I stumbled upon an article published last June by Knowledge@Wharton mentioning “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion” by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison. Somehow I had missed this book that offers intriguing alternatives to organizations mired in their own structures. To learn about it you can read this critique by The Economist,  that happen to be titled “In Search of Serendipity” – on a side note, I’m happy that this word that I discovered in 1997 has been enjoying increasing popularity since the beginning of this millennium.

I can’t stand playing a MMORPG for even fifteen minutes (I prefer tactical, operational or strategical games – preferably with a pseudo-realistic environment), but I watched my people play and I agree about Hagel & al’s the mob collaborative dynamics that happen there :

Guild leaders in World of Warcraft “require a high degree of influence,” noted Hagel [..]. “You have to be able to influence and persuade people — not order them to do things. Ordering people in most of these guilds doesn’t get you far.”

In addition to the leadership qualities involved with becoming the head of a guild and assembling a problem-solving team from previously independent players, World of Warcraft enthusiasts, as noted by Hagel, conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader. In addition, he said that game players typically customize their own dashboards to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy.

This parallel between gaming and management is interesting – but Hagel & al. are not the first to notice it. In 2008, in “Collective solitude and social networks in World of Warcraft” my fellow ESSCA alumni and friend Nicolas Ducheneaut remarked :

We show that these social networks are often sparse and that most players spend time in the game experiencing a form of “collective solitude”: they play surrounded by, but not necessarily with, other players. We also show that the most successful player groups are analogous to the organic, team-based forms of organization that are prevalent in today’s workplace. Based on these findings, we discuss the relationship between online social networks and “real world” behavior in organizations in more depth.

“Prevalent in today’s workplace” ? From my big company point of view, I find that statement more than slightly optimistic – though not surprising considering how Nicolas enthusiastically embraces the future. But that is definitely the direction that we are going in. Expect even more of it as Generation Y enters the workforce. Until then, there is still a lot of evangelism to do…

In the digital world, the folder metaphor has perpetuated the single dimensional limitations of the physical world : each message is present in one and only one folder. The problem of adding more dimensions to the classification has been solved ages ago – whether you want to go hardcore with a full thesaurus or just use your little folksonomy the required technical foundation is the same : tags, labels – or whatever you want to call your multiple index keys.

Noticing how Google has been successful with email tagging, I started exploring free implementation four years ago, aiming to complement my folder hierarchy with tags. But inertia affects all, and I actually never went beyond happy experimentation. As Zoli Erdos puts it in his eloquent description of Google’s 2009 breakthrough in ending the tags vs. folders war :

Those who “just can’t live without folders”, mostly legacy users of Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and mostly Outlook. They are used to folders and won’t learn new concepts, don’t want to change, but are happy spending their life “organizing stuff” and even feel productive doing so.

Ouch – that hits a little too close to home. And even if I had gone forward with tags, that would have been pussyfooting : as Google illustrates, the distinction between tags and folders is a technical one – from a user point of view it should be abstracted. Of course the abstraction is somewhat leaky if you consider what folders mean for local storage, but in the clouds you can get away with that.

For cranky folder-addicted users like myself, born to the Internet with early versions of Eudora, later sucking at the  Microsoft tit and nowadays a major fan Mozilla Thunderbird, there is definitely a user interface habit involved – and one that is hard to break after all those years. It is not about the graphics – I use Mutt regularly; it is about the warm fuzzy feeling of believing that the folder is a direct and unabstracted representation of something tangible on a file system.

Software objects are all abstractions anyway but, with time, the familiar abstraction becomes something that feels tangible. This is why, while I acknowledge the need to get the tagging goodness, I still have desire toward the good old folder look and feel with features such as drag-n-drop and hierarchies. Google seems to know that audience : all those features are now part of Gmail. Now tell the difference between folders and labels !

To make a smooth transition, I want Mozilla Thunderbird to display tags as folders. It looks like it is possible using Gmail with Claws through IMAP. I have yet to learn if I can do that on my own systems using Courier or Dovecot.

Five months have elapsed since that first week-end when my encounter with Android was a severe case of culture shock. With significant daily experience of the device, I can now form a more mature judgement of its capabilities and its potential – of course from my own highly subjective point of view.

I still hate having to use Google Calendar and Google Contacts for synchronization.  I hope that SyncML synchronization will appear in the future, make Android a better desktop citizen and provide more choice of end points. Meanwhile I use Google. With that out of the way, let’s move on to my impressions of Android itself.

I am grateful for features such as a decent web browser on a mobile device, for a working albeit half baked packaging and distribution system, and for Google Maps which I consider both a superlative application in its own right and the current killer albeit proprietary infrastructure for location enabled applications. But the rigidly simple interface that forces behaviours upon its user feels like a straitjacket : the overbearing feeling when using Android is that its designers have decided that simplicity is to be preserved at all costs regardless of what the user prefers.

Why can’t I select a smaller font for my list items ? Would a parameter somewhere in a customization menu add too much complication ? Why won’t you show me the raw configuration data ? Is it absolutely necessary to arbitrarily limit the number of virtual desktops to three ? From the point of a user who is just getting acquainted with such a powerful platform, those are puzzling questions.

I still don’t like the Android ’s logic, and moreover I still don’t quite understand it. Of course I manage to use that system, but after five month of daily use it still does not feel natural. Maybe it is just a skin-deep issue or maybe I am just not the target audience – but some features are definitely backwards – package management for example. For starters, the “My Downloads” list is not ordered alphabetically nor in any apparently meaningful order. Then for each upgradeable package, one must first browse to the package, then manually trigger the upgrade package, then acknowledge system privileges the upgraded package and finally clear the download notification and the update notification. Is this a joke ? This almost matches the tediousness of upgrading Windows software – an impressive feat considering that the foundations of Android package management seem serious enough. Where is my APT ?

Like any new user on a prosperous enough system, I am lost in choices – but that is an embarrassment of riches. Nevertheless, I wonder why basics such as a task manager are not installed by default. In classic Unix spirit, even the most basic system utilities are independent applications. But what is bearable and even satisfying on a system with a decent shell and package management with dependencies becomes torture when installing a package is so clumsy and upgrading it so tedious.

Tediousness in package management in particular and user interaction in general makes taming the beast an experience in frustration. When installing a bunch of competing applications and testing them takes time and effort. Experimenting is not the pleasure it normally is on a Linux system. The lack of decent text entry compounds the feeling. Clumsy text selection makes cut and paste a significant effort – something Palm did make quick, easy and painless more than ten years ago. Not implementing pointer-driven selection – what were the developers thinking ?

PIM integration has not progressed much. For a given contact, there is no way to look at a communications log that spans mail, SMS and telephony: each of them is its own separate universe. There is no way to have a list of meetings with a given contact or at given location.

But there basic functionality has been omitted too. For example when adding a phone number to an existing contact, search is disabled – you have to scroll all the way to the contact. There is no way to search the SMS archive and SMS to multiple recipients is an exercise left to applications.

Palm OS may have been unstable, incapable of contemporary operating system features, offering only basic functionality and generally way past its shelf date. But in the mind of users, it remains the benchmark against which all PIM systems are judged. And to this day I still don’t see anything beating Palm OS on its home turf of  PIM core features and basic usability.

Palm OS was a poster child for responsiveness, but on the Android everything takes time – even after I have identified and killed the various errant applications that make it even slower. Actually, the system is very fast and capable of feats such as full-motion video that were far beyond the reach of the Palm OS. But the interaction is spoilt by gratuitous use of animations for everything. Animations are useful for graphically hinting the novice user about what is going on – but then hey are only a drag. But please let me disable animations as I do on every desktop I use !

The choice of a virtual keyboard is my own mistake and I am now aware that I need a physical keyboard. After five months, I can now use the virtual keyboard with enough speed and precision for comfortable entry of a couple of sentences. But beyond that it is tiring and feels too clumsy for any meaningful work. This is a major problem for me – text entry is my daily bread and butter. I long for the Treo’s keyboard or even the one on the Nokia E71 – they offered a great compromise of typing speed and compacity. And no multitouch on the soft keyboard means no keyboard shortcuts which renders many console applications unusable – sorry Emacs users.

The applications offering is still young and I cannot blame it for needing time to expand and mature. I also still need to familiarize myself with Android culture an develop the right habits to find my way instinctively and be more productive. After five months, we are getting there – one handed navigation has been done right. But I still believe that a large part of the user interface conventions used on the Android does not match the expectations for general computing.

It seems like everything has been meticulously designed to bury under a thick layer of Dalvik and Google plaster anything that could remind anyone of Unix. It is very frustrating to know that there is a Linux kernel under all that, and yet to suffer wading knee-deep in the marshes of toyland. The more I use Android an study it, the more I feel that Linux is a mere hardware abstraction layer and the POSIX world a distant memory. This is not the droid I’m looking for.

As the Geohack template used by Wikipedia for geographical locations attests (see Paris for example) there are many map publishing services on the Web. But almost all of them rely on an oligopoly of geographical data suppliers among whom AND, Navteq and Teleatlas dominate and absorb a large proportion of the profit in the geographical information value chain :

“If you purchase a TomTom, approximately 20-30% of that cost goes to Tele Atlas who licenses the maps that TomTom and many other hardware manufacturers use. Part of that charge is because Tele Atlas itself, and the company’s main rival Navteq, have to buy the data from national mapping agencies in the first place, like the Ordance Survey, and then stitch all the information together. Hence the consumer having to pay on a number of levels”.

And yet, geographical data is a fundamental pillar of our information infrastructure. A few years ago the realm of specialized geographic information systems, geography is nowadays a pervasive dimension of about every sort of service. When something becomes an essential feature of our lives, nothing short of freedom is acceptable. What happens when that freedom requires collecting humongous amounts of data and when oligopolistic actors strive to keep control and profits to themselves ? Free software collaboration and  distributed data collection of course !

Andrew Ross gives a nice summary of why free geographical data is the way of the future :

“The tremendous cost of producing the maps necessitates that these firms have very restrictive licenses to protect their business models selling the data. As a result, there are many things you can’t do with the data.

[..] The reason why OpenStreetMap will win in the end and likely obviate the need for commercial map data is that the costs and risks associated with mapping are shared. Conversely, for Navteq and TeleAtlas, the costs born by these companies are passed on to their customers. Once their customers discover OpenStreetMap data is in some cases superior, or more importantly – they can contribute to it and the license allows them to use the data for nearly any purpose – map data then becomes commodity”.

The proprietary players are aware of that trend, and they try to profit from the users who wish to correct the many errors contained in the data they publish. But why would anyone contribute something, only to see it monopolized by the editor who won’t let you do what you want with it ? If I make the effort of contributing carefully collected data, I want it to benefit as many people as possible – not just someone who will keep it for his own profit.

Access to satellite imagery will remain an insurmountable barrier in the long term, but soon the map layers will be ours to play with – and that is enough to open the whole world of mapping. Like a downhill snowball, the OpenStreetMap data set growth is accelerating fast and attracting a thriving community that now includes professional and institutional users and contributors. Over its first five years, the Wikipedia-like online map project has delivered great results – and developed even greater ambitions.

I have started to contribute to OpenStreetmap – I feel great satisfaction at mapping the world for fun and for our common good. Owning the map feels good ! You can do it too – it is easy, especially if you are the sort of person who often logs tracks with a GPS receiver. OpenStreetMap’s infrastructure is quite impressive – everything you need is already out there waiting for your contribution, including very nice editors – and there is one for Android too.

If you just want to add your grain of sand to the heap, reporting bugs and naming the places in your favourite neighbourhood are great ways to help build maps that benefit all of us.  Contributing to the map is like giving directions to strangers lost in your neighbourhood – except that you are giving directions to many strangers at once.

If you are not yet convinced, take a look a the map – isn’t it beautiful ? And it is only one of the many ways to render OpenStreetMap data. Wanna make a cycling map with it ? Yes we can ! That is the whole point of the project – we can do whatever we want with the data, free in every way.

And anyone can decide he wants his neighbourhood part of the worldmap, even if no self-respecting for-profit enterprise will ever consider loosing money on such endeavour :

“OpenStreetMap has better coverage in some niche spaces than other mapping tools, making it very attractive resource for international development organizations. Want proof ? [..] we looked at capital cities in several countries that have been in the news lately for ongoing humanitarian situations – Zimbabwe, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For two our of the three, Mogadishu and Kinshasa, there is simply no contest – OpenStreetMap is way ahead of the others in both coverage and in the level of detail. OpenStreetMap and Google Maps are comparable in Harare. The data available through Microsoft’s Virtual Earth lagged way behind in all three”.

Among other places, I was amazed at the level of detail provided to the map of Ouagadougou. Aren’t these exciting times for cartography ?

LinkedIn’s profile PDF render is a useful service, but its output lacks in aesthetics. I like the HTML render by Jobspice, especially the one using the Green & Simple template – but I prefer hosting my resume on my own site. This is why since 2003 I have been using the XML Résumé Library. It is an XML and XSL based system for marking up, adding metadata to, and formatting résumés and curricula vitae. Conceptually, it is a perfect tool – and some trivial shell scripting provided me with a fully automated toolchain. But the project has been completely quiet since 2004 – and meanwhile we have seen the rise of the hresume microformat, an interesting case of “less is more” – especially compared to the even heavier HR-XML.

Interestingly, both LinkedIn and Jobspice use hresume. A PHP LinkedIn hResume grabber part of a Wordpress plugin by Brad Touesnard takes the hresume microformat block from a LinkedIn public profile page and weeds out all the LinkedIn specific chaff. With pure hresume semantic XHTML, you just have to add CSS to obtain a presentable CV. So my plan is now to use LinkedIn as a resume writing aid and a social networking tool, and use hresume microformated output extracted from it to host a nice CSS styled CV on my own site.

Preparing to do that, I went through the “hResume examples in the wild” page of the microformats wiki and selected the favorite styles that I’ll use for inspiration :

• Jason Erb
• Stacey Cordoni
• Matthew Levine
• Matt Williams
• Manas Tungare
• Richard Davies
• Ciaran McNulty
• Edward Lau
• Brad Touesnard
• Clint Andrew Hall
• Robert O’Rourke
• Keri Henare
• Kenneth Wilson

Great excuse to play with CSS – and eventually publish an updated CV…

If you want to skip the making-of story, you can go straight to the laconica2IRC.pl script download. Or in case anyone is interested, here is the why and how…

Some of my best friends are die-hard IRC users that make a point of not touching anything remotely looking like a social networking web site, especially if anyone has ever hinted that it could be tagged as “Web 2.0” (whatever that means). As much as I enjoy hanging out with them in our favorite IRC channel, conversations there are sporadic. Most of the time, that club house increasingly looks like an asynchronous forum for short updates posted infrequently on a synchronous medium… Did I just describe microblogging ? Indeed it is a very similar use case, if not the same. And I don’t want to choose between talking to my close accomplices and opening up to the wider world. So I still want to hang out in IRC for a nice chat from time to time, but while I’m out broadcasting dents I want my paranoid autistic friends to get them too. To satisfy that need, I need to have my IRC voice say my dents on the old boys channel.

The data source could be an OpenMicroblogging endpoint, but being lazy I found a far easier solution : use Laconi.ca’s Web feeds. Such solution looked easier because there are already heaps of code out there for consuming Web feeds, and it was highly likely that I would find one I could bend into doing my bidding.

To talk on IRC, I had previously had the opportunity to peruse the Net::IRC library with great satisfaction – so it was an obvious choice. In addition, in spite of being quite incompetent with it, I appreciate Perl and I was looking for an excuse to hack something with it.

With knowledge of the input, the output and the technology I wanted to use, I could start implementing. Being lazy and incompetent, I of course turned to Google to provide me with reusable code that would spare me building the script from the ground up. My laziness was of course quick to be rewarded as I found rssbot.pl by Peter Baudis in the public domain. That script fetches a RSS feed and says the new items in an IRC channel. It was very close to what I wanted to do, and it had no exotic dependancies – only Net::IRC library (alias libnet-irc-perl in Debian) and XML::RSS (alias libxml-rss-perl in Debian).

So I set upon hacking this script into the shape I wanted. I added IRC password authentication (courtesy of Net::IRC), I commented out a string sanitation loop which I did not understand and whose presence cause the script to malfunction, I pruned out the Laconi.ca user name and extraneous punctuation to have my IRC user “say” my own Identi.ca entries just as if I was typing them myself, and after a few months of testing I finally added an option for @replies filtering so that my IRC buddies are not annoyed by the noise of remote conversations.

I wanted my own IRC user “say” the output, and that part was very easy because I use the Bip an IRC proxy which supports multiple clients on one IRC server connection. This script was just going to be another client, and that is why I added password authentication. Bip is available in Debian and is very handy : I usually have an IRC client at home, one in the office, occasionally a CGI-IRC, rarely a mobile client and now this script – and to the dwellers of my favorite IRC channel there is no way to tell which one is talking. And whichever client I choose, I never missing anything thanks to logging and replay on login. Screen with a command-line IRC client provides part of this functionality, but the zero maintainance Bip does so much more and is so reliable that one has to wonder if my friends cling to Irssi and Screen out of sheer traditionalism.

All that remained to do was to launch the script in a sane way. To control this sort of simple and permanently executed piece of code and keep it from misbehaving, Daemon is a good way. Available in Debian, Daemon proved its worth when the RSS file went missing during the Identi.ca upgrade and the script crashed everytime it tried to access it for lack of exception catching. Had I simply put it in an infinite loop, it would have hogged significant ressources just by running in circles like a headless chicken. Daemon not only restarted it after each crash, but also killed it after a set number of retries in a set duration – thus preventing any interference with the rest of what runs on our server. Here is the Daemon launch command that I have used :

#!/bin/bash
path=/usr/local/bin/laconica2IRC
daemon -a 16 -L 16 -M 3 -D $path -N -n laconica2IRC_JML -r -O $path/laconica2IRC.log -o $path/laconica2IRC.log $path/laconica2IRC.pl

And that’s it… Less cut and paste from Identi.ca to my favorite IRC channel, and my IRC friends who have not yet adopted microblogging don’t feel left out of my updates anymore. And I can still jump into IRC from time to time for a real time chat. I have the best of both worlds – what more could I ask ?

Sounds good to you ? Grab the laconica2IRC.pl script !

I sometimes get requests for help. Often they are smart questions and I’m actually somewhat relevant to them – for example questions about a script or an article that I wrote, or an experience I had. But sometimes it is not the case. This message I received today is particularly bad, so I thought it might be a public service to share it as an example of what not to do. This one is especially appalling because it comes not from some wet-behind-the-ears teenager to whom I would gracefully have issued a few hints and a gentle reminder of online manners, but from the inside of the corporate network of Wipro – a company that has a reputation as a global IT services organization.

From: xxxxxx.kumar@wipro.com
Subject: Perl
To: jim@liotier.org
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:22:32 +0530

Hi Jim,

Could you please help me in finding out the solution for my problem. Iam new to perl i have tried all the options whatever i learned but couldn’t solve. Please revert me if you know the solution.

Here is the problem follows:

Below is the XML in which you could see the lines with AssemblyVersion and Version in each record i need to modify these values depending on some values which i get from perforce. Assuming hardcode values as of now need to change those values upon user wish using Perl. Upon changing these lines it should effect in existing file .

<FileCopyInfo>
<Entries>
<Entry>
<DeviceName>sss</DeviceName>
<ModuleName>general1</ModuleName>
<AssemblyVersion>9</AssemblyVersion>
<Language>default</Language>
<Version>9</Version>
<DisplayName>Speech – eneral</DisplayName>
<UpdateOnlyExisting>false</UpdateOnlyExisting>
</Entry>
<Entry>
<DeviceName>sss</DeviceName>
<ModuleName>general2</ModuleName>
<AssemblyVersion>9</AssemblyVersion>
<Language>default</Language>
<Version>9</Version>
<DisplayName>Speech – recog de_DE</DisplayName>
<UpdateOnlyExisting>false</UpdateOnlyExisting>
</Entry>
</Entries>
</FileCopyInfo>

Thanks & Regards,
Xxxxxxx

From what I gather from the convoluted use of approximative English, the problem is about changing the value of two XML elements in a file. Can anyone believe that this guy has even tried to solve this simple problem on his own ? It is even sadder that he tries to obtain answers by spamming random strangers by mail, soliciting answers that will never be shared with the wider world. Least he could have done is posting his message on a Perl forum so that others with similar questions can benefit from the eventual answer.

Had he performed even a cursory Google search, he would have found that one of his compatriots has done exactly that and gotten three different answers to a similar question, letting him choose between XML::Twig, XML::Rules and XML::Simple. These are just three – but the Perl XML FAQ enumerates at least a dozen CPAN modules for manipulating XML data. The documentation for any of them or the examples in the FAQ would also have put him on the track to a solution.

Everyone can be clueless about something and learning is a fundamental activity for our whole lives. But everyone can do some research, read the FAQ, ask smart questions and make sure that the whole community benefits from their learning process, especially as it doe not cost any additional effort. Knowledge capitalization within a community of practice is such an easy process with benefits for everyone involved that I don’t understand why it is not a universally drilled reflex.

The funny part is that while I’m ranting about it and wielding the cluebat over the head of some random interloper, I realize that the same sort of behavior is standard internally in a very large company I know very well, because a repository of community knowledge has not even been made available for those willing to share. Is there any online community without a wiki and a forum ?

Ten years ago I was beginning to believe that consulting opportunities in knowledge management were drying up because knowledge management skills had entered the mainstream and percolated everywhere. I could not be more wrong : ten years of awesome technological progress have proved beyond reasonable doubt that technology and tools are a peripheral issue : knowledge management is about the people and their attitudes; it is about cooperation. This was the introduction of my graduation paper ten years ago, with the prisoner’s dilemma illustrating cooperation issues – and it is today still as valid as ever.

Amanda Mooney remarks that :

Actually it was always like that, but slower and invisible. Original ideas are few because similar inputs through similar individuals generate similar outputs - the same problems with the same environment and the same tools handled by people who share backgrounds produce the same conclusions. So it is not surprising that concepts are invented simultaneously and reinvented all the time. I don’t feel belittled by finding out that I’m not unique – on the contrary : I feel empowered by finding that I’m not isolated anymore. I remember lounging in libraries in my youth, reading esoteric technical books chosen at random. I often resented not being able to share that with people who have similar interests. Now we can find each other easily and all be surfing together at the wavefront. Childhood dreams came true – life is good !

But if you anguish about being a unique snowflake just like all the other unique snowflakes, there is still hope for you. Our mental agility and cultural maleability suffer from a rather heavy inertia, so the processing stage is not readily manipulable. That leaves only the input to be tinkered with in the short term – and you can play with inputs a lot ! This is why it is important to cultivate diversity in your social network, and it is also why adding some noise into your web feeds is good for you. Who is not addicted to new stimuli ?

Have you tried one more time to convince you parents to switch to web feeds to get updates from the family ? Do you cringe when you see your colleague clumsily wade through a collections of sites main pages instead of having them aggregated in a single feed ? Or did your technophobe girlfriend miss the latest photo album you posted ? With a wide variety of source acknowledging that web feeds ans web feeds readers being perceived as too technical, many of us have scaled back this particular evangelization effort to focus it on users ripe for transitionning from basic to advanced  tools.

Breaking through that resistance outright is beyond our power, but we can get around it. Electronic mail is a mature tool with well understood use cases with which even the least competent users feels comfortable thanks to how easily it maps with the deeply assimilated physical mail model. This is why Louis Gray has started mailing Google Reader items to promote the use of that web feed reader. But we can do better than that by building a fully automated bridge from web feed to email.

Our hope for plugging the late adopters into the information feeds is named rss2email. As its name suggests, Aaron Swartz’s GPL-licensed rss2email utility converts RSS subscriptions into email messages and sends them to whatever address you specify. Despite the name, it handles Atom feeds as well, so you should be able to use it with just about any feed you like. And of course rss2email is available from Debian.

The nice introduction to rss2email by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is all the documentation you need – and rss2email is so simple that you probably don’t even need that. I now have some of my favorite late adopters each plugged into his custom subset of my regular information distribution feeds. The relevant news stories get mailed to them without me having to even think about it. And the best part is that they now read them !

I had explained the etymology of the title and where the seagazing ostriches come from, but that still left the mistery of how I chose the title. So here is an explanation.

In their 1997 article “Browsing is a collaborative process” Twidale, Nicols and Paice coined the term “serendipitous altruism” to describe a willingness among online database searchers to assist one another whether or not they were directly responsible for the search outcome or had a direct interest in each other’s performance. In each case, the users acted as information conduits and filters on behalf of their respective audiences.

This paper had a significant influence on me at that time when I was employed at France Telecom to research cooperation issues in collaborative systems. The meme did not spread very widely, so I appropriated it as a slightly obscure yet meaningful blog title !

I have become a user of Brightkite, a service that provides situational awareness in the geographical context. Once its relationship to user location information sources such as Fire Eagle improve, it may become a very nice tool, especially in mobile use cases where location reporting may be partly automated.

But even if they add technical value in the growing world of geographically aware applications, theses services are actually not innovative at the functional level. For example, in the ham radio universe, APRS is already a great system for real time tactical digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area – which includes among other things the position of the participating stations. And there is also TCAS, which interrogates surrounding aircrafts about their positions, and AIS which broadcasts ship positions and enables the entertaining Vessel Traffic Services such as the one provided by MarineTraffic. All these radio based systems broadcast in the clear and are not satisfying the privacy requirements of a personal eventing service. But that problem has also been solved by the Blue Force Tracker which even though it is still a work in progress has already changed how a chaotic battlefield is perceived by its participants.

“Where am I, and where are my friends ?” is not only the soldier’s critical information – it is also an important component of our social lives, witness the thriving landscape of geosocial networking. Geographic location is a fundamental enabler : we are physically embodied and the perimeter of location based services actually encompasses anything concerning our physical presence. So we can’t let physical location services escape our control. Fire Eagle may be practical for now, but we need to make geographical information part of the basic infrastructure under our control and available on a standardized, open and decentralized basis. The good news is that much thoughts have already been invested into that problem.

Physical location is part of our presence, and as you may have guessed by now, this means XMPP comes to the rescue ! We have XEP-0080 – User Location, an XMPP extension which is currently a XMPP Foundation Draft Standard (implementations are encouraged and the protocol is appropriate for deployment in production systems, but some changes to the protocol are possible before it becomes a Final Standard – as good as a draft standard RFC and therefore good enough for early adopter use). It is meant to be communicated and transported by means of Publish-Subscribe or the subset thereof specified in Personal Eventing via Pubsub. It may also be provided as an extension of plain vanilla <presence/> but that is quite a crude way to do it compared to the Publish-Subscribe goodness.

The rest of the work is left to the XMPP client. Of course, the client can show them on a map, just as Brightkite currently does. But I can also easily imagine an instant messaging contact list on my PDA where one of the contact groups is “contacts near me”. I would love to have Psi do that…

I stumbled upon this gem in Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism :

“The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect’s friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind of intimacy. The totalitarian ruler knows that it is dangerous to send a person to a concentration camp and leave his family and particular milieu untouched; [It is a common practice in Soviet Russia to arrest whole families; Hitler's "Health Bill" also foresaw the elimination of all families in which one member was found to be afflicted with a disease.] the map on the wall would enable him to eradicate people without leaving any traces of them-or almost none. Total abolition of legality is safe only under the condition of perfect information, or at least a degree of knowledge of private and intimate details which evokes the illusion of perfection”.

Hannah Arendt’s nightmare social mapping system was somewhat mitigated by the technological limits of her time – The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 and in her mind the information processing technology capable of supporting an extensive social graph was still about as far away as it seemed to the Czarist secret police. But today we are all busy building representations of the social graph to support and enrich our interactions. We are busy on social networking tools making the secret police’s work and making their dream come true.

Have we lost our minds and forgotten about the dangers ? Not quite : privacy management remains at the center of most social graph use cases. But this is a superficial defense : if a totalitarian state was to emerge among our society I know I would be as good as dead – or rather disappeared without a trace.

Luckily I am an European and I therefore enjoy the benefits of a life with historically high levels of freedom. But evil is never as far away as we imagine, and the generation of our grandparents who experienced totalitarism will not remain among us much longer to remind us that.

“You must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government” — Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

I set up a link blog and a collaborative bookmarking site for our tiny geek community. My friends have initially been slightly confused by the conceptual similarities. So here are a few general guidelines to provide a clearer distinction of use cases.

Both tools are relevant for posting links with no significant value added by the poster. If there is value added by the poster in the way of analysis, context, story telling or anything else, a traditional blog entry is a better choice.

A social bookmarking tool must focus on resources that the user might want to come back to in the future, or that he thinks that his friends might be interested in one day. The accent is on easy recall through various means of discovery such as search, feed reading and folksonomic exploration.

By contrast, a link blog focuses on immediate sharing. It is the place to show off the spectacular, the anecdotic, the exceptional – novelty items that you want to share with your friends but whose future recall value for practical use might be low.

The motive for link blogging is not just altruistic : posting in a link blog is also a way to elicit reactions to the content you discovered. And that is why the community gathered around your link blog is important : you want to gather contributions from the people that matter to you. And if you have enough feedback, then there might just be enough new material to warrant more synthetic capitalization in a proper blog article.

As you can see, although the niches of social bookmarking and link blogging in knowledge management do overlap a little, they are definitely distinct and educating the users in extracting the highest value from them is worth the effort.

Open is everything – the rest is details. That is why we must take the best use cases of the closed social networking world and port them in the open. This is a lofty goal in all meaning of the adjective, but a surprisingly large number of potential basic components are available to cut the way short.

Friend of a Friend (FOAF) enables the creation of a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. This concept is a child of the semantic web school of thought that has its origins about as far ago as the Web itself. In a narrower but deeper way, XFN (XHTML Friends Network) enables web authors to indicate their relationships to people simply by adding attributes to hyperlinks.

Microformats such as hCard, xfn, rel-tag, hCalendar, hReview, xFolk, hResume, hListing, citation, media-info and others provide a foundation for normalizing the information sharing. Some major operators are starting to get it – for example my LinkedIn profile contains hCard and hResume data. If you like hresume, take a look at DOAC while you are at it !

Some code is already available to process that available information. For example, identity-matcher is a Rails plugin to match identities and import social network graphs across any site supporting the appropriate Microformats. This code extracted from the codebase of dopplr.com and this is probably how Dopplr now supports import from other social networks like Twitter.

But part of the appeal of a social networking platform is how it empowers the user with control of what information he makes available, how it makes it available and to whom. So microformats are not sufficient : a permission management and access control system is necessary, and that requires an authentication mechanism. That naturally takes us to OpenID.

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an “identity provider”. OpenID solves the authentication problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

The OpenID project is going even further than just authentication – authentication is just the surface. What OpenID really is about is digital identity management. OpenID Attribute Exchange is an OpenID service extension for exchanging identity information between endpoints. Although the list of attributes included in the OpenID Attribute Exchange schema does not match a nice collection of microformats, a process is defined to submit new attributes. And anyway, such a standard looks like a great fit to cover the need for keeping the user in control of his own content.

Finally, the social graph is the support for applications that must interact with the user’s information wherever it is hosted. That is why Google’s OpenSocial specification proposes a common set of API for social applications across multiple websites.

So a few technologies for social networking do exist, and they seem able to provide building blocks for an open distributed social networking. The concept of open distributed social networking itself has been in people’s mind for a long time. But until now only large proprietary platforms have succeeded in seducing a critical mass of users. Thanks to them, there is now a large body of information about the best practices and use-cases. What is now necessary is to think about how those use-cases can be ported into a decentralized open environment.

Porting a closed single provider system into an open distributed environment while equaling or surpassing the quality of the user experience is a huge challenge. But social networking and digital identity management are such critical activities in people’s life that the momentum behind opening them may soon be as large as the one that led Internet pioneers to break down the walls between networks.

Someone asked : what is the mobile Web ? Here is my take :

The mobile Web is not just about overcoming the connectivity, ergonomics and device constraints that make access more difficult than on the desktop that the Web originated on. Focusing on these issues is merely playing catch-up with the “normal” Web.

The value that the mobile Web brings is context sensitivity. The mobile Web is about being there, in contact with the physical world away from a desktop. So bring on location sensitive services, search by photo similarity using the on board camera, search by sound similarity using the on board microphone, augmented reality (for navigation, social life or technical help), QR code readers and barcode readers using the camera, RFID readers, permanent presence management including location and activity…

Shoehorning complex applications on a handheld device is hopeless. On the other hand, the handheld device is the one you being with you, so when time comes to interact with the environment anywhere there is just no other choice. Linking the physical world to the virtual one, that is the mobile Web.

When the physical world merges with the data, wonderful things happen !

It has been said from the start but with the availability of a proprietary application platform it became so glaringly obvious that this spring the rumor became insistent – Facebook increasingly looks like the new AOL :

“Fast forward to Facebook 2007 and see similarities: If you want access to their big base of users, develop something in their proprietary language for their people who live in their walled garden. Strangely, many young facebookizens aren’t very net savvy (Facebook *is* their internet) & they have little desire to go beyond the walled garden — just like the old AOL users. There’s even a proprietary Facebook messaging system (kids don’t use much open internet email).”

But it is really Jason Kottke’s “Facebook is the new AOL” followed by “Facebook vs. AOL, redux” that made the rumor grow into a swell in July :

“Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site. Nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesn’t index any user-created information on Facebook. All of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Maybe we shouldn’t be so excited about the web’s future moving onto an intranet.”

Steve Rubel sums that up : “Facebook gives nothing back to the broader web. A lot of stuff goes in, but nothing comes out”.

In a comment to Jeff Atwood’s “Avoiding walled gardens on the Internet”, Alex Chamberlain makes another parrallel with an historical precedent that seems lost to many among the current generation of Internet users :

“I’ve had the same uncomfortable feeling about web-based message boards. Prima facie, the walled-garden model violates the principle that information wants to be free.

Think of how Fidonet helped to open up the insular world of BBSs. Think of how Usenet was designed to be inherently inclusive (just start a news server on a Net-connected machine and all its users instantly join the “conversation”) and eternal (because decentralized). Now, Usenet is irrelevant to all but a tiny online subculture, BBSs are dead, and the traffic that those media would have borne is now happening on Web-based message boards, whose owners can edit content, forget to pay for their server space, or shut down for good at will, and whose content (more important) is essentially invisible to Google unless you know the secret password (the URL of the site’s archives). Balkanized again !”

Just as most of them are using stupid proprietary instant messaging networks instead of Jabber, they are now deliberately walling themselves in again. As Matthew says :

“Facebook is reinventing the wheel a little in an attempt to give anybody and everybody their very own web presence. Except it’s not a web presence, it’s a Facebook presence, bound by Facebook’s rules. The experience feels forced and leaves me wanting more. [..] I want to be able to find you on Google, read your weblog and browse your Flickr photos”.

But it is not just the users who drink the Facebook Kool Aid… As the RSS blog mentions, even developpers are falling for it :

“Everybody is going nutty about the Facebook platform. They are writing custom widgets for Facebook. They are saying that Facebook is the greatest because it support proprietary widgets. WTF ? We already have an API for widgets, it’s called HTML. We’ve been embedding widgets in MySpace for years using HTML. Why does Facebook need a proprietary widgets API ? It’s called lock-in. A walled garden. The work you do on your Facebook widget doesn’t port to other social platforms. In this case, platform means proprietary. When the euforia fades, just how many $billions are going to get spent by 3rd parties to better the Facebook platform ? This is nuts !”

Yes, many developpers are happily coding for a closed platform. And they are definitely locked in as Richard MacManus explains in “How Open Is Facebook, Really ?“ :

“Facebook ultimately is a closed, proprietary system. Primarily this is because Facebook doesn’t use existing Web standards for mark-up or database language. Instead of using HTML and SQL, Facebook uses two “variants” – called FQL and FBML. The official reason for the variants is that they offer more functionality and integration within the Facebook environment – which is no doubt true, however it also of course means your apps can only run in Facebook. As Andreessen noted, the upshot is that “Facebook’s own code and functionality remains closed and proprietary.”

But Facebook now has such an influence on the mass market that it can’t be ignored and even people like me can’t resist taking a look if just to see what all the fuss is about. So here is my Facebook profile… Oops ! That’s right. The walled garden thing. Forgot about that. You have to be a member… Screw that !

So welcome to Faceprison ! Nice clean interface conveniently packaged in a proprietary walled garden from which your data shall never escape.

A little search later I find that the word “Faceprison” has been by used by Neil Dixon who last June posted feelings similar to mine in “Facebook – a very big claustrophobic bubble” :

“There is one element to Facebook that makes the alarm bells ring for me, in contrast to almost every other major social network: you have to be logged-in to do anything, anything at all. Nothing is visible or accessible to the outside. Even notification emails about messages, etc., force you to log in to view them. Everything is designed to get you inside, and keep you there.

Facebook to me feels immediately claustrophobic, a state of interweb virtual bondage where the only safeword is ‘logout’. The sterilised, razorwire-topped walls are (currently) unscalable and the locks are more sturdy than Broadmoor. But even in a physical prison you can have real visitors: in Facebook, your visitors have to join and become part of the exclusive hive themselves, trapped squirming in its peer pressure driven, shallow society.

I fear the worst for those lost souls in particular who will suffer a similar fate to those of us who took up AOL in the early days”

Users never learn and history repeats itself. Have fun poking each other to digital death ! Or go read Ethan Zuckerman’s “Web 2.0 and the web serf” and understand why friends don’t let friends sink their data into proprietary bottomless pits.

Well… I can’t conclude on such a dark note, so I’ll cite the more hopeful outlook of Jason Kottke about Facebook :

“Faced with competition from this open web, AOL lost… Running a closed service with custom content and interfaces was no match for the wild frontier of the web. Maybe if they’d done some things differently, they would have fared better, but they still would have lost. In competitive markets, open and messy trumps closed and controlled in the long run. Everything you can do on Facebook with ease is possible using a loose coalition of blogging software, IM clients, email, Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, etc. Sure, it’s not as automatic or easy, but anyone can participate and the number of things to see and do on the web outnumbers the number of things you can see and do on Facebook by several orders of magnitude (and always will).

At some point in the future, Facebook may well open up, rendering much of this criticism irrelevant. Their privacy controls are legendarily flexible and precise…it should be easy for them to let people expose parts of the information to anyone if they wanted to. And as Matt Webb pointed out to me in an email, there’s the possibility that Facebook turn itself inside out and be the social network bit for everyone else’s web apps. In the meantime, maybe we shouldn’t be so excited about the web’s future moving onto an intranet”.

As Jonathan Kahn writes, “microformats and OpenID will kill Facebook’s business model“. Information wants to be free !