I Just Need a Little Privacy
Posted by Monty on Apr 25, 2008
Today I’m thinking about identity. This is a result of attending the Health2.0 discussion this morning and listening to David Recordon speak about Open ID and XFN (the XHTML Friends Network). All of the social applications here at Web2.0 Expo rely in some part on the user providing and agreeing to share their personal information. Are there standards for the data? How will it be shared? And most importantly, how secure is it? When I give PageFlakes my Gmail username and password to get my mail in a handy little AJAX box on my personal start page, are those credentials safe? Shouldn’t I worry about this at least a little? Would that I could authenticate against a central, trusted identity partner and then provide security tokens to those applications requesting credentials.
This idea is rapidly becoming a reality thanks to OpenID and OAuth. Having a single, trusted identity and a permission granting service is key to taking social media past sharing personal social information to sharing personal private information such as medical data. As a healthcare industry web geek I’m worried about how patients will access and share their medical information.
I’m not sure the public identity standards efforts are quite at the level needed for medical information. Today’s Health2.0 discussions suggested a growing market for medical social media services, all of whom rely on users sharing their data. Maybe not their HIV status, but certainly a summary of their basic health conditions. In order for my social network to build my network associations, it needs to know how to limit the possibilities, limits based on personal information.
Disease support groups come to mind as a super easy application. Why search for people when they could easily be found for you based on condition and some other limiter like location. We’ve been looking at the disease support group concept for a while at work and we keep running up against the data privacy/HIPAA question when it comes to hosting and specifically sharing our patients’ personal information. To date we’ve pushed the activity a step away from us by directing people to a third-party service provider. I feel badly about that. I can’t guarantee that they will have a good experience with that provider, nor do I have any control over the integrity and privacy of their information.
I’m wanting an independent service, run by a non-rofit, and overseen by consumer and industry representatives to manage the storage of my private information. At the very least there should be open and robust standards for how we deal with the data privacy and ownership issues. I also want an open source, open standard for electronic medical records let’s call it MXML for the moment. It bugs me that my most personal and intimate information is currently locked away in a variety of vendor-supplied proprietary systems that I can’t access without jumping through huge hoops.
So I’m a hippie, and that’s a good thing. I should control my identity, the information associated with it and my data should be mine and be portable. Hello dataportability.org.
Conference Culture
Posted by Monty on Apr 24, 2008
I’ve noticed an emerging culture at the web conferences I’ve attended over the past couple of years. There are the usual conference inhabitants: sales reps, booth babes/boyz, swag hounds and earnest newbies. These folks are ubiquitous at all conferences these days regardless of the industry. But the web world has it’s own special species, some of which I’ve been able to identify at Web2.0 Expo this week.
1) The Uber Geek - Dress is intentionally deconstructed, t-shirt from failed start-up required, MacBook Pro covered with stickers, knows more about just about anything related to the underlying technologies powering the web than you do. Extra points for skateboarding through the expo hall. These guys make the products but you can’t talk to them unless you are a real hacker. Doesn’t use Twitter, wrote the framework Twitter relies on.
2) The Blogocrat - Shaved head, goatee, MacBook Pro with custom cover. Black shirt, jeans, nerd glasses. Knows everyone, actually uses Twitter for more than journaling trips to the restroom. Works from home/airport and probably has a better handle on what’s going on than the editors of Information Week.
3) The Re-Tread - Enterprise software sales slime now with Web2.0 features added. You know the guys, they sold your company $30M worth of ERP/BPO software in the early 90s and now want to sell you an underlying network service architecture to make the box of parts they sold you last time come closer to working. Company logo polo shirt, $100 hair cut, golf slacks, loafers with tassels and no socks. These guys are your best friends as long as you control corporate money. Loves his Dell Laptop, wants you to join his LinkedIn network so he can have a TweetUp with you.
4) The VC - Or is he? - Blue blazer, open collar dress shirt, dockers, loafers with socks, really good hair. Shiny new MacBook Air. Has the secret to monetizng Twitter, just can’t share it with you, yet. Wants to reach out to a larger market and will talk to you as long as you have knowledge or potential. Says things like “As a VC you don’t want to know what I’m thinking”. May be real, may be Memorex. This guy just might fund your startup so you have to take him seriously. Follow him on Twitter
Have you noticed any other outstanding types, want to help catalog these rare species? Leave a comment…
Web2.0 Expo Day 1
Posted by Monty on Apr 23, 2008
It’s 1996 all over again folks. The hype is flowing, bloggers blogging and thetwitterheads are twittering. There’s more excitement than I’ve seen since the Web1.0 bubble started to inflate. My focus this week is in the social meets enterprise space, especially focused on how wikis with extensible social frameworks can stretch to fill the collaboration space.
I was reading Wiki Patterns on the plane ride out and was struck by the contrast the author (Stewart Madder) drew between structured collaboration architectures and the flatness of a wiki. If we don’t completely understand the use patterns, or if in fact they are still evolving, should we really be deploying rigid hierarchical topologies and expect them to work?
Had a great discussion with Stewart about this and decided immediately he’s a person whose thoughts you should follow.
Other interesting threads are in the open ID data portability space. How many profiles should you have? Personal, professional, theme related? How many of each? It’s a common question within the enterprise as well. Employee ID, LAN ID, wiki login, single sign-on issues are more relevant in the enterprise then perhaps in the public space since use is mandated.
Sitting in the Blogtropolis blogger lounge right now, seeing faces that must belong to my Twitter stream, interesting how a global social network is still relevant in finding a person across the room.
More thoughts later…
Why Twitter Beats Facebook
Posted by Monty on Apr 1, 2008
I’ve been using Facebook for a while now to connect with friends and family and at first I loved it. Facebook was fun and I felt like the Web was a smaller, more intimate space because of it. I even got my wife to start using it which is a big deal given her general aversion to geek toys. I accumulated a pretty substantial number of friends and colleagues from real life and the web faithfully changing my status whenever I could muster the creativity to come up with a sentence that started with “is”. I would occasionally post on someone’s wall and they might post back, or maybe I’d upload a photo or two to share. All of that was working fine and I thought Facebook would become the place where my worlds connected. But it didn’t turn out that way…
There a certain discontinuity about Facebook even with the news feed and status updates trying to aggregate the bits of information that are relevant to me. There’s just not enough real information coming across the line to keep me interested. Add to that the swarm of requests to join groups, applications and other crap that clogs the Facebook stream and I’m thinking it’s time to give it up. Don’t get me wrong, facebook is cool, it’s just not that relevant. I want something fresher, more relevant, and that allows me to parse bits of information from a wider group of people than my one or two degrees of friend separation can offer.
Just in the nick of time comes the micro-blogging upstart Twitter. It’s got a dead simple proposition: post and read bits of information in a single continuous stream from a group of people that you choose to follow. No friend requests, no “is”, no groups, no ads. Just drinking from the stream of consciousness fire hose. I’m following about 40 people, ranging from my daughter at college to Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble with all sorts of people in between. It’s a wild, diverse and amazingly relevant information feed.
What amazes me about Twitter is that I can follow just about anyone, and many of the people I follow also choose to follow me. The conversation, while disjointed, is relevant and to date has not gotten out of hand. I’m seeing content that I would normally find out about on Digg or one of the tech blogs earlier and in a more raw state than before Twitter. I love reading Michael Arrington’s bombastic tweets which then appear later as much more refined posts to Techcrunch.
So I set up Twitter to feed my facebook status, thats all I was using FB for anyway. I don’t even visit Facebook most days, but my Twitter feed is blazing away pretty much constantly. I’m pretty sure I won’t be back to Facebook other than to occasionally check on my friends, but then given the lack of real connection on Facebook I think I’d rather email or call them if I really want to connect. I don’t really care that much what you’re doing, I care deeply about what you’re thinking. Twitter comes closer to a thought feed than anything I’ve seen yet.
So go on, get yourself a Twitter account before your name is taken. If you like it you might want to try Twhirl, which brings Twitter to the desktop in a very sweet UI that resembles an IM client. It’s nice to have a live feed without refreshing your browser. Even nicer to have that browser back for surfing.
If you’re interested in what I’m thinking you should consider following me on Twitter at twitter.com/mflinsch
Update:
Matt Maroon has written a great post on why Facebook just isn’t that special, and if I haven’t completely offended you by this point maybe you’d enjoy reading it. He echoes some of my concerns but takes it to the next level by asking how Facebook possibly compares in its impact to what Google has done. Matt’s right, in my mind, that the Internet isn’t a social thing… That really struck me, and I think I might agree. What I’m doing on Twitter isn’t really all that social, in some ways it’s more voyeuristic than participatory. I’m scanning the feed for the next meme, looking for relevance rather than a relationship. I have plenty of relationship contact in real life and do not need the Internet to fill that space for me. But I sure do need the Internet to inform me faster about things that are not clicking in my existing social network. Anyway, read Matt’s post, it’s good.
Are Micro StartUps the Next Great Thing?
Posted by Monty on Mar 24, 2008
I’m sure you’ve heard of Twitter, the micro blogging startup from Obvious in San Francisco. Twitter has a simple purpose, allow users to post small blurbs of text (tweets) to the service which are read by an individual user’s followers. It’s a sweet service and does one thing really well. More than a status or presence message, and less than a blog post, Twitter fills a void in the 2.0 space. The product emerged in an organic fashion and given the rather simple and inexpensive development pathway (read Ruby on Rails) did not require a traditional start up approach.
Guy Kawasaki has launched an RSS aggregator called Alltop that resembles Twitter in that it also does one reasonably simple thing quite well. Both of these services are great examples of what I think is the next hot business trend: the Micro StartUp.
Venture capital has clearly adapted to this trend as can be seen with the emergence of the Y Combinator and the Founders Co-op among others. The business model is radically different from traditional VC models in that the initial investment is in the range of $10k to $20k instead of low to mid seven figures. Business plans are eschewed in favor of the ability to rapidly produce a functional application. Business models are often left in flux in favor of achieving first to market status. I’m still not sure how Twitter plans to monetize their service.
I’ve been preaching about opening access to content production with wikis and blogs and how this represents a radical power shift in the publishing industry. I think the micro startup phenomenon is evidence of a similar trend in the arena of idea realization. How cool is it that a small group of people can launch a product to a global marketplace with a tiny budget and a project life cycle that is measure in weeks rather than months or years?
Given that both the technology and business case for much of what we’re doing in the web2.0 space is still emerging it really makes sense to me that we try small steps that can be easily realized rather than grand unification projects that often spend longer in development than the projected life span of the product being developed.
I’m thinking this is cool.
Is it Web2.0 Yet?
Posted by Monty on Mar 16, 2008
There’s a fair amount of hype these days regarding web2.0 and whether it’s real, over, or just another tech trend that fails to materialize. Google web2.0 and you’ll find a pretty deep list of links including a nice overview in Wikipedia. Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media characterizes web 2.0 as:
“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform” (link)
Ok, that’s pretty cool but what’s he really saying, and what does it mean for the average user? I’m pretty sure business revolutions are rare, and I’m absolutely sure that web2.0 isn’t a true revolution. I do however think it’s a pretty significant evolution of what the web was intended to be in the first place.
Web1.0 was all about content and the ability to publish to a global audience with a limited amount of overhead. HTML provided a simple format for delivering words, pictures and other media and linking between documents. Browsers enabled regular people to consume this information without having to know much about technology other than how to drive a mouse.
Today’s web is still anchored in content, as it should be, but it is increasingly about functionality and what the user can do with the functionality and the content. To me the fundamental difference between web1.0 and web2.0 is the level to which the user is actually involved. Web1.0 users consumed. Web2.0 users contribute, or at the very least participate. User contributions are at the key of leading web2.0 sites such as flickr, digg, and youtube. While contribution has been around since the early days of Usenet, what we’re seeing today is a democratization of the level of accessibility the user has. You don’t need to be a geek to upload a video to youtube.
So it it web2.0 yet? I think so. Average people are interacting with web sites and applications as if it were normal, google is now a mainstream verb. My Mom probably doesn’t understand what cloud computing is, but she relies on the cloud every day for her email services, but who cares if she knows what it’s called. It’s become part of her life.
So if my Mom is using participatory web services and contributing content to the interwebs and relying on the cloud for her data storage and features isn’t it time to admit that we’ve crested the hill?