paul walk’s weblog

In a recent post, Facebook Or Twitter - Or Facebook And Twitter , Brian Kelly says:

…in some circle such use of Facebook is being derided with comments such as “It’s a closed garden“, “Its popularity is on the wane” or “Twitter is a better development environment” being made. I have to say that I foind that such comments tend to miss the point.“.

Brian tackles the “popularity on the wane” comment with some web statistics, but leaves the “closed garden” and “better development environment” arguments. I’m not at all sure what the argument is about development environments, but I am very interested in the walled garden aspect - I wrote about this in July last year, and I have seen nothing since to change my mind. I’m not sure I’m deriding Facebook, but I do maintain that it is a walled garden. I still keep an account in Facebook out of interest but I rarely access it.

I attended a session on digital libraries earlier this week at the JISC conference, at which Lorcan Dempsey spoke about how where once the user built their workflow around the library, now the library must build services which fit into the user’s workflow. Facebook, it seems to me, is a destination. I go there sometimes, almost always because someone has uploaded some photos of an event I have attended. I go there for occasional amusement. According to the figures, Facebook is very successful at being a destination. But is it embedded in anyone’s workflow I wonder? Twitter is very much part of my workflow - it is the single most used application on my iPhone.

Twitter is an eminently ‘composable‘ service by design, while Facebook is an attractive (for many) destination. Twitter participates in any number of mashups, and has, given rise to an extraordinary range of user-interfaces. It fits into people’s workflows because they can choose how to access it. I use a combination of the mobile web interface and SMS: others use these and a variety of rich desktop interfaces.

So I think my response is still: use Twitter and Facebook, or both, or neither. But I believe that Twitter is more interesting, really because it’s composable nature will allow it to fit all kinds of workflows.

Your mileage may vary

Tags: composable, Facebook, Twitter

Yesterday I left a comment on Brian Kelly’s post, Is That A Pistol In Your Pocket?, where I explained how the iPhone had changed my mind about preferring to carry several dedicated devices which inter-operate, as opposed to carrying one integrated device. At one time I was determined to pursue the former approach, making connections with Bluetooth and, later, WI-FI. Essentially, I expected to create a responsive peer-to-peer network of devices, what has been termed a Personal Area Network.

I’ve given up, probably temporarily, on this approach - the sheer ease-of-use of the iPhone trumps my other concerns at this stage in my career/life/biorhythms. But as we approach a world of ubiquitous, networked computing, it seems to me that a new model is emerging. Where once the personal network of peer-to-peer devices seemed an obvious approach, now we might observe that this can be unnecessary: each of our devices is going to be, if it isn’t already, capable of communicating with the global ‘interweb’ at usable speeds.

To give a concrete example: I once aspired to use my PDA (with it’s larger screen) to act as the pocket display device for photographs I had taken with my mobile phone. Both devices had a Bluetooth interface, so this was the channel to use. I did get this working, but it was never a convenient operation and I eventually stopped bothering.

With today’s equivalent devices, I might do something different: use the mobile phone’s internet connection to post photographs to flickr for instance, and, on my PDA, directly download the ones I want to display there. Of course with my iPhone, I can go a little step further - I have sufficiently robust access to the web to be able to be able to leave some resources on the web and just view them from there when I want to.

Now, there are plenty of use-cases where one might want one’s devices to inter-operate, and where the web might not provide an easier solution than a short-range, peer-to-peer approach. But some common requirements, particularly around the using and sharing of resources (photos, video, bookmark lists, contacts databases etc.) are ideally served by the web.

So, it seems that it is the area in personal area networks which is diminished in importance: the networking remains, but the very local area has been supplanted by the cloud in some respects.

Tags: cloud, iPhone, personal-area-network

I haven’t used a dedicated instant messaging (IM) client for many months. I do occasionally use text-chat facilities when they are built into other tools - notably Skype at the moment. Last week however, a colleague sent me their contact details on four of the available IM networks:

• AOL/AIM
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Google

Because I cannot control what my ID or ’screen-name’ will be on each of these, I am forced to use different IDs for some. I would love to be able to use my OpenID for all these, but none of the above networks offers an OpenID consuming interface. If I were to rely on IM more than I do, then I would want to establish my ‘presence’ on each of the networks in which I have contacts or ‘buddies’. Using an aggregation client (like the excellent Adium for the Mac, or if you prefer a web-solution, Meebo) makes this just about manageable. My presence can be maintained on all four of these networks while running a single client. But the networks are not joined - buddies on one network cannot talk directly to buddies on another. They are also not interoperable (although Google do at least show willing by supporting the Jabber protocol).

I’m quickly remembering why it was that I gradually gave up on IM in the first place….

So, now, as well as buddies, I have friends, thanks to social networking systems like Facebook and Twitter. At one time I was maintaining three IM networks, with many actual contacts spread across them, often with several identities each. Now I’m doing the same for several unconnected, and mostly closed, social network systems. One popular aspect of such new systems is their support for an extended ’status’. Where IM allows the user to indicate if they are online, ‘busy’ etc, Facebook and Twitter (among others) encourage the user to give a little more detail.

Attempts have been made to build aggregation clients such as MoodBlast which allow the user to update their status across several social-networking systems. The developers behind MoodBlast have removed support for updating Facebook however, claiming that this is motivated by a threat of legal action from Facebook.

Now, it’s certainly not unusual to maintain more than one, unconnected circle of contacts. Many people prefer to keep their professional and their social networks separate. But, and this is the important point, I really don’t want my social networks to be constrained by particular software choices. As I can connect resources across the web in a uniform way to form a network of resources, I want to be able to connect people to form my social network. Perhaps OpenID or something similar could provide the solution.
Update: Michael C. Harris says that Facebook have restored the ability for third-party apps to update a user’s status - see his comment below for a link to some details about this - thanks Michael.

Technorati Tags: im, moodblast, openid, social-network

A couple of years ago, Dave Winer posted an article in which he outlined the notion of a River of News, describing the use of an RSS aggregator to simply scroll through the latest new items from many sources (or categories), all merged together in one ’stream’. I don’t tend to use my RSS reader (the excellent NetNewsWire) in this way, preferring to browse particular sources as the fancy takes me. But this is for news, serious comment, articles etc. What about more lightweight uses?

I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter for a few weeks now (I’ve actually been subscribed to Facebook for far longer, in the sense that I created an account and had a cursory look at it more than a year ago, but I’ve been actively using them recently). I’m quite persuaded of the usefulness of Twitter in terms of its functionality. What I’ve found is that I’m using Facebook in the same way. I now ignore the multitudinous applications which have been developed on Facebook’s much-vaunted Platform. But I’m still reading my friends’ status-updates, along with occasional invitation to an events.

Now it turns out, as I described recently, that I can get this information from Facebook in RSS format. Twitter also allows me to subscribe to an RSS feed of the stream of posts from the people that I’m ‘following’. The only reason I’m still bothering with Facebook is that it is used by quite a few people that I care about and who aren’t using Twitter.

So with both Facebook and Twitter, what I really want is to be able, from time to time, to read the gossip from my friends. I don’t want to have to really care whether they are using Facebook or Twitter (or whatever comes along next to join or usurp these).

And so to Yahoo’s Pipes. It seemed to me this morning that it would be useful to be able to merge these two tributaries from Facebook and Twitter into one combined river of gossip. Of course I can approximate this by creating a group of feeds in my RSS reader. But it occurred to me that Pipes offered a neater solution. And so, using Pipes, I created a merged feed of RSS feeds from Facebook and Twitter, and then subscribed to this feed in the normal way.

From realising the need, to figuring out a simple solution, to actually implementing the solution with Pipes, took less than ten minutes. If you haven’t yet had a play with Pipes, you really should give it a go. My solution is completely disposable - I have had to install nothing.

It’s clear that the availability of a machine API to a service can utterly change your human experience of that service. Mike Ellis, a long term user of TechCrunch, noted his surprise at how poor its user interface was - his experience of TechCrunch had been mostly through its RSS feed. I don’t think that Facebook’s user interface is bad - I think it’s actually, objectively speaking, quite good. But I’m happy, nonetheless, that most of the attention I give to Facebook can be through an interface I have available all the time, whether online or offline - my RSS reader. When I want to tell my friends what I’m up to, or send out a general plea for help etc. I can use Facebook or Twitter’s respective websites. But when I simply want to access the river of gossip, I’m more than happy to use a tool I use all the time, my RSS reader.

Technorati Tags: Dave Winer, Facebook, river of gossip, river of news, RSS, Twitter, Yahoo Pipes

Brian alerted me to a post by Dave Winer, called Facebook *is* opening up. It’s true! Some Facebook content is now easily available as RSS feeds: for example a feed of items which have been posted by my ‘friends’. Note how you don’t need to be logged in to Facebook (or have an account for that matter) to use this. Dave reports that, in fact, these feeds have been available for some time. Nonetheless, as he says:

According to convention wisdom, Facebook was, until today, considered a sandbox, a walled garden, a silo. Now that we know that the feeds are being implemented (many are still needed to make it really open) it’s possible for Facebook-generated data to percolate into other Internet applications. As Fred Wilson has wisely pointed out, there is no winner-take-all outcome possible, and closed sandboxes just encourage route-arounds, so what Facebook is doing is smart and necessary.

For me, Facebook just became considerably more interesting. As I said in a previous post:

If facebook’s social networks were exposed to the web, ‘mine-able’ and mashable - now that would be exciting.

I’m not excited just yet…. we need to see more ‘opening up’, but I’m watching with real interest now.

UPDATE: The default privacy setting for most of the content a user can add to Facebook appears to be “All my networks and all my friends“. This is the most ‘open’ of the settings possible - there is no ‘public’ or ‘absolutely everyone’ setting. So when when one of my friends changes their status message for example they might, if they care at all, be under the impression that this can only be viewed by their friends (including me) and people in their network(s). If I then go and publish the feed URL to the world, this information is now available without restriction.

Have I betrayed the trust of my ‘friends’ by making such an RSS feed available? Is this model broken?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, privacy, RSS, security

Interestingly, I’ve just discovered that if you use the Twitter application in Facebook, then you can, under certain circumstances, see what your Facebook friends are ‘tweeting’ even if you aren’t ‘following’ them in Twitter. ‘Tweet’ is becoming common parlance for a message sent/received via the Twitter system.

This is how I think it works (caveat: some of this is conjecture based on flimsy evidence, but however it works, it raises interesting questions):

I have a social network on Twitter, which means I’ve registered my interest in the tweets of some users, and some users have registered interest in my tweets. This activity is called ‘following’ in Twitter. I also have a social network on Facebook, made up of users whom I have designated as my ‘friends’ and users who have designated me as their friend. There is a client application for Twitter which can be embedded in Facebook. The Facebook Twitter app can be configured to send notifications to a Facebook user’s news feed.

The ramifications of this seem quite interesting. Assume I have a Facebook friend called Pete. Although both Pete and I use Twitter, neither of us is following the other. However both of us have installed the Twitter application for Facebook. Within Facebook, I see a notification in my news-feed whenever Pete ‘tweets’ something (together with the tweet itself), so long as he has used the Twitter client in Facebook to do this. If Pete uses any other Twitter client, I will never know that he has tweeted, or ever see his tweet. Of course, if I only use a non-Facebook Twitter client, I will never see Pete’s tweets because Facebook’s ‘interoperability’ with other social networks only extends in one direction.

As it stands, in facebook I’ll see the following categories of tweets:

• tweets from Facebook friends that I’m following in Twitter
• tweets from people Im following in Twitter but who are not Facebook friends
• tweets from Facebook friends that I’m not following in Twitter, so long as they use the Facebook Twitter client to send their tweet (and so long as they, and I have enabled various options in Facebook).

If I try to consider what this means in terms of my social networks, it means that Facebook offers something of the promise of a union between the sets of users making up my Facebook and Twitter social networks. One of my colleagues argues that this is positive thing - that Facebook is enriching my experience as a user. I disagree - Facebook (with the willing support of Twitter) has just encouraged what was an understandable, though slightly inconvenient situation with different social networks and different clients, to become a potentially very confusing one.

If I keep these two sets of users synchronised manually - if I befriend someone in Facebook and then cross over to Twitter and follow them there as well, then I can use Facebook as a client for Twitter and enjoy the convenience of reducing by one the number of separate client tools I must maintain. If I start to ‘follow’ Pete in Twitter, then it doesn’t matter which client I use, I’ll receive his tweets in any case.

So, does this matter? I think it does - I think this shows Facebook to be disruptive technology - but we knew that already. The question is, what is it disrupting, and is this disruption going to be generally beneficial?

Technorati Tags: disruptive technology, Facebook, interoperability, Twitter

In Facebook, Ross Gardler asks:

What features of Facebook make you come back day after day?

The interesting thing about Facebook for me is to see how far I am dragged into using it by the groundswell of public enthusiasm before the next, more compelling thing comes along and we find this closed system is no use anymore. A bit acerbic perhaps. I guess what I’m tryin to say is that I’m using Facebook in an experimental way, and one prerequisite for a useful experiment would seem to be to use it regularly.

So, what can I find in Facebook to motivate me to bother logging in?

• finding out what ex colleagues are up to. I joined Facebook while working in London and the networks of people associated with that former life are busier than the networks associated with my current life.
• discovering small snippets of things I didn’t know about colleagues/friends/acquaintances. For example, I see that Pete Johnston lists the work of Augustus Pablo among his favourite music - I’m a fan, and might now compare notes with Pete when I next see him in the pub (rather than making disparaging remarks about Sunderland FC’s lovely manager).
• former colleagues have been uploading photos of people in The George pub (Holloway, North London) as part of the activities of a Facebook group called “The George Appreciation Society” - it’s been fun remembering people I haven’t seen for years.
• discussions about Facebook…. well, this is where most of the discussion takes place

Slim pickings really…. all quite trivial, but fun (for me) nonetheless.

So far I haven’t used Facebook to do anything useful - it’s more of a distraction than anything else. Several people have talked about using Facebook as a new web-portal - the one-stop-shop interface into various other systems and information flows. I’ve already installed the embeddable Twitter application for example. But this is hardly compelling.

I would love to be able to connect this post to Ross’s question in Facebook in much the way that we are accustomed to doing in the blogosphere, but the closed nature of Facebook makes this a less than ideal arrangement. I guess if you want to join in the conversation, then you already have a Facebook account and can find Ross in Facebook and answer the question there. In the meantime, I will post the URL to this post as my answer to Ross’s question in Facebook - my blog can be freely accessed from within Facebook of course ….

(Note that I’ve deliberately not linked to people’s Facebook profile pages because they are not accessible without a Facebook account).

Technorati Tags: Augustus Pablo, Facebook, Pete Johnston, Ross Gardler

I came across this quote:

The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else

attributed to Rufus Pollack, in a in a post on the Talis blog, Nodalities.

Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. The point is not so much whether this statement might be true or not, so much as what it does to your thinking and planning if you decide to take it as an article of faith. This reminds me of conversations I had with colleagues last year when I was working on the XCRI project (a project to develop a schema and related tools for the creation and management of standard and interoperable course catalogue data). We started to evolve the idea that Universities should consider the approach of opening up the non-contentious data in their considerable internal management information systems, slapping public facing APIs on to these data sources and inviting the world in to use what they could. We surmised that:

• the barriers and costs to doing this kind of thing were rapidly diminishing
• the possible gains, in terms of new business opportunities, partnerships etc. might be worth this small investment.
• the more you did this, the more chance of discovering a new opportunity

During many a debate about addressing all kinds of thorny issues surrounding IPR, security, access control etc. we wondered aloud why we didn’t start with the peripheral stuff - the data which didn’t need to be secured or controlled in these ways. We recognised that this sort of development had long since taken place with other systems in a typical university - notably with library catalogues for example. So why not with course catalogues?

In business terms, this kind of activity might, perhaps, be described as a loss leader - giving something away for free in the hope that it might open up a channel to more profitable business. Amazon did this long ago with their E-Commerce Service, and it seems to be working well for them! Crucially, they go out of their way to show-case the solutions built by other, third-party developers on top of the Amazon services.

As me move into a world of institutional repositories, with Universities beginning to accept the benefits of providing open-access to scholarly output, will we see this trend extend to other types of less sector-specific information? Some quick examples might include accommodation details and bookings, expertise directories, course catalogues(XCRI!), calendars of public lectures etc.

Technorati Tags: AWS, management information, open data, Rufus Pollack, Talis, universities, XCRI

An interesting post from Philipp Keller on Tag history and gartners hype cycles from back in May of this year which I missed first time around. Now part of me thinks it must be possible to plot just about anything on the Gartner Hype Cycle, but it can be a useful tool for provoking reflection and discussion.

Note how Philipp indicates that we now find ourselves in the Trough of Disillusionment in 2007. Gartner define this stage in the cycle thus:

Technologies enter the “trough of disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.

I’m not sure that this is where we are.

Phillipp suggests that:

There are no blog posts any more. Tagging is not really unfashionable but the topic is “done” à la «if that’s all what’s tagging adds to the web experience, I’m not interested in this technology any more». There isn’t much thinking and innovation going on.

I half agree. I agree that tagging is not unfashionable, but that people aren’t blogging about it to the same degree. But I can’t help wondering if we haven’t already reached the Plateau of Productivity - the last stage in the Gartner curve and absent from Phillipp’s diagram. Surely del.icio.us and Flickr can be considered mainstream and accepted?

Did we go through a Trough of Disillusionment already? Or does the Gartner curve not really apply in this instance?

Technorati Tags: folksonomies, Gartner Hype Cycle, Philipp Keller, Tagging, Trough of Disillusionment

On the subject of the e-Framework for Education and Research, Andy Powell, in eFoundations, asks:

…does the e-Framework support the Web (again, read Web 2.0 if you like) mindset, does it fight against it, or is it neutral?

Although the e-Framework is careful to position itself as technology-neutral it is, nonetheless, somewhat associated with WS-* in some quarters. This may be partly because the e-Framework was born partly out of a perceived need for our communities to engage with SOA.

The arguments between proponents of WS-* and REST respectively are, by now, well-rehearsed. I’ve been a little startled by the strong positions I’ve heard people take on this issue. There are use-cases for both, but the fact that the REST approach has gained a great deal more traction recently is interesting and shows a healthy interest in opening up ‘resources’ for simple web-based operations.

In a post entitled ” REST vs. WS-*: War is Over (If You Want It)”, David Chappell asserts:

To anybody who’s paying attention and who’s not a hopeless partisan, the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce rather than crushing victory for one side–it’s Korea, not World War II. The now-obvious truth is that both technologies have value, and both will be used going forward.

David cites impending support for REST in Microsoft developer products and similar support in ‘official’ Java frameworks. He suggests that the argument was caused by the use of the phrase ‘web services’ to describe a set of standards, protocols and technologies which have only a passing connection with the Web and that, by contrast, REST is entirely rooted in the Web and its architecture.

Interestingly, Elliotte Rusty Harold extends David’s ‘Korean War’ metaphor, to suggest that “WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea”. It therefore follows that:

WS-* fails because it believes massive central planning works better than the individual decisions of millions of web sites. It’s no coincidence that the WS-* community constantly churns out volume after volume of specification and one tool after another. [...]

By contrast you don’t see a lot of complicated REST frameworks or specifications. [...] REST/HTTP sets up a simple economic system based on a few clear rules, and then pretty much gets out of the way to let people do their own thing. It doesn’t even get too upset when people break the rules[..] they will be dealt with by the RESTful market.

Of course Elliotte has changed the central message of David’s original piece - Elliotte believes that WS-* is, essentially, doomed. The important point for him is the superiority of the market-place versus the inadequacies of central control.

So, back to the e-Framework, and Andy’s question. Well, the political answer might be to say that the e-Framework can’t afford to be seen to be fighting against the Web/Web 2.0. If the e-Framework confined itself to describing SOA within the education/research enterprise, then it might avoid the Web 2.0 market-place. But the e-Framework doesn’t want to be North Korea, it wants to be, if not global, then international at least.

The pragmatic answer is, I suspect, that so long as we allow the e-Framework to be shaped by our communities, we will see the answer emerge. Over time, we’ll be able to re-ask Andy’s question as “do our communities support the Web mindset….?”, using the e-Framework as evidence. If, on the other hand, we do not allow the e-Framework to be shaped by the market-place of our communities, then it will matter less and less what it supports or fights against….

Technorati Tags: Andy Powell, David Chappell, e-Framework, Elliotte Rusty Harold, REST, SOA, WS-*