Dewitt Clinton

If the end of privacy is so evil, so awful, so unthinkable, then why am I liking the new Pandora so much?

See, in the past three days since Facebook announced major new changes to its social contract with all of us, I’ve been able to study my friends’ personal musical tastes in a way I couldn’t just four days ago.

Here, come on over to the new Pandora on my screen. I click on “Friends’ Music” and now let’s look through what I can see.

I see that Aaron Roe Fulkerson, MindTouch’s Inc founder and CEO, listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago.

I see that Adrian Otto, chief of research at the Rackspace Cloud (where I work at), listens to Kenny G. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago. Aside: Kenny G, really dude? Heheh.

I see that Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic, and head of a famous software design studio that bears his name, listens to the Barenaked Ladies. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago.

Should I keep going? I have 1,300 friends over on Facebook and a lot of them use Pandora.

To me this is freaking awesome. I have found more music in the past week than I’ve found in the past year.

Oh, yeah, and you can see my own account and see how my musical tastes are changing thanks to this new feature.

But, on the other hand, this new feature has heralded a new age where we move closer to the end of privacy.

While listening to music that now is shared by all my friends I’ve been reading thousands of words about how Facebook screwed its contract with us to keep our stuff private.

Here’s one thread from DeWitt Clinton that talks about why he deleted his Facebook account. Here’s a story on Techcrunch about a bunch of Google employees leaving Facebook. And finally, here’s yet another thread, started by Louis Gray, about those employees leaving Facebook (in the comments there I lay out why Google’s employees made the wrong decision).

If you read those posts — and all the comments in them — you’ll see that there’s a lot of people who are very disappointed with Facebook’s moves pushing us all to be more public.

Personally I have not taken a good stance on this lately in public.

First, what has been my public stance? Privacy is dead.

Why did I take that stance? Because, personally, I’m bored with the discussion about privacy.

Why am I bored?

Because the people who are against having their previously-private stuff shared with the world (whether it was when Google Buzz shared my email connections that I made in Gmail with everyone, or it was when Facebook forced everyone to accept being public and to reconfigure their privacy settings and, in some cases, taking away a few ways to keep their stuff between them and their friends) don’t discuss is my Pandora example above. They don’t admit that there’s a lot of goodness that comes from pushing us to be more public with our lives.

The truth is I — as a user — get more features every time the industry moves us toward a more public world.

Google did this when they put a cookie on my machine that nearly never expired. I remember employees at Microsoft thinking that that was a horrid move against their privacy (they knew that that meant that their surfing behavior could be studied by Google at a rate that Microsoft’s search engine wouldn’t be able to do because Microsoft had a stricter stance toward protection of privacy). I remember telling those employees to get over it and that soon our entire online lives would be shared and that Google would gain massive adoption because of the features that afforded it.

Google is NOT blameless here. They have moved us a long way toward a world where we have no privacy. Even Google’s CEO’s home address was shared with the world via Google. Today we are sharing that kind of data with each other all the time as we post stuff with geotags applied to it or check in on Foursquare or Gowalla.

But last week was about Facebook’s moves and Facebook pushed us another inch toward the cliff of no more privacy. Is that scary? Well, yes! But is it good too? Well, yes! Here, listen to my Pandora music again and tell me you don’t like being able to study my previously-private life in even more glorious detail.

The truth of the matter is that we are going to live our lives from now on — at least in part — in public and we need a new kind of privacy contract with the companies that use our data.

Tonight we started that discussion where I asked my Twitter followers what the last bastion of privacy is?

We ended up that the last bastion of privacy is control. I recorded an audio CinchCast to talk about that. Control of the ability to tell our life’s story.

In that audio I told you that we are no longer in control of how our life’s story gets shared with others. For some, like me, we’ve crossed over to where we accept that loss of control. Others still hold onto the — in my view, mistaken — belief that they can control what others learn about them.

That is privacy: control of our human story. Last week Facebook took something we thought we had control of and gave it away. That pisses off a lot of people, but on the other hand, I gotta say I am loving my new Pandora music that that change brought to me.

And thus we have moved an inch closer to the end of privacy whether you like it or not.

So, now what?

1. We need new skills to deal with our new lack of privacy. How do we make sure Facebook doesn’t share what we don’t want shared? There’s lots of discussion on that around the web but we need more.
2. We need a more nuanced discussion about privacy. It’s not just about “never take my private stuff and make it public.” If it were, we wouldn’t have gotten the new Pandora features we just got last week.
3. We need more control over our data so that we can easily figure out what is going where. With Facebook it’s hard to figure that out now (I solved that by just making everything I do public, but others don’t want to live the same way I do).
4. What else? Add your thoughts to the conversation and what privacy means to you.

Talk to you later, I’m off to meet Thomas Hawk where we’ll walk around a car show in Half Moon Bay — in public — and take pictures. You’re welcome to join us. Bring your stash of great music. Oh, yeah, bring your iPhones!

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Facebook Revealed Private Email Addresses Last Night
• How To Restore Your Privacy On Facebook
• Clever: Facebook Funds A Privacy Watchdog Group

Shared by Bud
The problem is that I find no value in these personalization features.

If the end of privacy is so evil, so awful, so unthinkable, then why am I liking the new Pandora so much?

See, in the past three days since Facebook announced major new changes to its social contract with all of us, I’ve been able to study my friends’ personal musical tastes in a way I couldn’t just four days ago.

Here, come on over to the new Pandora on my screen. I click on “Friends’ Music” and now let’s look through what I can see.

I see that Aaron Roe Fulkerson, MindTouch’s Inc founder and CEO, listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago.

I see that Adrian Otto, chief of research at the Rackspace Cloud (where I work at), listens to Kenny G. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago. Aside: Kenny G, really dude? Heheh.

I see that Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic, and head of a famous software design studio that bears his name, listens to the Barenaked Ladies. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago.

Should I keep going? I have 1,300 friends over on Facebook and a lot of them use Pandora.

To me this is freaking awesome. I have found more music in the past week than I’ve found in the past year.

Oh, yeah, and you can see my own account and see how my musical tastes are changing thanks to this new feature.

But, on the other hand, this new feature has heralded a new age where we move closer to the end of privacy.

While listening to music that now is shared by all my friends I’ve been reading thousands of words about how Facebook screwed its contract with us to keep our stuff private.

Here’s one thread from DeWitt Clinton that talks about why he deleted his Facebook account. Here’s a story on Techcrunch about a bunch of Google employees leaving Facebook. And finally, here’s yet another thread, started by Louis Gray, about those employees leaving Facebook (in the comments there I lay out why Google’s employees made the wrong decision).

If you read those posts — and all the comments in them — you’ll see that there’s a lot of people who are very disappointed with Facebook’s moves pushing us all to be more public.

Personally I have not taken a good stance on this lately in public.

First, what has been my public stance? Privacy is dead.

Why did I take that stance? Because, personally, I’m bored with the discussion about privacy.

Why am I bored?

Because the people who are against having their previously-private stuff shared with the world (whether it was when Google Buzz shared my email connections that I made in Gmail with everyone, or it was when Facebook forced everyone to accept being public and to reconfigure their privacy settings and, in some cases, taking away a few ways to keep their stuff between them and their friends) don’t discuss is my Pandora example above. They don’t admit that there’s a lot of goodness that comes from pushing us to be more public with our lives.

The truth is I — as a user — get more features everytime the industry moves us toward a more public world.

Google did this when they put a cookie on my machine that nearly never expired. I remember employees at Microsoft thinking that that was a horrid move against their privacy (they knew that that meant that their surfing behavior could be studied by Google at a rate that Microsoft’s search engine wouldn’t be able to do because Microsoft had a stricter stance toward protection of privacy). I remember telling those employees to get over it and that soon our entire online lives would be shared and that Google would gain massive adoption because of the features that afforded it.

Google is NOT blameless here. They have moved us a long way toward a world where we have no privacy. Even Google’s CEO’s home address was shared with the world via Google. Today we are sharing that kind of data with each other all the time as we post stuff with geotags applied to it or check in on Foursquare or Gowalla.

But last week was about Facebook’s moves and Facebook pushed us another inch toward the cliff of no more privacy. Is that scary? Well, yes! But is it good too? Well, yes! Here, listen to my Pandora music again and tell me you don’t like being able to study my previously-private life in even more glorious detail.

The truth of the matter is that we are going to live our lives from now on — at least in part — in public and we need a new kind of privacy contract with the companies that use our data.

Tonight we started that discussion where I asked my Twitter followers what the last bastion of privacy is?

We ended up that the last bastion of privacy is control. I recorded an audio CinchCast to talk about that. Control of the ability to tell our life’s story.

In that audio I told you that we are no longer in control of how our life’s story gets shared with others. For some, like me, we’ve crossed over to where we accept that loss of control. Others still hold onto the — in my view, mistaken — belief that they can control what others learn about them.

That is privacy: control of our human story. Last week Facebook took something we thought we had control of and gave it away. That pisses off a lot of people, but on the other hand, I gotta say I am loving my new Pandora music that that change brought to me.

And thus we have moved an inch closer to the end of privacy whether you like it or not.

So, now what?

1. We need new skills to deal with our new lack of privacy. How do we make sure Facebook doesn’t share what we don’t want shared? There’s lots of discussion on that around the web but we need more.
2. We need a more nuanced discussion about privacy. It’s not just about “never take my private stuff and make it public.” If it were, we wouldn’t have gotten the new Pandora features we just got last week.
3. We need more control over our data so that we can easily figure out what is going where. With Facebook it’s hard to figure that out now (I solved that by just making everything I do public, but others don’t want to live the same way I do).
4. What else? Add your thoughts to the conversation and what privacy means to you.

Talk to you later, I’m off to meet Thomas Hawk where we’ll walk around a car show in Half Moon Bay — in public — and take pictures. You’re welcome to join us. Bring your stash of great music. Oh, yeah, bring your iPhones!

Shared by Bud
Interesting test suite via DeWitt Clinton at Google.

There is a natural cycle in Social Media applications, where there’s an initial excitement (the romantic phase), a leveling of activity (the wedding phase) and hopefully the “till death do us part” phase, where the application becomes part of our lives.

But most often than not, there’s a divorce phase. The application just doesn’t measure up to our needs. Or the community on it changes.

The latter is what’s happened with FriendFeed. Even though the service is up and running (albeit with some ongoing server hiccups), this brilliant post from Akiva Moskovitz says it all: the FriendFeed community has stagnated.

I was one of the users who fled the community as soon as I heard that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed and tried, in vain, to move my “social furniture” to a new home. I tried Facebook, I tried Twitter, I tried Pip.io.

I was even very bullish about Google Buzz. But after really trying it for a number of weeks, the truth is Google Buzz doesn’t work as an aggregator, but it’s rather a commenting platform for original content. The problem is that its algorithm seems to favor people with lots of followers, but for users with a few hundreds of friends like me, it’s sort of a dead town. I get more value reading my feeds in Google Reader than going to Buzz and reading about the same things, or read what DeWitt Clinton, Louis Gray or Thomas Hawk are talking about.

The truth is that none of these places felt like home. We really got spoiled during the golden time of FriendFeed, when you posted anything, and you immediately got feedback, amazing comments and different points of view.

Today, FriendFeed activity is still strong with a few users. But, going back to Akiva, it’s the same small group of people commenting and regurgitating their points of view. I am close with a lot of them and care about them. But the truth is that FriendFeed is not that active place anymore. Even Louis Gray, one of FriendFeed’s last faithful defenders, talks about the very apparent decrease of traffic coming from the site.

At the end of the day, I still think it’s Facebook’s game for the taking. I am sure the FriendFeed team is working hard in turning Facebook into the FriendFeed for the masses. Facebook already surpassed Google in U.S. traffic, and there is a community there (including a lot of my FriendFeed peeps). The main obstacle is that Facebook’s present UI plainly sucks to do effective sharing of content.

Either that, or a completely unknown startup sweeps everyone’s feet. It’s happened before and it’s going to happen again.

Until then, I will be sitting here in the middle of the huge social crater called FriendFeed. It’s still the place I call my social home.

Photo from NASA – Jet Propulsion Labs

Google Buzz Statistics Now Available Via App Engine Project — With Google Buzz still being considered very new, just a little over a month after its introduction, it has been interesting to see users adapt to the new aggregation engine - seeing some use it to pull in their content and others using it as a self-contained blogging platform. Some people see lots of activity on their feeds, while others get significantly less. Now, as we have seen with products like TweetStats for Twitter and a multitude of packages for blog statistics, we now have the first entry (of many, no doubt) aimed at showing your activity on Buzz, and how much traction your feed is getting, along with details on who is commenting, and how much they are saying.

The new project, hosted on Google App Engine, authored by Siegfried Hirsch, analyzes your last 100 entries to Buzz, from any source, shows their origin, counts up the words, characters and replies, and displays the people interacting with your feed.

As Buzz does not yet have an official API, there is a lot of information hiding from the initial cut, such as the total number of "likes" for your feed, who is liking your content, and any data beyond the first 100 posts. It also does not analyze your own personal activity - trying to find just where you are commenting and liking through your own network (although Google's Dashboard can give you some top-level stats).


As I ran the numbers for a number of people on Buzz, from the highly prominent Googler DeWitt Clinton (whose script was the inspiration for this project) to Twitter's John Kalucki, Jesse Stay and myself, it seemed that those who posted natively to Buzz gained the most engagement, while those who piped in activity from third party services - such as Twitter - got less.


DeWitt, who has 76 native Buzz entries, saw responses from more than 430 unique authors, with 12 different people (him and myself included) making more than 25 comments on those entries. In contrast, 156 different authors made comments in my last 100 entries, the overwhelming majority of which have been shares from Google Reader.


Not unsurprisingly, DeWitt's native entries into Buzz are much longer than my shares, which are often excerpted. While my 100 posts totaled 4,228 words, the 76 posts he provided were a whopping 18,380 words, or more than 240 apiece. The attention to length resulted in nearly 2,200 comments on his items, with an average of 61 words per reply. The nearly 400 comments I received had a similar 57 words pre reply over the last 100 entries.

The Buzz-Statistics engine is billed as version 0.1, and has some work to do. I found it often lagged with larger accounts (my own included), but it's an intriguing first step into getting analytics data out of the new platform. You can check out your data by going to http://buzz-stats.appspot.com/ and entering your Google user ID.

Tim O'Reilly and DeWitt Clinton are both experimenting with Google Buzz as a long form -- well, longer form -- publishing tool. It's an interesting adaptation for Buzz, and I think they're on to something.

Here's why: Blogs are great for getting people to a site. Twitter is great for tossing around short-form ideas and quips. Facebook is great for talking with a defined community.

But blogs are not inherently social. They try to be, with comments and RSS, but they're still built in silos. Twitter is unbelievably social, no doubt about that, but it's also shorthand. It's very hard to have an engaging conversation in 140 characters. And Facebook is like a ping-pong match: lots of back and forth excitement, but very little substance.

Buzz could be the missing link here. It's a hybrid option that's not particularly good at being a blog, or a microblog, or a social network, but it's a good tool for starting conversations and noodling on topics. (Keith Crawford picked up on this early on.) Tim noted during a recent conversation that Buzz is a throwback to blogging's early days, when informal posts were the norm.

Buzz in many ways occupies the same domain as Tumblr and Posterous. All of these services let you dip a bucket in the social/content stream and pour the catch into your own trough. But Because Buzz is constructed in a social environment, as opposed to a publishing environment, it's a bit more natural to share all that conversation and information.

A lot of people just like to get on with it, which is why Twitter and Facebook will always be more popular. And I'm not saying -- nor am I even hinting -- that blogs are dead. Far from it. You need a hub for all those social media spokes, and blogs make great hubs. DeWitt Clinton, in that same Buzz update, actually predicts a time when posts and comments from blogs, Buzz, and other networks will "flow seamlessly back and forth between them, such that the syndication will no longer be in only a single direction, but rather a network of threads woven together." That functionality is still a ways off (and I hope it arrives sooner rather than later), but in the interim it looks like Buzz has opened yet another content channel; a social space where you can toss an idea into a pool of willing conversationalists and see what happens.

One last thing ... because a blog post lauding Buzz for its conversation tools carries a hint of hypocrisy, here's my own attempt at a related Buzz conversation starter.

Chris Myles, an active Buzz user, albeit a critical one, has a buzz post out suggesting that Google Buzz needs a “Customer Advocate,” to do “community management” for Buzz. I suspect that as Buzz grows over time, that community management types might begin being added to the product team. Having been very involved in web communities over the course of the past seven years or so, I thought I’d post some of my own thoughts on this subject matter.

So far to date, I think Google has been doing a *very* good job with community management on Buzz without having any specific individual as a formal “community manager.” Overall it seems that many on the team, from product managers to engineers, are simply informally doing a lot of good community management directly themselves.

Engineer DeWitt Clinton has perhaps been the most vocal Google engineer interacting with Buzz’s users, but his voice is far from a solo one from the team. Bradley Horowitz, who describes himself as a “Product Dude” at Google, is a significant Google executive voice who is providing community management. So is Todd Jackson, Buzz’s Product Manager. Josh Willis has been vocal. And many, many others on the team have consistently dropped into conversations providing sort of unofficial community management.

Even more impressive, many Google employees who are *not* on the Buzz team, still are actively participating in Buzz and directing threads to the team or helping out in other ways whenever they can. It is obvious to me that the spirit of good community management is highly valued by the team and it’s leadership. I’m impressed.

So, does Buzz *need* an official community manager? I suspect that they *might* at some point. Buzz is still early and the hand holding that the team is providing likely can’t scale with millions of users in the long run. But before we just assume that they need to start hiring managers, let’s keep in mind that community managers aren’t always necessarily good for communities. In fact community mismangers can sometimes actually be poisonous for a community. That said I think that great care should be used in the selection of the right community managers for any community and whenever possible non-interventionist tools should be considered before community management intervention.

Principles of good community management:

1. Whenever possible, empower your users to deal with internal community problems *themselves* directly. Empower them with the technological tools to self manage community conflict.

One of the problems on Flickr is that over the years there have been some powerfully and negatively hostile community interactions. Malicious anonymous harassing trolls have invaded groups and people’s photostreams and other public areas of the site and posted the most hateful and objectionable material. The first line of defense against these sorts of negative elements is to empower your users to deal directly, immediately and decisively with these sorts of situations. Trolls, spammers, racists, hate mongers, etc. will invade any community. It is only a matter of time. But the first line of defense against dealing with these individuals should be a robust “block” feature. One of the things that FriendFeed did right from the get go was their “Block this user” function. Basically using the block this user function wipes that user off the face of FriendFeed for you. They are gone. Entirely invisible. They can’t post on your feed items. They don’t see your feed items (if they are logged in). If they comment in any conversations they are completely and entirely invisible to you. This is a powerful tool. It’s powerful because it immediately removes objectionable content from before a uses eyes (by choice) and it is immediately applied. Rather than reporting bad behavior (which still ought to be able to be done) this immediately addresses the negative situation and empowers the offended party by feeling that they have power and control over the negative situation that they are dealing with.

Further, a robust block command actually *discourages* trolling, spamming, racism, hate speech, etc. Because these people are quickly minimized and end up talking to themselves and unable to get a reaction grow tired and move on.

If you can solve a problem with technology, that’s superior to solving it with community management.

2. Be very, very, very, careful with censorship. Censorship should *not* be an everyday hammer that a community manager uses to solve every potential problem. The censorship on Flickr as applied by community managers is really bad. I’ve had literally hundreds of hours of my own work permanently deleted there. This pisses me off as a user to no end. If feels personal and spiteful and petty and creates an enormous amount of ill will. A good community manager should resist the urge to simply censor someone they disagree with, or who is reported, or who they don’t like personally.

There will be times when censorship is necessary. Illegal content for example. If a company gets a DMCA notice, they will likely have to deal with copyrighted material in their network. But even here, the *greatest* of care should be taken to censor as little as humanly possible. A few years back I posted a screenshot of a known griefer’s television appearance on Fox news. This individual filed a false DMCA request to have the image removed with Flickr. The EFF later pursued this individual and as part of a settlement against him made him publicly apologize for illegally abusing the DMCA. But the way that Flickr handled this was not by simply doing the legal minimum of removing the image, they actually nuked hundreds of comments that went along with the image unnecessarily.

If there is some thread that must removed. Kill the absolute bear minimum. Be strategic. Take out a single line, not an entire thread, and certainly not thousands of other completely non-offensive threads, simply because they are tied to a user that you’ve found offensive in one instance.

3. Hire someone who lives, eats, sleeps, breathes, your community. Consider hiring from within. Good community management is not a 9 to 5 job. It doesn’t go on vacation. Hire someone who is emotionally invested and involved in your community and who has a deep seated passion and love for the product you are creating and for the difference that it is making in the world.

4. Hire someone who can get out on the road. There is nothing like face time. You cannot underestimate the enormous amount of positive energy that can be generated for any community when real life social interaction begins to take place. Recently I had an opportunity to spend some time photographing music service Pandora. I met their founder Tim Westergren. When I met Tim, one of the things that he was most proud of was of a map pinned up outside his office which documented all of the cities that he’d visited going around the entire U.S. holding meet ups with their users. Set a budget and get your community manager out on the road. Set public events where the most active emotionally invested users can personally get to know this individual face to face.

Town hall meetings are great. Use your corporate offices all over the world as much as possible to host get togethers, etc. People that work for your company will be encouraged to attend because it’s easy for them (at their office already) and people that love your product will consider it a wonderful experience to get to see your offices first hand. It’s also easier to get management to stop by for an hour for a meet and greet if they don’t have to drive somewhere specifically.

5. Authorize transparency. You will never be able to please everyone in your community. You will always have people who hate things that you do. Don’t shy away from these problems and issues. Keep the lawyers as far away from the community managers as possible. Be open and comunicative even if it means telling people something that they don’t want to hear. Err on the side of being too transparent over withholding information. If there is some reason why information can’t be shared, explain the reasoning behind that.

6. Acknowledge your critics. Critics of a service should never be marginalized or dismissed or certainly locked out of help forums or censored. Critics can be a pain in the ass, they can create discord in your community, they can hurt esprit de corps. But… oftentimes their points are valid. They document real problems and bugs. They challenge your service or product to be the most excellent that it possibly can be. One of the highest ambitions a good community manager should have is to turn a critic into an evangelist. There is no greater accomplishment in my mind or measure of the success of a community manager.

7. Act immediately. Nothing creates a worse problem than letting an issue fester over time. And internet time moves fast. In 24 hours a community problem can easily move outside of your community and be significantly amplified across the web. Digg, reddit, Slashdot, Twitter, blogs, etc. are very quick to latch on to community problems. Nip your community problems in the bud. Immediately address them, even if the address is simply that you need more time.

Recently Starbucks decided to launch a social media beachhead on Flickr. This was probably not the best idea as Starbucks historically has had a less than good reputation for prohibiting photography in their stores. But rather than deal with this conflict immediately, Starbucks let this issue fester on and on and on for months. Users in their Flickr group got so upset about Starbuck’s inability to address this problem over the months that almost every thread kept bringing this failure up over and over and over again. Finally Starbuck’s was forced to lock down the entire group. Effectively censoring all who had participated. Had Starbucks come up with a faster solution to this problem this failure could have been avoided.

8. Monitor all channels for your product. Recently when I updated my CoolIris/Firefox I found that cmd-click would no longer open a new background tab. This was frustrating to me as a user because it was a change that I wasn’t used to and made it much harder for me to use that product. So I tweeted out that I disliked this. Within hours someone from Cool Iris tweeted back an easy solution to my problem and I tweeted back that they were the Bestest after that. They turned a very negative feeling I had about their product into a very positive feeling. Good community managers should not just monitor their own community. They should monitor what is being said about their community outside their community. Twitter, facebook, FriendFeed, etc. And while the eyes of a community manager cannot be everywhere at all times, all employees of a company should be empowered to forward things that they find out there to the community manager.

9. Promote, promote, promote, promote. A good community manager’s fingers should be blistered by the end of the day from hitting the like button over and over and over and over again. Give praise to the most prominent members of your community religiously. Acknowledge them even in the smallest of ways. Build them up. These are your evangelists. These are your ambassadors. These users provide you a tool to leverage good vibrations. They broadcast and spread your message of product excellence. Let them feel the love.

An interesting firefight broke out over the weekend as Google engineer DeWitt Clinton defended Google data policies in Buzz and related “open” standards. Those who remember the politics of RSS and the games companies played around its buildout would recognize a number of the names and tactics of the current positioning. Closed comment threads, insinuations, calls to action — only the names of the bigcos are shifting, and not all that much either.

The latest wrinkle is to describe developer acceptance as the key measurement of open standards. As Clinton and fellow Google evangelists fan out across the realtime stream’s version of the Sunday talk shows, they’re having to argue the borginess of Facebook versus Google. C’mon guys, get serious. Google has the gorilla crown going away.

Think of the breadth and depth of Google’s strategy: own every product category and decorate each with their own metadata. Gmail, done. Apps, done enough. Chrome. OS, Android, Nexus. Now Buzz. What folks who argue against the Google tax don’t understand is that this isn’t going to happen if…. It’s done, banked, in the books, check cashed, burger eaten. Every time a Buzz gets distributed, the addition of key voices from this and previous eras solidifies the new metadata type as the social graph ripples spread.

It doesn’t matter how immature Buzz is compared to other systems; in fact, it just makes the resultant Buzzes on the subject all the more canonical. No matter how long it takes for these systems to converge, each object will have its own metadata stamp. From here on out, Buzz stamps are getting licked and posted in increasingly significant numbers. The big companies behind these moves have learned a lot from the pioneers of RSS and open source, as well as the bigco strategies of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle/Sun.

But Google has taken all the previous strategies and combined them into one relentless juggernaut: create the data and let the process fall into place around it. It would be cynical to suggest that Google was somehow behind the open standards players who started the ball rolling, but clearly the two groups scratched each other’s backs along the way. Perhaps the key melting pot for this buildout was the Internet Identity Workshop, where key players from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook first got together openly.

Facebook seems to have the most to gain by adoption of the various open standards. It mutes the argument that the social media giant is a closed, proprietary system by pushing the discussion to its Adsense-like Facebook Connect. This in turn fueled the idea that Facebook’s huge developer community makes adopting the Facebook API’s a more logical choice than Google forcing their own set. DeWitt Clinton simply ignored the suggestion.

He also doesn’t touch the suggestion that Dave Winer’s RSS and RSS Cloud be supported. This is a mistake, by the way. Noise from Atom mainstays about how Atom is better architected and more robust aside, the best way to marginalize RSS is to implement it and move on. It will be interesting to watch whether Clinton will continue to stonewall, or pass the ball to someone with more clout and willingness to think strategically and act tactically.

It’s likely Buzz has already survived, riding shotgun with the Nexus One release as Google executes on several different fields simultaneously. The Android code is infuriatingly unstable, but the overriding message is one of rapid innovation and aggressive challenge to Apple’s one-thought invulnerable crown. Nothing suggests that Steve Jobs will slow down or be anything but invigorated by the competition, but Google’s strength in cloud computing will take some catching up for Apple.

In the context of the imminent iPad release, Buzz will have a big new stage to finance the next round of improvements. While FriendFeed fans await more rational filtering and UI tweaks, the biggest bang for Google’s buck will be to double down on the email integration. Scorned as a privacy invasion, the built-in integration of relevant Buzzes lets me keep the noise down by only commenting on threads I want to track. The Clinton debates serve as a handy promotional campaign while we wait for the iPad to make additional forays.

For its part, Facebook would do well to adopt a more open stance on Buzz. With plenty of bona fide standards cred on the line, Facebook has been pretty well locked down since Buzz shipped. Perhaps the strategy is to go the big media route with IPO talk, but the silence over the FriendFeed acquisition is disingenuous, particularly given the founders’ willingness to share and learn from customers and the addicted press. Buzz’s weaknesses highlight why the company bought FriendFeed, and not in a flattering way.

Salesforce remains the wildcard, with Chatter suggesting a subscription model for micromessaging that flies in the face of Marc Andreesen’s conversation with Eric Schonfeld. We’ll know soon, because Chatter has plenty of room to maneuver in the absence of a Microsoft strategy for realtime. The window won’t stay open forever, however. But Benioff has been underestimated for years, and never more so than with Chatter.

So prepare yourself for a few weeks of jawboning about the new reality, as Buzz continues to fire more and more objects into the stream, creating more and more metadata as those objects are consumed, ignored, threaded into Twitter and FriendFeed chats, and in general recalling the late great days when all this stuff was invented, bearhugged, and muzzled. Buzz suggests there’s life in the old strategies, even when the shoe has moved to the other foot.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In a response to my article here, DeWitt Clinton of Google defined what he deemed the definition of “open” to be.  According to DeWitt, “the first is licensing of the protocols themselves, with respect to who can legally implement them and/or who can legally fork them.”  I argue if this were the case, then why didn’t Google clone and standardize what Facebook is doing, where many, many more developers are already integrating and writing code for?  Facebook itself is part of the Open Web Foundation, and applies the same principles as Google to allowing others to clone the APIs they provide to developers.

DeWitt’s second definition of “open” revolves around, according to DeWitt, “the license by which the data itself is made available. (The Terms and Conditions, so to speak.) The formal definitions are less well established here (thus far!), but it ultimately has to do with who owns the data and what proprietary rights over it are asserted.”  Even Facebook makes clear in its terms that you own your data, and they’re even working to build protocols to enable website owners to host and access this data on their own sites.  Why did Google have to write their own Social Graph API or access lesser-used protocols (such as FOAF or OpenID) when they could, in reality, be standardizing what millions (or more?) of other developers are already utilizing with Facebook Connect and the Facebook APIs to access friend data?  Google could easily duplicate the APIs Facebook has authored (even using the open source libraries Facebook provides for it), and have a full-fledged, “open” social network built from these APIs many developers are already building upon.  I would argue there are/were many more developers writing for Facebook than were developing under the open protocols and standards Google chose to adapt.  I’d like to see some stats if that is not the case.  Granted, even Facebook is giving way to Google to adopt some of these other “open” standards so developers have choice in this matter, even if they were one of the few adopting the other standards.

I still think Google is adopting these standards because it benefits Google, not the user or developer.  If Google wanted to benefit the majority of the audience of developers they would have cloned the already “open” Facebook APIs rather than adopt the much lesser-adopted other protocols they have chosen to go by.  This is a matter of competition, being the “hero”, and a brilliant marketing strategy.  Is Google evil for doing this?  Of course not.  Do I hate Google for this?  Only for the reason that I have to now adapt all the apps I write in Facebook to new “open” APIs Google is choosing to adopt.

IMO, if Google wanted to truly benefit the developer they would have chosen to clone the existing “open” APIs developers were already writing for.  This is a marketing play, plain and simple.  It may have started with geeks not wanting to get into the Facebook worlds, but management agreed because in the end, it benefits Google, not their competitors.  If you don’t think so, you should ask Dave Winer why Google is not implementing RSS or rssCloud instead of Atom and PSHB (I’m completely baffled by that one, too).

Image courtesy http://northerndoctor.com/2009/04/17/re-inventing-the-wheel/

If you haven't seen a lot of applications built in the last few weeks that leverage the Google Buzz API, it's because there aren't any. In fact, Google hasn't yet rolled out any API for Buzz. According to the company, this isn't due to any backroom dealings where they plan to introduce proprietary code and hooks that tie activity to their platform, but instead, because they wanted to be sure they could first build a product that in fullness leveraged open Web standards, and start with that foundation to deliver an interoperable system that could continue to function even if Google were to "disappear off the face of the earth".

In a presentation to the Silicon Valley Google Technology Users Group last night, held at the Google campus, DeWitt Clinton, a software engineer for the company, talked to developers and other tech enthusiasts about the company's API strategy and approach to Buzz, and explained that Buzz is designed not to increase lock-in to Google, but instead, to leverage open technologies that will let data flow to and from sites without central ownership. While a Buzz API will eventually be released, it will leverage the same open standards that power it today.

"The first principle of Buzz is that we can build this on protocols that are open and free, but not centralized," DeWitt said. "Can Google disappear off the face of the earth and Buzz still works? We need to make this data federated and distributed."

On the day Buzz launched, I referenced much of the foundation for Buzz in a quick article about the open tools and APIs that "make Buzz hum". But last night, DeWitt expanded that story to include 9 major open APIs, briefly outlined below.

1. Atom

DeWitt called Atom "the lingua franca of the programmable Web today", explaining that Atom contains entries that are "well structured", and include source entry, GUIDs that enable deduplication, and specification of the content type. He said, "You are able to pass rich data in that Atom feed in a way that is more specific than other feed types."

2. AtomPub

DeWitt said AtomPub "has become the most popular paradigm for restful APIs on the Web." AtomPub expanded the original Atom format to include the ability to both create and update feeds, not just passively read.

3. ActivityStreams

ActivityStreams essentially watch users' activity and can specify rich verbs and actions within those feeds. This enables feeds for all comments posted on Buzz, all likes, or even alerts that one person following you on Buzz also follows you on another network. DeWitt's examples hint at future developments for the platform, as these specific feeds are not yet clearly visible.

4. Pubsubhubbub

Much discussed here on the blog, Pubsubhubbub reduces the need for sites to poll for updates, and powers real-time updates between services. DeWitt reiterated "the hub is decided on by the publisher" and "there is nothing Google-specific about that.", saying that the infrastructure and plumbing for Buzz has been laid for the last few years. Pubsubhubbub has been pioneered by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin, both Google employees.

5. MediaRSS

Developed by Flickr, MediaRSS syndicates rich media through both RSS and atom feeds, creating a structured namespace inside RSS for content and a thumbnail. Buzz leverages MediaRSS, letting you pull rich content, like Flickr photos, into the platform. Of course, PicasaWeb, a Google property, also supports MediaRSS.

6. OAuth

The product of engineers from all corners, including Twitter, OAuth was engineered "to solve a vexing problem in the industry," Dewitt said, explaining OAuth prevents the need to ask users for their name and passwords on third party sites, acting as a delegated authorization protocol that gives permission to the application. Google Buzz, like Twitter, leverages OAuth to provide authenticated access to your data.

7. WebFinger

A new-age version of the old command-line prompted, text responding Finger protocol, WebFinger aims to be a way to get public information tied to an individual, through their identity, assigned to an e-mail address. "We want people to identify themselves, and we want people to discover people," DeWitt said.

WebFinger is similar to the strategy of OpenID, but OpenID hasn't had massive adoption by end-users who have found it unwieldy. WebFinger, aiming to be less arcane, enables the independent nature of Buzz, helping to federate the data and distribute it by domain, owned by the end user. DeWitt said, "The profile lookup and notification mechanism can be in the hands of the user being addressed."

8. Salmon

Still in earliest stages of development, Salmon is an extension or replacement for the old PingBack model that had blogs informing the other about references or links. This "flawed" model only provided minimal data, and could not be verified, letting me send PingBacks anywhere I wish if I chose. Salmon's goal is to leverage what's being called "Magic Signatures", signed with a public key to prove and verify linkage.

The first approach for Salmon will be to migrate comments from aggregators to originating posts, as covered a few times on this blog. But DeWitt said that "Likes" are similar activities that could flow back with Salmon, or be used to notify users of "following" or other activity. DeWitt forecast that sites like Blogger and StatusNet would rapidly adopt and federate Salmon to transmit data updates.

9. Portable Contacts

Simply described, Portable Contacts show your information and that of the friends who you follow, providing users a secure way to get access to address books and friends lists without having to request credentials or scrape the data. (more here)

DeWitt also noted XFN, the XML Friend Network, and FOAF (Friend Of a Friend) as being key contributors to the Buzz technology stack today, adding that he was "glad smart people were working on this ten years ago because we are all benefiting from it now."

DeWitt, on his Buzz feed, has been talking a lot about open standards and their importance to the Google team at large. See @Jesse Stay A few points of clarification to your most recent post [1], because I believe getting the details right matters. and "The thing I find most attractive about Google Buzz is its stated commitment to open standards.", as well as his first post from February 21st, which thanked the standard developers: Standing on the shoulders of giants—a look at the people behind the protocols behind Google Buzz:

Given Google's size, there is a good amount of distrust on the Web from people who think they own too much of your data, know too much about you, or have goals that run contrary to your own ideals on privacy, communication and sharing. Not even DeWitt's detailed presentations and explanations and promises of openness and data portability will convince everyone that they are on the right path. But I personally believe the frankness and detail that is being shown here is not just promising a strong future for this individual product (Buzz), but also in extending the groundwork done for the entire Web, for products and services we haven't even seen yet.

DeWitt adds: "All of these protocols are open. They are literally also all free. They are intended to be used by everybody, with or without Google being involved. You don't have to ask us if you can use Salmon or Pubsubhububb. We have a liberal and permissive patent license."

Is Google going away? Not today, and not this year. Is Buzz perfect? No. Of course not. Can it do all the things I can do on other sites, like FriendFeed? No. Not yet. But it seems that the Buzz team has opted to make tradeoffs that favor fast shipping and openness over completeness and individual features. And if you don't trust Google, it sounds like you can do something about it.

"We are pretty adamant about not building this on proprietary technology," DeWitt said last night. "If any of you feel that it is not going in the right direction, you have the power to change its direction and Google will not stop you."

You can find me on Buzz here and can follow DeWitt Clinton on Buzz here.