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I huddled in the dark, under the wooden stairs leading out to the backyard, the metal of my unsheathed flash drive digging into my thigh. I could hear them in the house, opening drawers and moving furniture. They spoke to each other in a low murmur, an indistinguishable bassline while my Spotify playlists ran their course in the background, silently pushing unknown songs to my Facebook profile.

Through the clouds, an aircraft’s engines announced its descent.

I knew I would have to run. My backyard was surrounded by tall fencing on three sides, the result of neighbors jealously guarding their privacy. If I was going to make a break for it, I would need to climb over on one side, and I wasn’t sure if I could make it without drawing attention to myself.

Creaking floorboards. Inside, the men were moving from room to room. I wasn’t sure how many of them were, but it sounded like five at least: enough to keep guard while the others looked around.
From the glimpse I’d had of them when I looked through my bedroom window and seen them marching towards my house, they were police of some kind. They weren’t uniformed, as such, but each wore an identical suit, and each of them had been reaching for something as they approached my front door. It could have been phones, or documents, or anything, but I didn’t want to risk it. Particularly now as they’d forced their way into my home.

My breath caught the reflected light from the house in front of me, hot clouds of condensation reaching out into the cold of the night. I realized I was panicking.

“He’s still here,” one of them said, his voice urgent and raised enough for me to hear. “His phone’s on the network.”

The wifi! I whipped my handset out of my pocket and pushed down the power button to turn it off. Its screen lit up the yard, turning the grass and my weeds unnatural shades of blue and orange as the men ran through the house in an avalanche of heavy footsteps, down to the back door to find me.

Quickly, I set my phone on a ten second timer, and threw it over the fence to my left as hard as I could. Panting, my heart in my throat, I scrambled past the trashcans and garden debris to the alley beside my house, flung my back against the wall, and waited.

Coming soon.

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In short: latakoo is a cloud video service that gives you full control over who you share and manage your video with.

Here’s an overview of how it works:

Let’s say you’ve got a minute-long piece of uncompressed 1080p High Definition video. That can easily run to 2Gb, which would take forever to upload on most connections – and running your video through compressors like Sorensen Squeeze or the Handbrake client can be similarly painful if you’re not familiar with the right settings to use.

We’ve got a simple app for Windows, Mac and Linux, with iPhone imminent and both iPad and Android to follow. Just drag your video file into the window (or select it from your camera roll on mobile devices) and hit “start”. The file is compressed using the most appropriate settings, and sent to our cloud servers. (If you’re interested: it ends up as an h.264 MPEG-4 file, and we upload using our own API via HTTP over SSL. The result is maximum compatibility with both video applications and Internet connections.) The tool accepts most major video formats.

You don’t lose audible or visible quality, although we do provide quality settings. Users on latakoo’s professional and corporate tiers have access to better settings – but the cheaper version is also good enough to already be used on broadcast television.

Once the video’s been uploaded, it’s in the latakoo private cloud. By default, it’s completely private: only you can see it. But we’ve got a few options that let you share it with the people who need to see it, while making sure you keep full control.

Direct shares. You can send your video to anyone with an email address. They’ll get an email containing a link that gives them access to your video via a private inbox. There’s no way that they can share the email with anyone else. If they’re already a latakoo member, they can just log in and visit their inbox. (They’ll still get an email notification.)

Video networks. Or, to put them another way: collaboration groups. These are shared areas that let you pool video with groups of your contacts. You get to choose who can upload and download. For example, you could set up a video network as a dropbox where people can upload video, but not see anyone else’s contributions. Education and crowdsourced news: I’m looking at you guys.

Hangars and Wings. For some people, standalone video networks aren’t enough. Hangars and Wings are nested groups that allow larger organizations to share within their existing corporate structures. Each group has its own access permissions and individual settings. Appropriately, these are part of our corporate payment plan.

Auditing. You get to see usage throughout all the spaces you control (video networks, hangars, wings and your own private video space).

Finally, each shared video can have notes, tags, comments and files attached to them. These then become part of the search index – so if you post a video’s script to your notes, you can search on its contents.

Coming imminently: the ability to push directly to Facebook, YouTube, Brightcove, Dropbox and many more. Upload once, share anywhere.

All of latakoo’s paid plans allow you to download HD video for use in offline editing. As well as the h.264 MPEG-4 files, the latakoo tool allows you to download in some popular editing formats, including MPEG-2, DV, DVCPro, Avid DNxHD, and more. The idea is to maximize compatibility with peoples’ existing workflows – and although h.264 is pretty great, some of the older editing suites don’t work so well with it. If you’re using Avid, Final Cut Pro, Edius, or many more, we’ve got you covered.

One of the other things that makes us different is that we don’t alter the resolution of the video at all – or its audio tracks. Often, professional video will contain a bunch of different audio tracks for natural sound, speech, sound effects, music, and other useful things, and latakoo will keep them separate. We’ve optimized the tool for editing and professional use rather than broadcasting on the web – although you can do that too.

How’s the quality? Amazing. It’s passed the smell test from many very large video media companies who pride themselves on their quality (trust me, you’ve heard of them). But despite that, the file sizes are very small, making it easier to move them around.

The best way to decide, of course, is to try it.

You’re uploading to a server and then downloading from a server. Isn’t that slower than sending it directly to someone? No – and it’s more secure. With latakoo’s user-centric access controls, you know your video’s being seen by the right people, and the compression means that it’s still faster than using, say, FTP or a file sharing app.

Can I integrate this as a platform with my own service? Watch this space – or get in touch.

What’s that iPhone app like? Take a look:

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When the French MEP Kader Arif stepped down last week from scrutinizing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, declaring that he “would not participate in this charade”, it was the culmination of eight years of political lobbying, back-room deals and undemocratic conniving that now threatens to undermine the entire global Internet economy.

[...] Despite declaring an intention to prevent piracy, the agreements once again represent a significant infringement of civil liberties and undermine the principles by which the Internet works. The agreements’ intentions appear good at first glance – who doesn’t want to protect the rights of artists? – but actually represent an irreversible erosion of personal freedoms.

Click here to read the whole article.

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The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. [...] How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

Cue pitchfork-wielding posts about how the studios are broken and we should be funding movies using the startup model.

In my opinion, these miss the mark in a fistful of ways.

Paul didn’t ask for new ways to make movies. He asked, what are people going to do for fun in 20 years? That’s a separate problem. Think about how storytelling has evolved through motion pictures: one-off shorts, full-length movies, talkies, serials, TV shows, video games, web shorts. Each of these advances was made possible by technology, but has art at its core. How can a connected medium like the Internet create new narrative experiences without disappearing into the mindless clicking of Zynga et al?

By the way, movies are awesome – and can’t be replaced by games. They’re ingrained as a deep part of our culture in a way that digital narratives have mostly managed when movie people get involved. (My favorite game of all time is The Secret of Monkey Island – a LucasFilm production.) Movies are also a collective experience in a way that digital culture can’t yet manage. Film nights – themed house parties where people watch a curated series of movies – are one of my favorite things in the world. The digital equivalent is probably LAN parties, where everyone has to bring their own computer and play a game together. Admittedly, that was fun when I was 15, but do you have the same conversations? Movies evolved from theater and literature – from pulpy paperbacks all the way through high art – whereas most games can still be tracked back to sports. They’re both important, but occupy different cultural niches.

Also, Raiders of the Lost Ark is five minutes shy of two hours long. Can you imagine sitting and watching someone play a game for that long? I’ve done it, and by the end of the first hour I’m usually half a Goomba jump away from going feral.

You can’t make a minimally viable movie. It’s tempting to treat a movie like a startup – and, of course, most movies are individual businesses with their own profit and loss sheets. But imagine what would happen if you tried to invent a whole plot and script based on the kinds of audience research and iterative demographic analytic analysis we all claim to practice on the web. You’d get the kind of forgettable paint-by-numbers movie that we’ve all seen a thousand times. No risks mean we never get to see anything new. (The same goes for startups, in my opinion.)

(Edit: the community over at Hacker News make an excellent point about this: that test screenings are commonplace, and that I contradict myself by saying that these methods lead to poor movies, which shows that it can be done. I guess I’m saying that movies can’t be made by lean methodologies alone.)

(A further edit: I don’t consider a low-budget movie to be a minimum viable product. This post by Anthony Panozza does a good job of explaining what the difference is, in my opinion.)

Distribution is the weakest link – and the real gatekeeper. Anyone can make a movie, especially now that cameras and professional editing suites have fallen into a price range that ordinary people can afford. The trick is getting a distributor to pick it up. Studios are legally barred from owning movie theaters; in other words, they haven’t owned the whole vertical chain since 1948. It’s distributors who ultimately control release dates and distribution, and who are blocking more innovative models from being established. These companies are the pink elephants on parade. What’ll we do?

The final reel

Movies aren’t going anywhere in the face of digital, just as novels weren’t killed by movies. The incredibly creative people who make them aren’t going away either, although decreasing technology costs mean there may be more of them. Instead, we need to look to the next new model for narrative entertainment: a kind of social experience that we can experience together, passively, holding each other’s hands and laughing at the jokes in unison. That’s the only thing that’ll really kill Hollywood.

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In this post, though, I’m going to rave, because I’m majorly impressed.

The major feature of my SOPA blackout page was a simple widget that detected your location, listed the representatives you needed to call to tell them about your opposition to the bills, and then let you call them straight on the page. This is like magic to me, even though I know it’s a Twilio integration. Brilliantly executed.

The three developers, Drew Inglis, Nick Meyer and Tess Rinearson, built Grassroutes as part of PennApps, a weekend hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania held a couple of days before the protest. It’s not just for SOPA and PIPA: you can relabel it for any political issue that you want to drive action for. Like nothing else before it, it turns slacktivism into direct action that spreads virally among site owners. And, again, it’s slick, simple, beautiful and well-built.

Grassroutes made it to the front page of Hacker News, where hackers continued the work by (for example) turning it into a Facebook app, and I certainly used it to call my representatives. My hope is this is part of a new wave of apps that will overcome the traditional criticisms of politics online and lower the barrier to direct participation in the democratic process.

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If I’m walking around, you’ll get me on my Samsung Galaxy S II. If I’m in transit (but not driving), you’ll probably get me on my iPad. If I’m at my desk, I’ll answer and take the whole call through my laptop. For you, the experience of contacting me will be exactly the same (give or take some background noise). For me, the experience fits my context: I can make and receive calls and texts on any of my devices. The same is true for email.

Consumption works the same way. All my important files are stored on Dropbox. If I need to get at something – for example, a work-in-progress piece of writing, or a receipt – I can pick up any of my Internet-connected devices and grab the contents. Similarly, my notes, which I take through Evernote: I can create and consume these anywhere.

A final example: I love movies. Watching them at the theater is still magical for me, but I also enjoy them elsewhere, depending on what kind of movie it is. (My favorite streamable new release right now is Midnight in Paris. A great film.)

At home, I use my dedicated media PC to play through a sound system and flat-screen monitor. It’s not perfect, but it works. Elsewhere, I might use my laptop or my iPad. On the road, I can play the same movie through the same service on my phone, or I may be able to take a downloaded version for offline consumption.

So far, so obvious. These are all known use cases that demonstrate why the consumer Internet is so powerful. But I have a question:

Shouldn’t applications, services and content be sold to me, instead of my devices?

Right now, I have to set each of my services up on each of my devices, and tell them to use the same account. That sometimes doesn’t work perfectly: for some reason, for example, I seem to have two Path accounts – one for my US handset, and one for my UK handset. I’m not sure how this happened.

Ideally, I want to sign up:

1. Once for each device, to tell them that I own it, and where I store my identity.
2. Once more for each service or application, to associate them with my identity.
3. The filesystem would be networked and bound to the identity. So rather than storing it on its own infrastructure, Evernote would save notes to my filesystem, which could potentially be accessed by other networked software.
4. Each identity would have an Internet-accessible unique identifier and point of entry.

The applications would then automagically become available on each of my devices. Crucially, when I go to buy or rent Midnight in Paris, it then is also available on all of my devices, because I’m renting via my identity rather than any one device. For the next 24 hours, say, I can stream the movie wherever is most convenient. If I buy a license for Microsoft Office, then it is licensed to my identity and I can use it on any of my devices.

This is literally a per-seat model for selling software. It makes buying and consuming simple, and will reduce piracy.

So here’s a follow-on question. It’s a dull-sounding one, but bear with me:

Wouldn’t this make enterprise provisioning dramatically easier?

Right now, system administrators in enterprise environments push software over their networks, and often refuse to allow non-approved hardware onto their infrastructure in order to make this easier. In an identity-centric model, though, where applications are delivered using Internet technologies:

1. Software would be provisioned to identities rather than machines.
2. The available identity domains and software on any given network could be locked down as appropriate (so, for example, I could bring in my smartphone but only use a sanctioned identity with it if I wanted to connect to the local network).

Wouldn’t this make consumer applications dramatically less annoying?

For me, the answer is “yes”. I don’t want to care about my devices and their capabilities, and I’m a CTO with a computer science degree. End users want their software to seamlessly “just work”, and they want to seamlessly be able to move content from one machine to another, or share to another person no matter what that thing happens to be, or where their data is stored. Right now, operating systems have become gatekeepers: bottlenecks that get in the way of users.

For me, this is the real application of a decentralized social web. It’s not just about sending messages around – it’s about using the Internet to create a fabric of interdependent applications where we retain control of our data (those identities and networked filesystems could be anywhere) while enjoying a simpler experience. Application providers and content owners sell more of their products, because they’re easier to consume, everyone loves their devices that little bit more, and every new product sold becomes a window onto a much bigger, connected ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Photo by Troy Holden, released under a Creative Commons license.

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SOPA and PIPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act respectively (PDF links) – are legislative acts that undermine the structure, culture and universality of the Internet. As Stanford Law Review points out, they’re unconstitutional and fundamentally in opposition to the principle of free speech:

This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that governmental action suppressing speech, if taken prior to an adversary proceeding and subsequent judicial determination that the speech in question is unlawful,is a presumptively unconstitutional “prior restraint.” In other words, it is the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,” permissible only in the narrowest range of circumstances. The Constitution requires a court “to make a final determination” that the material in question is unlawful “after an adversary hearing before the material is completely removed from circulation.”

I highly recommend reading the whole article, which also includes references, surrounding discussions and lots more detail.

This is a fight between old and new media, gatekeepers and consumers, democrats and those who seek to control discourse. One thing it’s not is a fight between people who want to pirate and people who are against it; a lot of people who oppose the bill, myself included, are also against piracy. The people – and they do exist – who choose to download illegally rather than purchase media when they have the choice are part of the problem, and not on the right side of the debate. However, there are better ways to fight piracy, and undermining the processes by which the Internet works is not an appropriate response – unless, of course, it’s the true purpose of the bill. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up, but it’s worth thinking about CBS Viacom’s role in distributing the software used to distribute files, and their own instructions for downloading copyrighted material.

The Internet is my livelihood. Rather than seek to undermine the rights of artists and creators, I’ve built platforms that – in a minor way – allow more people to create, share and be inspired. latakoo, for example, allows filmmakers and journalists to share their footage with editors, legal teams, customers and newsrooms more easily. Elgg allows people to learn, reflect and share with each other within schools, companies and organizations. Neither of these things undermines anyone’s rights. It sucks that a group of companies and lawmakers want to destroy the underlying principles through which I make my money – and which generate many billions of dollars every year – because some people prefer to steal their stuff than to buy it. When any website can disappear overnight without due process, the Internet becomes a very poor investment, and businesses are on shaky ground.

The MPAA has effectively suggested that we impose filters on the Internet similar to those in China and Iran. Yet, we also know that Netflix is reducing movie piracy in the US (implying that media companies need to better serve their potential customers), and more fundamentally that people who seek to pirate will find a way, whether through encryption, darknets or other methods. We also know that this is a great excuse to set up databases, track websites and create provisions to bring speech offline without due process. Let’s not let that happen.

One indication of the shadiness of these bills is that Lamar Smith, the author of SOPA, actually had a copyrighted image as the background of his website. In response to the discovery, his web team set up a block to prevent the Internet Archive from storing prior versions of his site – thereby hiding the evidence.

Once again, I encourage you to join organizations like ACLU, EFF and ORG, and to speak to your representatives. It’s not too late to save an industry, my job and our freedom of speech.

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“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.

Dave Winer notes that it probably won’t succeed:

There is no market for that. Facebook is the Facebook for the 99 percent. The goal should be to make something open and non-monolithic that provides many of the most valuable services of Facebook without the silo walls. It should not be something that an individual does, or a small group laboring heroically, rather it should be something that the Internet does.

In principle, I agree with Dave. It’s a fundamental mistake that a lot of people make when they build a social site. I used to spend a fair amount of my time at Elgg dissuading people from trying to make the new MySpace (which was the hot thing at the time), and inevitably, none of the neo-MySpace generic social networking sites worked out. Where open social networking did work out was for specific use cases: connecting people inside charities, providing platforms for reflective learning in education, rallying around causes or products.

However, that’s also an argument for why a social engine for Occupy might succeed. If it’s geared specifically at the needs for protest, while using existing technologies and simple solutions where appropriate standards don’t exist, it may become the first broadly-adopted decentralized social platform. From the backbone of Occupy using it, I can easily imagine other progressive organizations and individuals picking it up, eventually spreading through the academic sector – until it finally reaches the commercial world. Sure, there’s no market for that, but there’s a drive and motivation.

In an age where laws like SOPA are considered – where the threat of sites being yanked off the Internet without due process is real – decentralization in platforms underpinning progressive causes makes a lot of sense. You can easily imagine the “retweet” or “reshare” feature found in the likes of Twitter or Tumblr being used to create a copy of information so that it spreads across the network like an old-school Usenet post; a kind of social multicast which ensures that nothing really dies. Some nodes may live in the cloud, some on dedicated server clusters, and others on always-on home computers linked via a Comcast router; the same free speech, everywhere, indelible and impossible to control.

That’s a future I can get behind, and a platform I’d love to be involved with. In comparison, taking on Facebook just seems so small.

Occupy photo by Sasha Y. Kimel, released under a Creative Commons license.

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“We’ve all been dropping status updates and photos into a void,” said Ben Werdmuller, the chief technology officer at Latakoo, a video service. “We knew we were sharing this much, of course, but it’s weird to realize they’ve been keeping this information and can serve it up for anyone to see.”

Mr. Werdmuller, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said that the experience of browsing through his social history on Facebook was emotionally evocative – not unlike unearthing an old yearbook or shoebox filled with photographs and letters.

Regular readers will know that my opinion goes beyond it being “weird”. Here’s how I described it back in September:

Except now, when someone clicks through from anywhere on the web that uses Facebook Connect to see your profile, they’ll really see you: your life in context. It’s a contextual identity; something you won’t get from a real name, a passport, an ID card, or even a DNA profile. Whereas previously profiles were a collection of hand-picked pieces of information coupled with some things you’d shared recently, now you’ll see wedding photos, pictures of drunken nights on the town four years ago, and perhaps a status update you made when you were hurt and upset after something you’ve long forgotten that happened in 2006 – mixed up with more professional status updates and links, of course.

You can read my entire Facebook Timeline post over here, and here’s today’s New York Times article.

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November was a hard blogging month for me. I managed two posts: a single embedded TEDx talk (albeit one by Kaliya, who I respect greatly), and one about Thanksgiving.

I just didn’t have it in me. You see, I don’t love tech on its own; I love what it can do for people. More specifically, I love the ways the web empowers ordinary people with information and the power to be heard. It levels playing fields, democratizes markets and removes bottlenecks. Nobody gets to decide which music is released, which books are published or what news stories are reported any more. If a musician wants their song to get out, it will. If a witness at a protest wants to broadcast their shaky video of police officers in riot gear beating students unprompted or nonchalantly spraying tear gas into a line of nonviolent protesters, they can make that happen.

And they did. And they are. And they will again.

The Occupy camps I’ve been to have been shining examples of how to run a protest: well organized, intelligent, completely passive and filled to the stars with positive energy. I’m by no means a video professional, but I felt compelled to take some footage of Occupy San Francisco (please feel free to add your own Occupy video to that space), to record how beautiful it was. Entirely the opposite of angry or undirected, they even gladly welcomed people against the movement to speak their mind at their microphone.

Yet:

At first glance, it seems impossible that such a lovely gathering could be attracting so much anger and violence. But Naomi Wolf gets it perfectly:

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. [...]

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation [... and] correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

Make no mistake: this has everything to do with the web, and the democratization of information. More than the startups, platforms, ubiquitous connectivity and access to incredible amounts of information, as a community we were disrupting the way people think about information and democratic power. Having disrupted publishing, the music industry and countless other incumbent models, the flow is finally reaching political power structures.

And it’s war.

The Stop Online Piracy Act ostensibly exists to help battle piracy – a serious problem, for sure, albeit one that in large part is of the content owners’ making. Unfortunately, the legislation allows websites to be removed without due process, restricts secure communications, and undermines whistleblowers. There’s understandably been a huge response against the Act from across the web – this site also ran a call to action – but it’s not dead yet.

More worrying still, the National Defense Authorization Act (which is renewed every year to maintain defense budgets) passed in the Senate yesterday with a new clause that allows suspected “domestic terrorists” – including US citizens – to be detained indefinitely without trial. In a world where someone can be investigated for terrorism and banned from airports for life over a tweet or added to the no-fly list for writing a book criticizing the President, this is deeply concerning. In a nation that prides itself on democracy and freedom, you can now be made to simply disappear.

As developers and evangelists, we have to make a decision. We all want to empower our users and make the world a better place, and usually we try to do this by making great products. But our success as an industry, and as individuals, has been a result of the context in which we’ve thrived. That context is being both directly and indirectly challenged, and we have to decide: are we going to carry on as before, or are we going to do something about it, ideologically stand with the people who are arguing for a more equal system, and build systems that truly, overtly empower?

Hopefully you’ll forgive me if I haven’t been as excited about the next big thing of late.

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This blog has traditionally been about web technology, so I’d like to say:

Thank you to the people who push the web forward. To everyone working on open technologies, standards, browsers, decentralized mechanisms and new user experience models; to the people who write, evangelize and promote the web way of doing things; to the people who put usable, ethical tools that empower users into the right hands. You’re making the world a better place – not to mention allow me to have a really interesting career – and I am in awe of what you do.

More personally (or selfishly, depending on how you want to look at it), thank you also to everyone who’s supported me and my writing over the years. I’ve been blogging for almost thirteen years in one place or another, but many of you became aware of me during my Elgg years. The support I’ve had since then has allowed me to have countless adventures that would have otherwise been impossible. Thank you.

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latakoo lets you send HD video in a fraction of the time by compressing it to an H.264 MP4 file. (You’ll still see the compression benefit even if your original video is an MP4. I’m both amazed by, and proud of, what our video guys have been able to achieve.) And then it’s completely private, and manageable from a web app. You can send it to anyone with an email address, and they can download it.

To get started, just click the button below:

We’ll be releasing a slew of new features over the next couple of months that will change how video is uploaded and shared on the web. Signing up today means you’ll be the first to know when they’re ready to use.

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It just occurred to me that everything being worked on at IIW is meaningful to CRM. I had been thinking that only the VRM stuff was meaningful, but I realize now that all the IIW stuff is, because — from a CRM perspective — it’s all about customer empowerment. And empowered customers are entities that CRM will welcome, sooner or later.

I think that’s true, but I also think we can go further than that. A huge part of identity on the web is controlling who can see what: think about the Google+ Project’s approach, where your identity consists of a series of data objects (posts, photos, status updates, etc), each having its own set of access controls. Controlling access to items requires that you have people to restrict access with. Therefore, contact and relationship management is integral to digital identity.

In turn, federated social networks are integral to both. For identity to be useful online, you need to be able to use it virtually anywhere. If identity is a series of items restricted to people based on your relationships with them, those relationships need to persist everywhere you use your identity. Hence, your relationships need to federate across identity-aware applications – and federated social software is the future of identity online.

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“The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white,” Poole said. “Who you are online is who you are offline.” [...] But human identity doesn’t work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that’s key to our creativity and self-expression. “It’s not ‘who you share with,’ it’s ‘who you share as,’” Poole told us. “Identity is prismatic.”

I’m going to draw lines in the sand and call Chris an identity progressive, while Google and Facebook (officially, at least) are identity conservatives. The former supports an individual’s right to choose their identity – while the latter assumes that identity is imposed by a higher authority. (With Google allowing rich, famous people like Snoop Dogg to use their stage identities, while banning anyone else who tries to use an alternate name, it almost feels like a class issue.)

On this spectrum, Facebook’s contextual identity is extreme conservatism: not only is the description of who you (your name, location, place of work) mandated, but it’s also expected to include events throughout your entire life, largely unfiltered through the kinds of prisms that Chris spoke about. Twitter, on the other hand, is at the other end of the spectrum: you can be whomever you want to be, as long as you don’t infringe someone else’s rights by pretending to be them.

I bet this is being hotly discussed at the Internet Identity Workshop today. I wish I could be there, but look forward to reading reports from the floor.

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Nah. In iOS 5, you can only download podcasts by the episode, and only via the iTunes Store. There’s no other subscription capability. If, as a content owner, you want to give your users the ability to subscribe, you’ve either got to build a native iOS app or ask your users to sync from their computers; either way, you’ve got to have your content approved by Apple (unless you ask your users to paste an RSS URL straight into iTunes). The latter situation is going to become less and less tenable as time goes on. Apple may sell 4 million iPhone 4S devices this weekend; Android is gaining significant market share. The Internet is slowly fragmenting into a series of proprietary (or in the case of Android, semi-proprietary) application platforms.

Let’s not kid ourselves about the reasons. Native apps are faster, have better UI, and tend to provide a user experience that is better overall. There’s a reason that there was so much buzz over Facebook’s iPad app, even though the iPad is capable of displaying Facebook’s full web interface. There’s no sense in being blinded by ideology: for most people, apps are better.

This is a problem. It’s a problem for companies like Google, who depend on web ad sales to make a living. It’s also a problem for the entire web ecosystem – one of the cultural and commercial strengths of the web has been the fact that nobody owns it.

That same strength has become a competitive disadvantage. Joe Hewitt caused a fuss a few months ago by suggesting that web technologies need an owner, and I think at least on one very practical level, he was right:

The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform acquires cutting edge capabilities in a timely manner (camera access, anyone?). The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform makes real developers happy and productive. The Web has no one to ensure that it is competitive with other platforms, and so increasingly we are seeing developers investing their time in other platforms that serve their needs better.

Nonetheless, the ideology is important. Just as the IBM PC eventually won out over the Mac in the eighties, open always wins, and there are countless use cases where an open web makes more commercial, cultural and political sense than a proprietary app platform. However, as Joe points out:

Let’s face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform. There will forever be other important platforms competing for users’ time. To thrive, HTML and company need what those other platforms have: a single source repository and a good owner to drive it. A standards body is not suited to perform this role. Browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they are stalled by the standards process in so many areas that is impossible to create a platform with a coherent, unified vision the way Apple has with Cocoa or the way Python has with Guido.

In a follow-up post, he points out that the web has one major thing going for it:

There is, however, one other characteristic that does define the Web, and that is the humble hyperlink. Links are a feature of HTML, but they are not limited to HTML. Links are the connections that give the Web its name, and links are the biggest thing missing from native platforms.

[...] So, my definition of the Web then is resources loaded over the Internet using HTTP and then displayed in a hyperlink-capable client. This definition is liberating. It helps me see a future beyond HTML which is still the Web. I can say now that when I exclaim my love for the Web, it’s the freedom of driving the open Internet in a browser that I love, not the rendering technology. Hyperlink traversal matters. The Internet being global and decentralized matters. HTML does not matter.

This powerful core of information democracy – these interconnected links between resources and people – are what the people who love the web have been protecting. It’s what gives the web life, and the universe of open source projects and standards bodies that Joe tears down have been continuing to build it.

Enter Mozilla, which is obviously worried about the future of the platform:

The challenges ahead of us are very real. Mobile platforms are more closed and more centralized than we have seen in decades. As individuals, we are losing the ability to act on the Web without permission from large, centralized gatekeepers. We are all being tracked, logged, cataloged, monetized and turned into products to be sold. We’re seeing the universal platform of the Web fragmenting back into multiple different worlds.

As the Internet experience is changing, Mozilla, too, is changing. The products and tools that we use to advance our mission are expanding and evolving. A browser is necessary but not sufficient. Equally important is expanding the number of people who understand our values and identify as Mozillians. Mozilla has both the challenge and the opportunity to expand our reach dramatically. We have the ability to bring our values to life in new ways. Embracing these opportunities means embracing change, embracing hope and embracing determination. This is how we will continue to give people ultimate authority over their digital lives.

There are some things to take issue with in this statement – in particular, I think the goal of asking people to identify as Mozillians is questionable – but there’s a great big declaration of intent embedded there, too. Mozilla wants to “give people ultimate authority over their digital lives“, and I believe it’s now the only major player on the web that does.

If Mozilla continues to follow through on this promise, it deserves our support – but this approach doesn’t have to be limited to one organization. The World Wide Web, decentralized and standards-based, created an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and there’s much commercial gain to be had through finding new, open business models and creating open software that harbors commercial ecosystems. For many of us, the ideology and the preservation of the culture of the web is all we need; movements like the Occupy protests have much in common with open source, and could really make use of open communications platforms. For everyone else, it’s important to spread the message that there’s money to be made. Let’s get out there and bring the web back.

Photo by liewcf, released under a Creative Commons license.

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There are so many technologists who I admire that happen to be women. But there’s only one person this post can possibly start with.

How I got into computers.

Both my parents are directly responsible for the direction of my career. My mother taught me BASIC and sat through Pascal tutorials with me; she typed in programs with me; she inspired me by learning how to program herself. Later, she used her business qualifications to become a financial analyst for the multimedia and mobile phone industries, directly inspiring me to start Spire Magazine, the ezine I’d edit through high school. When we couldn’t afford a cutting-edge computer, she arranged to start a weekly computer club where kids my age could mess around with them on a Thursday night. She took me along to MILIA, the European multimedia expo in Cannes, where I saw how technology is sold. She gave me inside information about the software industry and talked to me about the background deals behind events like the Windows 95 launch. All this while also being my moral compass, teacher and all the amazing things that parents do for their children. Both my parents are astonishing people, and I’m lucky to have them.

(She’s now an 8th Grade Physics teacher, and says that it’s the best job of her life, which tells you a lot about her. That inspires me too.)

Building interfaces for society.

I’ve actually only had one email exchange with danah boyd, and it had nothing to do with technology. (We’re both Ani DiFranco fans, and she maintains an incredibly comprehensive lyrics archive; I let her know that Righteous Babe Records used her site to print out a lyrics-heavy setlist so that a close, profoundly deaf friend could follow along during a gig.) But I keep up with her work, which is not just required reading for everyone involved in online communities, but should inspire all of us to think about the deep interactions between those communities and peoples’ lives. It’s through danah that we know that teenagers have a much more nuanced attitude to privacy that is normally talked about (a piece that I find myself citing increasingly regularly). And if her bibliography of social networking research isn’t in your bookmarks, and you’re in the field, you’re doing something wrong. I wish I could spend more of my career following in these footsteps; this is fascinating, vital stuff that has helped me make better things.

Making it.

The first time I spoke at the Edinburgh TechMeetup, it was about the decentralized social web. I’m pretty sure I’d come out of Elgg, and was also full of thoughts about how you should (or shouldn’t) run a startup.

One of the people who came up to me afterwards was Kate Ho, who had just finished her PhD in Computer Science and was starting Interface3, a consultancy business based around creating multitouch software. I don’t think I gave her any useful advice, but it was good to meet her. The next time I turned up at TechMeetup – not six months later – the company had been shortlisted for a Shell award. It’s been going from strength to strength since then, creating innovative multitouch apps that are more niche than rockstar flashy (often for the education market), but are profitable. Building a successful technology business in Scotland is not an easy thing to do, and what she’s doing is awe-inspiring. Companies like Interface3 don’t get the coverage of startups like Foursquare or AirBNB, but are every bit as important. Interface3 is hiring, by the way, and Kate’s story is an important lesson in just getting down and doing it.

Taking flight.

Finally, and without wanting to be sycophantic, I want to write a note about Jade Kurian, the President of latakoo. Her homepage says she’s a journalist, but don’t let that fool you (although she is that too). I’ve been around since latakoo took shape, and during that time she’s become among the most technologically skilled people in the company, happy to dive into codec details, read RFCs, talk through integration details. She’s not a declared scientist, but has become a de facto technologist as well as a tech entrepreneur, and I’m very glad every day to be working with her.

Who else?

Everyone. Monica Wilkinson‘s work with Activity Streams is incredibly important fo the future of the social web. Amber Case‘s work on cyborg anthropology is a source of awe to me and has changed the way I think about technology (and people). I’ve always admired the things Leah Culver builds – my own skills don’t compare. Daily Information Managing Director Miranda Rose – who I’ve known since we were both tiny – taught herself to program to keep her business going. There are so many role models for women in technology, and the Internet is amazing: I feel lucky to have been exposed to the ideas of all of these remarkable people.

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He didn’t personally invent the computer, or (as ReadWriteWeb points out) anything; but he understood that if computers were to become integral to our lives, they needed to be more than commodity objects. Apple remains the only company that really successfully considers the emotional design of a product.

To put it another way, Steve Jobs humanized computers, and his legacy is that they are more emotionally accessible, they’re better designed, and they empower anyone who creates in a way that they might not otherwise have done. And he did it in a way that made a product launch feel like a life-changing event.

As Om Malik says, our Elvis is dead. He will be sorely missed.

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The new latakoo is coming soon. It starts at free.

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In some ways, the web industry seems to have lost its way. From empowering users and smashing incumbent gatekeepers, the emphasis is now on how to raise the next round of funding and convert active users into their maximum possible value..

My piece about Facebook, contextual identity and radical transparency continues to get a lot of attention, and the conversation continues. Dave Winer urged his readers to log out of Facebook, and Nik Cubrilovic countered that logging out doesn’t help. In short, when you log out, Facebook continues to remember who you are, and your account details are still sent whenever you access a Facebook resource (like a page or facebook.com or a Like button anywhere). He goes on to say that:

Privacy today feels like what security did 10-15 years ago – there is an awareness of the issues steadily building and blog posts from prominent technologists is helping to steamroll public consciousness. The risks around privacy today are just as serious as security leaks were then – except that there is an order of magnitude more users online and a lot more private data being shared on the web.

It’s clear that privacy is becoming a business factor as well as something that some of us care about from an ethical standpoint, and that’s in large part due to Facebook bringing it to the public’s attention. I’m reminded of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, from 2007, which many of us signed as part of Marc Canter’s Data Sharing Summit. It was intended to address many of these issues before they became wider problems.

The meat of the Bill of Rights is:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

Ownership of their own personal information, including: their own profile data; the list of people they are connected to; the activity stream of content they create;

Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and

Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

At the meeting, a large and influential (at the time) web corporation suggested that the word “ownership” was a step too far, and that it should be enough for users to simply have control. Since then, I think it’s become acceptable to suggest that users own their data (as in the course of using a web service, a reasonable person would assume that he or she already does); instead, web services are granted an irrevocable license to use it.

Given this, and given the conversations we’ve been having as a community, perhaps the time is right to revive aspects of this document, and bring it up to date for 2011?

Photo: the Data Sharing Summit group, September 8, 2007. A prize for the first person to identify 90% of the people in the picture.

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