System or business partner in the industry is that we need to adopt the standards that are establishing themselves in the consumer space. Failure to do so will only serve to frustrate our customers, because the last thing they want is yet another user id and password to remember. This is especially true as we move in to a world of electronic health records. The health care industry has so many specialties that there will always be a wide variety of organizations that a consumer will need to interact with in the course of their care. Let's make it easier for our customers by allowing them to use services that they are already familiar with. Why can't a Yahoo, Google, AOL or MSN user use the same user id and password that they use everyday in order to access health information?

Yes we have to be cognizant of Data Privacy but we need to balance that with the needs of an increasingly engaged customer.

Promoting HealthCamp and DataPortability at SocialDevCampEast

This afternoon I led a session on DataPortability as it relates to HealthCare. The topic is expected to range over OpenId, OAuth, Microformats and other related projects.

This turned out to be a very lively discussion. PRivacy is a major concern but the idea is that there are a lot of developer eyeballs focused on standards like OpenID and OAuth that will address problems more quickly than with proprietary solutions.

This discussion will continue at the next HealthCamp.

HealthCampSf - more fascinating discussion and planning

A big thanks needs to go out to Manatt Health Solutions for providing the venue for HealthCampSf at the Manatt, Phelps and Phillips offices in the Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. The only downside to this venue is the distraction that the view from their 30th floor offices brings. The views over the bay are totally stunning! Check out my blog from the Health 2.0 Accelerator meeting that was held there earlier this week.

Happening the day after the high octane Heath 2.0 Conference, where even Dr. Ruth made an appearance, The event saw the effects of the party hangover.

HealthCamp took place both physically and virtually with people dialing in from across the country.

THe discussions ranged over a number of subjects.

• How to evolve the Health 2.0 Accelerator and the Health 2.0 Conference
• How to promote interoperability initiatives with the Health 2.0 Accelerator

During HealthCampSf the CEO and VP of Business Development from JanRain courtesy of an invitatin from Mike Kirkwood of Polka.com, joined in the sessions and presented the latest developments around OpenId. JanRain's OpenId tools have recently been adopted by Microsoft for use with HealthVault. JanRain have released a Software as a Service offering for OpenId and OAuth, RPX Plus and RPX Pro.

The objective of these products is to bring implementation of OpenId and OAuth down to a less than one day integration exercise.

This is great news. OpenId has over 500 million OpenID capable accounts globally and anything that simplifies the signup process, without sacrificing security is a positive move.

Some of the discussion that spun out of this OpenId and OAuth overview touched on creating an Health Information Interoperability Demonstrator. It was suggested that this could be run in conjunction with the Health 2.0 Conference.

The concept is to plan to bring together developers in the Health 2.0 space and over the course of one or two days to work together to create new health-centric mashups as demonstrators.

One of the things that came through in the Health 2.0 Conference is that the industry has moved on beyond simple health content aggregation and is now focusing on getting real work done and transactions processed. This is great progress, but it just served to drive home the realization that there is much more to be done and the real evolution is when these different applications, platforms and services can be connected together to create new services that can extend the reach and value of these Health 2.0 applications.

For example, how might PharmaSURVEYOR's drug interaction software be integrated with Intelecare's Medical Adherence platform to improve drug safety for patients.

The discussion with JanRain was invaluable. It demonstrated that OpenId and OAuth continue to evolve and provides practical single sign-on capabilities and secure information sharing mechanisms.

After the discussion I was even more convinced that the Health 2.0 Accelerator should leverage the work being done by DataPortability.org. Part of the role of the Health 2.0 Accelerator could be to act as a Health Industry Special Interest Group to promote Health Information interoperability.

Health Care is poised to go through massive transformation. It will increasingly become a consumer-driven industry. As that happens it is entirely logical that the industry should build upon and leverage the developments that are continuing at breakneck pace in the Social Networking world. Emerging standards such as Portable Contacts will grow to become underlying standards in healthcare. We do not need to re-invent the wheel.

Another area to leverage will be Microformats. These machine interpretable but human readable formats keep evolving. The Health 2.0 software sector needs to look at developing Health related formats to complement xisting formats such as Address cards (hCard), Calendars (hCalendar) and ratings (hReview).

Check out the wetpaint wiki site To find out more about HealthCamp. To find out about future events check out the BarCamp.org front page or the HealthCamp specific page.

Ping.fm - not gone!

I just found commentary on rejaw that indicates that ping.fm is just having some technical difficulties and is not going away.

It looks like they were transferring service providers and GoDaddy did something wrong. You know how DNS problems can sometimes take a little time to work their way out of the system.

Ping.fm - we are all rooting for you!

Blog Action Day - Poverty and Health Care

Today (October 15th) is Blog Action Day. This year the issue that is front and center is Poverty. With working for a major US Health Care provider my thoughts turned to the issue of how to bring Health and Wellness to those that can't afford traditional health care plans.

Making Health Care accessible to those that need it will be a major challenge that we will have to work together to solve in the USA.

The Health Care system is broken and we have to work out how to put it back together in a way that helps us address this and other significant challenges.

The transformation of Health Care through Social Media, Open Standards and Web 2.0 technologies is the central theme of the series of HealthCamp unconferences I have been organizing. If you will be at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week then look me up, I am helping the organizers there.

After the Conference I will be organizing a HealthCampSf event to take place on Friday October 24th. The venue is still being finalized but I am hoping to hold the event at the Courtyard Marriott San Francisco on 2nd street. The finalized details will be posted on the barcamp.org site.

I will also be attending the second SocialDevCampEast event on Saturday November 1st in Baltimore. The event is filling up fast and I plan to raise the Health Care issue as part of the Social Media conversation at that event. If you plan to be there drop me a line on twitter to ekivemark.

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This post is part of Blog Action Day 08 - Poverty

Where do I put all my VRM stuff?

Today has been fascinating at the VRM Workshop. I held a session on Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) and Healthcare but wished I could be at some of the other concurrent sessions.

Health Care has some great use cases that can demonstrate the value of VRM.

After a stimulating dinner, in which conversations continued, it was time for a walk back to the hotel and a chance to contemplate some of the discussions of the day.

It struck me that there is one question I must ask tomorrow. First, some background for those of you not familiar with the concept of VRM, to set the scene.

VRM puts the consumer at the center of transactions whereas today we are often the outsiders. This is especially true in the health care sector where we often feel like the uninformed observer, yet we are the subject of the tests and treatment.

One of the discussions that came up today was about data portability. The efforts of the dataportability.org collective appears to be to enable data to move between different social media sites. This is different to VRM where it is considered that the consumer owns the information. This is not putting down the essential efforts of the dataportability.org group because VRM depends upon data portability to allow information to be moved from data custodians.

This does raise a significant question. Let's pre-suppose that we as consumers adopt VRM and it is another "cloud" service that we use.

What are the essential characteristics of our VRM data custodian? This is a logical and important question because the average user will not want to be bothered with the information management tasks that go with managing a critical information store.

• So how do we determine the level of trust offered by our VRM data custodian?
• Do we need different custodians for different types of data?
• Does our medical VRM information need to be stored with a HIPPAA certified entity?
• If we have multiple data custodians how is that different from today's situation?

Do we need a service mark for VRM data custodians? Could this be something that pushes forward the identity and data portability agenda's too?

If we could define the characteristics of a VRM data custodian then we could establish credentials and validation programs. The benefit of this approach might be to allow the existing established data stores, whether they are Google, Microsoft or other bricks and mortar vendors, to participate in VRM without shutting off the evolution to an ideal state. The credentials could enshrine the

Another benefit of this approach would be to allow some of the forward thinking organizations to participate in VRM more actively than would be the case if the essential data stores for VRM were outside their purview.

VRM and the Medical Home concept

During the opening remarks to the Workshop Doc Searls asked what areas within organizations might be most receptive to the adoption of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)?

This question prompted this session. It struck me that the industry initiative in Health Care around the Medical Home concept might be Health Care's sweet spot.

Emerging issues in Health Care will help push the role of VRM. These include:

• The rise in the power of the consumer
• Public policy and the uninsured

In a conservative industry VRM might find a role as an enabler of the Medical Home. Medical Home is being promoted by the industry as a solution to improving the quality and efficiency with which care services are provided, particularly with respect to complex health issues.

The coach, advocate or practitioner that guides an individual through the maze of health care services can be considered a vendor partner of the patient. They can help pull together all of the relevant information to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of diagnostics and treatment.

During the discussion in the session a number of points emerged:

• Google is supporting Continuity of Care Record (CCR). They have also adopted Atom as the standard for sharing CCRs.

some of the participants are already working with solutions in this space:

• MedCommons.net
• Polka.com

Some of the conclusions from the session:

• Information is the bedrock on which Medical Home depends.
• The advocate or coach in a Medical Home program could be treated as "just another vendor" from a VRM perspective.
• The open standards of OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial and other standards can be used to enable MedicalVRM.

VRM Agenda Making

Be Prepared to be Surprised. The Workshop is being based on Open Space principles. This is similar to the AgileCoachCamp I attended recently and the HealthCampMd meeting I ran recently.

I have volunteered to lead a session on

"VRM and HealthCare - Is Medical Home a stepping stone to VRM?"

1:00pm - 2:00pm in Room 202.

The first session I attended was Kevin Marks of Google talking about Open Social.

One of the emerging standards that seems to be an off shoot of Open social is Portable Contacts. that initiative is being worked on by Joseph Smarr (Chief Architect of Plaxo) and Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe).

HealthCampMd is this Saturday June 14th

This weekend is HealthCampMd at Villa Julie College in Owings Mills, MD. You can still sign up by clicking on the link below:

Join us at HealthCampMd, June 14 2008! The initial theme of the Camp was:

"How Healthcare could be transformed by the adoption of Social Media, Open Standards and Web 2.0 technologies."

It will be fascinating to see how the camp actually develops because, unlike traditional conferences, the agenda will be set by whoever attends. There is always a possibility that someone volunteering to give a 1 to 3 minute lightning talk, at the start of the day, on a subject they are passionate about might point the ensuing sessions in a new and unanticipated direction. That is the great thing about these conferences and camps. There is so much reward to be gained from actively participating. There are some great sessions being prepared:

• Health 2.0 - What do we mean by Health 2.0? - Where are the opportunities to apply Social networking to the Health Care landscape?
• Using mobile technology to make better food choices
• Clinical healthcare opportunities vs consumer (patient) healtcare business models
• Using Clinical Informatics professionals in the 2.0 business quest.
• Personal Health Records (PHRs) - using Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault to build open source software that allow patients and clinicians to collaborate on each patient's care.
• Biology Futures, particularly personal genomics and synthetic biology
• Personal genome analysis with SNPedia

Will we get through all of these topics? We will have to see but the people who are coming are passionate about the issues and that should lead to fascinating discussions.

I am not an expert in running a barcamp so I am looking forward to the experience. I have been thinking about how best to engage people so I have stolen unashamedly from my experience at the recent AgileCoachCamp which was facilitated by the excellent John Engle. John did an amazing job of quietly guiding a passionate crowd. His facilitation skills are quietly effective, a real master. They are big shoes to fill.

Will I fit in?

One thing that I had concerns with when I thought about attending my first camp was whether I would fit in. We all probably have that concern in some form. What I have learned is that the passion that people bring to these events makes it a welcoming experience for everyone. It doesn't matter what level of expertise you bring, everyone has something to contribute. Indeed, not being an expert can be an advantage. The non-experts bring that uncanny ability to stop an expert in their tracks by asking a question as simple as "Why?" causing the expert to consider an issue from a completely different perspective.

So, I urge you, if you are in the Baltimore area on June 14th come down and join in. You will be made welcome. Bring your enthusiasm to learn and participate.

Once again, here is the link: http://barcamp.org/HealthCampMd

Heading to SocialDevCampEast

There is a great event on this weekend in Baltmore. SocialDevCampEast is meeting there at the Uiversity of Baltimore. This is the Unconference for Thought Leaders of the future social web.

I am excited about participating because I see so many opportunities to apply social technologies to transform health care. That will be the focus of HealthCampMd that takes place on June 14th in Owings Mills, MD.

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Tim O'Reilly was inspiring us with the message that there was still so much to do. We have only just begun. This message was tempered by a comment I overheard from a fellow attendee. "If there is so much to be done - why are we still just throwing sheep?" That insightful comment really puts our use of the cognitive surplus in to question.

Well, these two related BarCamp events provide the ideal opportunity to do something positive for society and the community through the creation of new social tools and the addition of social context to existing services.

I hope to see you at one of these events.

Data Portability and Privacy on the emerging Social Web

This session was given by Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect of Plaxo. Plaxo is a great address management service, one that I use on a daily basis to synchronize my various address books. Their new Pulse service is also a great way to stay abreast of what your contacts are doing.

The session is "Data Portability, Privacy and the emergence of the Social Web."

An increasing number of sites care about "Who you know." Even enterprises are waking up to this issue.

The Social Web today is broken...

• Re-create an account
• re-enter my profile
• Re-find friends
• Re-establish relationships

It is getting very frustrating...   But help is on the way. There are three classes of building blocks emerging:

• Who I am
• Who I know
• What's going on

Who I am

Create a portable, durable online identity.

OpenID

• This is the protocol that has come the furthest. 
• It is getting traction with over 200M (potential) users. It offers sign up using an existing account, such as AOL or Yahoo.
• Link and share profile data 
• It reduces friction and benefits sites and users.

You can consolidate online identities with me-links using rel=me (XFN) in hyperlinks.

Google's SocialGraph API has trawled for me-links across the web.

Bi-directional links become powerful. Plaxo's Pulse is a powerful example of using these links.

Who I Know

It is about building and maintaining real relationships. Contact APIs are growing to find people from your current address book because this leverages established relationships.

The next step is to leverage the granular investment in defining groups. OAuth is the standard way to trust between sites without revealing passwords. OAuth is gaining traction because it reduces the friction in building links between sites.

Friend List portability is the next phase in this evolution. This will provide continuous discovery across multiple sites. OAuth is a building block for this. This will leverage identifiers, whether they are twitter, Facebook or other identifiers.

OpenSocial is growing in popularity, driven by Google. It is an API being adopted widely by companies interested in social network capabilities.

RSS/Atom is another key tool for sharing activity updates.

Jabber (XMPP)  is also growing in popularity because it provides real-time distributed messaging framework.

The critical aspect is to follow open standards. Pulse is a leading example of the benefits of following these open standards.

How does this connect together?

• Identity Providers (AOL, Yahoo, Google and others)
• Social Content Aggregators (Plaxo Pulse is an early example.)
• Social Graph Providers  (Who I know - An emerging category, Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace etc.)

The bottom line: Open wins because the diversity and speed of innovation will beat the walled garden approach every time.

Spock - Social network power tool

Back at the Web 2.0 Expo in the spring Spock launched. For those of you that have not checked it out Spock can be described as the Web's Who's Who. In the nine months since it launched it has grown significantly in richness. One of the things I have realized is that an awful lot of LinkedIn users are also on Spock. 

In the last few weeks I have spent some time looking around on Spock. I realized that I am one of the top 500 Spock users. That was a big surprise. All I had done is tag people that I discovered with tags that were relevant to them.

I have also been using Plaxo and Plaxo's Pulse service. Plaxo is a great way to keep up with what friends and colleagues are doing. The biggest benefit I find from Plaxo is the integration it provides with the address book on my Mac. This integration keeps me up to date when people I know, who are also on plaxo, update their contact information. 

Now, I have been following the tales of people like Robert Scoble on their use of Facebook and hitting the limit of 5,000 friends. I have also been experimenting with Facebook and MySpace but get frustrated because some of the locations I work from actually block FaceBook and MySpace - Luddites!

There has been a lot of debate about the merits of Facebook versus LinkedIn. Personally, I believe they are complimentary, more than competitive. However, during all this experimentation I think I may have stumbled upon an incredibly powerful solution for social networking. What is that power combination?

LinkedIn + Spock + Plaxo.

LinkedIn is a great service for professional networking. Spock is a great people search engine that helps you discover people on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Pownce, Twitter and other social networks. Plaxo provides great feeds to keep me up to date on friends activities and posts and more importantly keeps their contact information up to date. I still realize that the majority of people I want to connect with have LinkedIn accounts. Each of these services plays a vital role. Let's take an example of what happens.

I can do a search for people with similar interests on Spock, for example Enterprise 2.0, I can find a link to people's LinkedIn profile. You can reach out with Spock and request a Trust relationship. The next step is that you progress to creating a relationship with LinkedIn. One of the neat features with LinkedIn is the ability to download a vCard to add to your address book. This is when Plaxo kicks in. If you download the vCard and add it to your address book it typically contains a person's email address. The background integration with Plaxo then discovers if this person is on Plaxo and you can suddenly find that address record populated with additional contact information, depending upon what information the person has chosen to release through Plaxo. 

This is incredibly powerful. I had been thinking that I would need to choose between Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo as my social network of choice but with the addition of Spock in to the mix I realize I don't need to choose and the combination of services becomes even more powerful.

When you think about it. Spock is demonstrating the potential that Google is grasping at with their OpenSocial initiative. If you haven't checked out Plaxo or Spock, do so. You owe it to yourself if you need to network. As you move in to 2008 it will supercharge your abilities to network.

 

 

Portals or Social Network - Who wins?

The Portal v. Social Network debate continues to move along. Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel are fueling that debate. I respect the knowledge and views of both Stowe and Steve. On this subject I have to side more with Steve. However, there is a caveat. The portals will only win out if they embrace social networks and not try to become one. This is why OpenSocial is such a significant development. The portals will win out if they allow us to bring the essence of our preferred social network or networks and encapsulate it inside my home page. The portals that allow us, the indigenous content creators, to create our own window on to the world we have created will win. The portals that try to replicate social networks and strong arm us in to using their flavor will fail. The successful portal will provide the open framework and underlying communications tools that allow us to be lazy. In this instance I believe laziness is the key. My attention is be scattered across a multitude of sites. The platform provider that allows me to consolidate those sites - on my own terms - will be successful. Don't you want to be able to fire up your browser with it showing your favorite search engine, a snapshot of your email and IM's and a window in to your social networks all there on one page? Or am I the only lazy one around?

Open Social and meebo

Last week Google launched Open Social together with a slew of Social Networks and Social Application developers. Are you holding your breath to see how this takes off? Creating platforms is the name of the game. meebo recently launched their own platform to integrate third party applications inside meebo. One of the fascinating partners with meebo is Tokbox. Tokbox provides flash-based video mail and video calling. The potential to provide cross-platform video calling is a compelling offering and one that none of the major desktop IM players are addressing. Yahoo and AOL can video between PC and Mac platforms but it is not possible to video beween services. If Tokbox cracks this challenge they will have a hit on their hands. On the Open Social front I am waiting to see if meebo is going to join Open Social. The ability to provide IM between social networks in a seamless manner, together with TokBox providing video chat, could be just the boost Open Social needs. meebo is a compelling platform, their user stats are impressive with growth in user numbers continuing to grow and the average daily stay of each user is lengthy. Of course meebo has an opportunity to flip the information flow with Open Social and this may be an attractive route to take. An increasing number of companies are blocking traffic to the major social networks like MySpace and Facebook. meebo is not typically blocked, may be because it still flies under the radar in comparison to the popular social network sites. However, if these sites are blocked but could be accessed through the application platform that meebo has built this could make meebo an even more significant player. So meebo - are we going to see support for Open Social and the delivery of MySpace and other Social Network data inside meebo?