Previous entries in the concept series include: Part 1: The Social Agent, Part 2: Connect, and Part 3: Follow.

Also take a look at the rest of my mockups (view as a slideshow) or visit the project overview.

. . .

Looking back, it’s quite plain to see that web browsing, email and chat co-evolved, each being the domain of different applications, and being powered by non-interoperable protocols. Over time, people grew used to separating information consumption from information exchange. The dual use of applications like Firefox and Thunderbird demonstrate this situation, as though sharing and consuming were completely distinct modes of computing.

However, people largely treat these behaviors as one in the same — they’re nearly as eager to share what they discover on the web as they are excited to discover it. It’s just that email is one of the few (clunky) tools they have. And yet, imagine what the experience is like for the uninitiated — launching a browser for the first time (especially if they aren’t inured to the ways of email). They’re going to find it terribly frustrating to share something they find on the web, no matter how great their natural desire is to share it.

This functionality should be supported by our software — browsers included! Social computing is about combining both discovery and sharing — and the social agent can, again, manage such transactions.

Thus, it’s disheartening (is it not?) that the most advanced sharing feature that browsers offer today — in 2010 — is a hand off to your preferred local email client, adding friction and interrupting your flow. Should you really need to launch a separate app just to share a link? ?

Meanwhile, it’s become all the more common to publish content openly on the web — a public display of sharing. While historically people have been hesitant to be too open online, the success of public-by-default services like Flickr over private-by-default services like Kodak EasyShare prove the durability of this trend, which is also manifest in services like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s clear that relying on email as the primary mechanism for sharing is useful, but not sufficient for today’s web user — whose network is increasingly not found in their email address book.

Enter: the social agent.

Recall that the social agent already manages the people and topics you follow and your relationships with various parties. The next step is to add sharing to the browser. In this way, the tool that you use to discover content will be the same tool that you use to share and rebroadcast that content. Thus sharing becomes a natural part of your routine, and you become a participant-creator of the social web.

Now, of course it’s not sufficient to just add a sharing button and call it a day. That’s what so many websites already do, marring their pages with a bunch of tiny icons intended to help you share better! Well, your social agent should banish those annoying pests and make it easier for you to share the links and content with the people that you care about. Sure — for web savvy folks this isn’t necessarily a problem — but as websites become more dynamic and complex, there is a need to make sharing much more straightforward and integrated.

So suppose you visit the New York Times homepage and spot a story you think your friend would be interested in. If you used the “Send Link…” function, you’d end up sending a link to the homepage: nytimes.com. By the time your friend visits the site, the article you wanted to share might have already fallen out of site. Sharing fail!

Yet, you didn’t do anything wrong. You saw something that you wanted to share and used the only tool your browser gave you. Regardless, you still want to share the story!

There are a number of ways that the social agent could help you gracefully achieve this, whether you want to share a video, photo, blog post, article, event, or other common web document. For one, the browser can ask you to indicate specifically which item(s) you want to share. It can then attach extra information (related links, titles, descriptions) to your share to enrich your message (Facebook already does this for those of you who have figured out how to use Facebook’s sharing bookmarklet).

The browser can also tell you what methods it has available to share content with certain friends, or can make a list of your contacts or friends available through a familiar and convenient auto-suggesting textbox.

This means that the browser should help you drag and drop content to your friends, and between any compatible web sites or services.

Additionally, the browser can also maintain a history all the items you’ve shared, giving you the ability to search across them, and bring them back up quickly. You could also filter by recipient, service, time, or where you were physically located when you shared.

The browser can also follow the items you’ve shared to watch for updates or other changes like new comments. Since following is a feature we’ve already discussed, it’ll suffice to say that the items you share will be recorded and followed for new updates, which will be available in your activity dashboard.

Given how prevalent sharing information has become now that nearly everyone can be reached online, a modern browser should support this behavior in order to make the experience more universal, discoverable, easier to use, and more convenient.

Other entries in the concept series include: Part 1: The Social Agent and Part 2: Connect.

Also take a look at the rest of my mockups (view as a slideshow) or visit the project overview.

. . .

Recently I stopped by my neighborhood Whole Foods looking to pick up fixin’s for dinner — some fish, beets; y’know: the basics. After checking out, I noticed a sign on the wall that I’d not seen before, providing links to that local Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook pages. It struck me as rather strange that a company like Whole Foods would promote their profiles on networks owned by other companies until I got out of my tech bubble mindset for a moment and realized how irrelevant Whole Foods’ homepage must seem to people who are now used to following friends’ and celebrities’ activities on sites like Twitter and Facebook. What are you supposed to do with a link to a homepage these days? Bookmark it? — only to lose it among the thousands of other bookmarks you already forgot about?

As the number of people and organizations who have homepages on the web has increased the people formerly known as the audience are diverting their attention from these static outposts to activity-based social content, often consumed as-it-happens, in real-time.

This has tremendous implications for the browser, an application devised during the age of the “slow web”. More importantly, the browser’s interface hasn’t kept up with the changing and rapidly evolving nature of web content, failing to provide native interfaces that help you track content that you’re interested in, and that updates you automatically as new atomic data is available.

Though many browsers have basic feedreader support, their implementations are uninspired and irrelevant — as evidenced by the popularity of alternative web-based aggregators like Google Reader, Netvibes, Friendfeed, and even Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, the popularity of these services proves that consuming syndicated content from various sources is something that people want — it’s just that the browser does virtually nothing to satiate this desire.

Whole Foods‘ promotion of their Twitter and Facebook profiles also underscores an additional evolution that existing feed formats don’t express: that people are interested in many more kinds of content than blog posts and articles! People want photos, videos, status updates, wishlists, favorites, birthdays, and more. They want to know what changed or what happened — whether someone left a comment, made a new friend, is attending an event, or changed their profile photo. These activities take place across several domains and contexts, and pulling them all together into one convenient place is needlessly tedious and rarely portable.

Though I’m sure Whole Foods would much prefer to advertise its own website, they must promote themselves in the contexts where their customers spend their time for one simple reason: Facebook and Twitter have made it insanely easy for people to follow what their friends and favorite brands are doing. Even though feeds subscriptions have been built into browsers for several generations now, it took the social networks to actually make this feature usable — and wrote the browser right out of the picture.

But all’s not lost. As it turns out, the social agent is perfectly suited to provide “following” functionality by modernizing the browser’s existing feed infrastructure. In fact, by implementing “follow” at the browser level, we can generalize the activity of “subscribing” beyond articles and blog posts — and bring the functionality that people expect from social networks to the entire web.

Like subscribing, “following” only goes one way — and doesn’t require a reciprocal relationship in the way that “adding someone as a friend” on a social network often does.

This means that following can apply to a wider array of subjects like people, sports teams, comment threads, brands, and any other entity that might emit a stream of updates or activities (even your scale can emit an activity stream!).

Following does not define the mode by which one “follows”, nor is it restrictive in what you follow. In Twitter, for example, you can follow someone’s updates on the web, on your phone via SMS, in apps, or in other connected social networking contexts. In other words, the social agent can continually evolve the experience of following all kinds of activities and objects, rather than being restricted to the conventional list of items common today.

The social agent can integrate following in two different ways: it can either provide built-in handling of syndicated content, or it can seamlessly hand off to a service like Friendfeed, Brizzly, TuneIn, Netvibes, Seesmic, or Google Reader. What’s important, though, is that when you hit the “follow” button, updates from your sources flow to a known preferred aggregator.

The power of “following” is evident when you connect to an activity publisher. To date, getting access to protected feeds in the browser has been complicated, especially if you use technologies like Facebook Connect or OpenID which don’t use passwords to provide access. By adding the ability to connect your active account to what you follow, the social agent can provide you seamless access to private feeds.

For example, say you decide to follow your friend, and want to receive updates when he posts new photos. That’d be easy, except that his photos are private to the world, and he posts them to a network that you’re not on. No problem: since the social agent knows who you are, it can help you connect with your friend and make it easy to just ask him for permission to see his photos. Next time he signs in, he’ll get a notification that you’ve requested access, which he can approve at his leisure. And you never have to sign up for the service that he happens to use — since his updates will be delivered to you through your social agent.

In practice, much of what I’ve described is already possible using recent protocols and formats. It’s really just a matter of providing a unified experience through the browser and pushing for wider adoption of these technologies across the most popular social web services.

Over time, it is conceivable that the browser may develop sophisticated functionality that provides personal analysis and insights into the people and activities that you follow. Such analysis may be presented in an aggregated view, or give you “Best Of” summaries along various slices (daily, monthly, locally, among your college friends, etc). It certainly will be exciting to improve your ability to consume all the information you’re interested in without being overwhelmed by it, with the social agent able to differentiate between content types, activity sources, actors, and contexts and able to pick out those things which are most relevant to your tastes.

One last thing: as processors become faster and computers more connected, managing information should be a burden borne by the computer, rather than the individual. The individual should instead focus on information intake, assessment, interaction, and decision making — the things that require human attentiveness.

Interfaces for managing data should be kept to a minimum, and where they do exist, should be made simple, efficient, and clear. Where we once relied on hierarchical folders and directories, for example, we can now rely on search or other heuristic ranking tools that take social inputs to improve their performance.

Over time we can expand functionality, but to begin, it makes sense to heed the wisdom of Gall’s law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

Also take a look at the rest of my mockups (view as a slideshow) or visited the project overview.

. . .

When was the last time you created a new username and password so that you could make use of some website? Do you remember what username you picked, or which email address you used to sign up? Probably. But what about that support forum that you signed up for a couple weeks ago while you were home for the holidays? Did you write it down somewhere? Or worse: did you just use the same username and password that you use everywhere else?

Spreadsheets, text files, sticky notes, cheat-sheets, software and browser extensions — you name it, people have probably found some way to recruit every kind of notational tool there is to help them remember the countless passwords, PINs, IDs, usernames, and secrets needed to access the apps, websites, and services that they use on a regular basis. But we can do better.

Step 1: Activate

The social agent is designed to unify your online social experience. With that in mind, a social agent must become an extension of you in order to mediate your online interactions.

This is achieved by activating your browser against your preferred account provider when you first begin your online session, just as you activate your mobile phone before being able to make or receive calls. This is how the browser is turned into a social agent.

By activating your browser, you are effectively telling your browser who you are and where to store and access your data online.

Fortunately, you can activate using any account that you already have that supports a Connect API, like Twitter Connect or Facebook Connect (or soon, OpenID Connect). It is also conceivable to use the browser in an anonymous or “incognito mode”.

Step 2: Connect

Once activated, you can visit any site that supports Connect and with the click of a button, sign up and bring your profile, relationships, content, activities, and any other portable data with you. This process is identical to Facebook Connect or Twitter Connect, except that the interaction occurs between your social agent and the site you’re visiting.

What is a Connect API? Writing for the O’Reilly Radar blog in February last year, David Recordon defined the anatomy of “connect” as meeting four criteria:

• Profile: Everything having to do with identity, account management and profile information ranging from sign in to sign out on the site I’m connecting with.
• Relationships: Think social graph. Answers the questions of who do I know, who do I know who’s already here, and how I can invite others.
• Content: Stuff. All of my posts, photos, bookmarks, video, links, etc that I’ve created on the site I’ve connected with.
• Activity: Poked, bought, shared, posted, watched, loved, etc. All of the actions that things like the Activity Streams project are starting to take on.

This is what the verb “connect” means for the social agent. The “connect” button communicates that your browser is going to share some amount of your profile data with the site that you’re connecting with. You’re not just signing in. You’re connecting — and creating a relationship with the site. You can of course change the data that the website gets — even after you’ve signed in — and the benefit of this model is that you have transparency into what data you’re sharing with whom.

Far from making it impossible for you to share your data, your social agent should help you mediate such decisions, guiding you about which sites to connect with, and providing context to help inform you actions.

For this model to work, your connections are actually made between your preferred account provider and the third parties to which you’ve connected. Your account provider, then, acts as a hub for all of your online doings — collecting, maintaining, and mediating your browsing history, relationships and contacts, activities, transactions, content and media, and online profile. This provider should let you selectively configure how much, how little, or how long such your data is made available to third parties — much in the same way that you manage access on Twitter or Facebook today.

For you, this means that you get to pick an account provider of your choice — without needing to worry about remembering or managing passwords or usernames. Instead, you can have any number of accounts that are available to you wherever the web goes.

As a core feature of the social agent, connecting is the action you take whenever you want to establish an enduring an ongoing relationship with a site, service, or individual.

Thus, this is the first of a five part series that re-imagines the browser as a “social agent” — and defines how it can do more to facilitate various social behaviors by supporting three verbs that can “socialize” the browsing experience: Connect, Follow, and Share.

To put the ideas presented here into some context, I will begin with a vignette that describes a future computing scenario, motivated by three emerging conditions:

• online account and data portability
• ubiquitous networked access
• decreasing cost of advanced computing devices

This scenario is intended to provoke us to peek around the corner of today’s browser paradigm. Little that is presented here is entirely novel. Instead, this sketch presupposes that the browser has learned new capabilities that take it from the document-centric era of the web into the age of people-centric web services. This “social agent” knows who you are and facilitates common tasks like connecting to sites, interacting with following people and information, and providing intuitive tools for sharing for than just links.

. . .

We begin at a conference, somewhere far from home that required air travel, sometime in the near-future. It doesn’t really matter what the subject of the conference is, where it’s happening specifically, or why you’re going. However, a big draw of this event is getting to meet fellow professionals and exchanging tips and experiences, with the outcome of the event some kind of shared digital artifacts that capture the top highlights. There will be ample WiFi at the event and something else: everyone attending the event is given a slate computer to use for the duration of the event.

In fact, this kind of access to computing has become quite common; and with data access and portability vastly improved, the need to carry around personal electronics of any kind has all but gone away. In fact, the very thought of bringing a personal laptop — even a netbook — to the conference — now seems obtuse, as though you were bringing your own rotary phone and Yellow Pages to the conference.

It is also not possible to “install” applications on the device; instead, any application or service you need is available on-demand, available as a zero-footprint web service.

This device is the definition of a web native device; it serves dual purposes: to make computing extremely convenient, and abundant. It omits all the distractions and bells and whistles in favor of a lean, clean user experience, and is designed to augment — rather than replace — human interaction, as a whiteboard or pad of paper might.

The “browser” on this device has been modified to accommodate a new mode of online interaction. While it has retained a number of browser conventions, it introduces new capabilities that enhance personalization, sharing, and collaboration by carving out specific interfaces dedicated to interacting with people and web services.

When you turn on the device for the first time, you’re asked to activate the machine by signing in to your preferred identity service provider. You can either choose from a list of well known providers or supply an OpenID Connect-enabled account address.

Once activated, the device becomes an “extension” of your existing digital identity and any activity that you perform on the device will be attached to that identity. You may activate additional identities in order to assume discreet roles, but most people get by with as few as one or two active digital identities at any given time.

To that point, passwords are a thing of the past. With the advances in data portability and service interoperability, all modern sites and web services accept users from other networks (just as we take for granted the ability to email people from different domains today), making it possible to connect with, follow, and share with people on other networks without needing to create a new account. For most people, you only need one account for all your computing activities.

To better illustrate activation, I’ll draw an analogy to selecting your active gamer profile on an Xbox: once you’ve logged in with your gamertag, all your high scores, achievements, customizations, and social connections get attached to your profile. You don’t create a new gamertag for every game you play, nor for every social network (Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, etc) that you add to your profile. Instead, your gamertag is like a meta-identity to which you attach services, preferences, and attributes. This gamertag becomes a convenient, reusable identity.

Furthermore, if you visit a friend’s house and sign in to her Xbox with your gamertag, you’ll be able to bring all those preferences, connections, and achievements with you. You would set up and use the account system of this web-based device in the same way. In our future scenario, you would likely activate the same account that you use in your typical computing tasks while at the conference — picking up from where you left off — bringing access to all the resources and services you use, without the hassle of having to bring your own device, or remember more than one password.

During the course of the event, you would be able to make use of the built-in sharing capabilities to trade notes, photos, and videos with attendees co-located and remote. You could also follow those speakers and presenters who you find interesting, again, using the built-in features of the social agent.

On the expo floor, you could use the device to wirelessly connect your account to any of the exhibitors, taking photos, making notes, and swapping contact information or gathering information to read later — which would all be seamlessly and securely synced to your cloud provider.

Best of all, because these activities would be performed under a primary account, it would be easy for you to revisit this experience later — filtering the connections and contacts you made by time, location, or contextual activity (for example, did you meet this person because they were a speaker, or were you introduced to this person through a mutual friend?). You would also have digital receipts of the information that you shared with people, and be able to recall the products and organizations you started following while at the event. In other words, rather than having to perform these different types of common tasks across a number of separate networks after the fact, your social agent would mediate these tasks for you — ultimately freeing you up to focus on the event itself — and the interactions with your fellow attendees.

. . .

Our opportunity, then, is to define how the browser could serve us better if it were recast as a social agent. To begin with, we need to make two assumptions:

• First, there’s no reason why the browser should remain a passive bystander in our online experience. With increasing information abundance, we require smart and sophisticated tools that bring us the information that we need to know, when we need to know it, and that brings back our focus, productivity, and accelerates our understanding of the world around us.
• Second, the social agent serves as an extension of the self into the web. Just as the mouse and keyboard facilitate the interaction between man and machine, the social agent facilitates the interaction between people through the medium of the web. We trust the keyboard to “communicate” our keystrokes to the computer just as we typed them, and expect the browser to help us articulate our connections other people directly. As the trust between the browser and man grows, we are extending ourselves into the digital medium — augmenting our access and ability to manipulate information — and enhancing our ability to connect with others. And yet, the browser is cast in the image of an infovore — and not a social being. Thus the potential to retool the browser as a social agent is huge, and remains largely unexplored territory, especially as we are spending more of our computing time in this application.

As the nexus of all of our online activities the browser is uniquely positioned to provide convenient and consistent access to friends, contacts, documents, and media across networks. And as an extension of man, the social agent is a fulcrum of user-centric computing — turning the individual into the point of integration by rejecting the current rash of fragmented service-centric identities. As far as the individual is concerned, it should be a choice whether one decides to fragment his identity into a thousand partial profiles strewn across the web, rather than a mandate.

From Mozilla’s perspective, the social agent offers dignity to the individual and brings balance to a chaotic ecosystem.

Just as Firefox has brought choice and innovation to a once-monopolistic browser market, the next generation browser must bring choice to the rapidly centralizing world of social networks. To achieve this, we need more than just another social network; we need a vision of the social web that is built on upon technological interoperability that fosters agency for the citizen of the web.

As my contribution to the Mozilla Concept Series on Identity, this series will explore the following hypotheses:

• that people’s experience on the web would be enhanced if the browser offered more compelling, integrated social functionality
• that the browser can be made social, becoming a personal, social agent
• that a social agent can minimize the overhead of participating in the social web and maximize the benefits
• that the architecture of identity in the browser is critical to achieving simplicity and clarifying the experience of social networking
• that a social agent should simplify and reduce the work necessary of web developers to create secure, compelling social applications
• that social functionality must be built into the browser in order to spread the benefits of the social web as wide as possible
• that establishing trust is essential to growing the social web, and that trust can be earned by putting the individual, rather than services, at the center of the personal social web experience

This series of posts will sketch out a vision for the future of social computing, and is intended to provoke discussion, critique, and alternative proposals. In my mockups, I depict three new flows that adding three new verbs (connect, follow, and share) could bring to the browser. Subsequent posts will tackle each of these topics in turn:

• Connect: acting as your social agent, the browser becomes an extension of yourself, making it easier and more secure to participate in the social web
• Follow: as a replacement for the antiquated notion of “subscribing”, “following” becomes the general way to track the activities or feeds associated with a people, brands, celebrities, or social objects.
• Share: as the fundamental activity of the social web, sharing media, content, and information is integrated into the browser and enhanced through making available social connections and publishing services

Yesterday’s launch of Google Buzz and the fledgling Google Buzz API is like a downpayment on what I see as Google’s broader social web ambitions, that have been bubbling beneath the surface for some time. Understand that Buzz is not entirely an end unto itself, but a way for Google to get some skin in the game to promote the use and adoption of different open technologies for the social web.

In fact, I’d argue that Buzz is as much about Google creating a new channel for conversation in a familiar place as it is about how we’re going about building its public developer surfaces. Although today’s Buzz API only offers a real-time read-only activity stream, the goal is to move quickly towards implementing a host of other technologies — most of which should be familiar to readers of this blog.

As Kevin Marks observes, in order to address the mess of the social web that Mike Arrington described, we need widespread use [of common standards] so that we can generalize across sites — and thus enable people to interact and engage across the web , rather than being restricted to any particular silo of activity — which may or may not reflect their true social configuration.

In other words, standards — and in particular social web standards — are the lingua franca that make it possible for uninitiated web services to interact in a consistent manner. When web services use standards to commoditize essential and basic features, it forces them to compete not with user lock-in, but by providing better service, better user experience, or with new functionality and utility. I am an advocate of the open web because I believe the open web leads to increased competition, which in turn affords people better options, and more leverage in the world.

Buzz is both a terrific product, and a great example of how the social web is evolving and becoming truly ubiquitous. Buzz is simply one more stitch in the fabric of the social web.

And this disaster still unfolds, with scores pitching in — many turning to the social web and social media to facilitate or amplify their efforts.

One such effort is being lead by Project EPIC, a collection of information scientists, computer scientists and computational linguists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Irvine.

Their initiative, called Tweak the Tweet, provides a dictionary of hashtags for reporting on issues on the ground in Haiti and calling for aid. Here are templates for using their syntax:

I applaud their efforts and desire to help people communicate their status in a way that facilitates machine-processing. I worry, however, that this approach may limit its success.

Hashtags are metadata for humans first, machines second

The original need for hashtags came from the lack of any formal or public grouping mechanism in Twitter.

For example, when half of Silicon Valley went to SXSW and tweeted for days on end about this speaker or that panel, those who weren’t at the conference desperately wanted some way to filter out such noise. I proposed the hashmark (#) as a way of adding context to a tweet, so that people could choose for themselves to filter out or follow tweets tagged with certain keywords. In July last year, Twitter decided to hyperlink hashtags to their respective search results, and the format became widely adopted — more often than not used to game the trending topics on Twitter’s homepage.

Initially, most people thought hashtags were ugly and useless; even the folks at Twitter thought that they were unnecessary because they’d eventually develop natural language processing algorithms that would supersede the need manual tagging. Contrary to initial complaints about their complexity, hashtags become easier to understand and use with repeated exposure and practice because they are so transparent: if you see someone use a hashtag, you know how to use a hashtag.

And so three years later, hashtags still serve a role in helping people express themselves to each other.

Keep it simple, make it memorable

Language is inherently mutable; mathematics (the language of machines) is not. Verbal language can be adapted by a speaker, and what is heard (or read) is itself interpreted; the conversion is never digital, and invariably bears some loss of meaning.

But using hashtags to clarify meaning prioritizes the needs of the machine over the capabilities of the individual.

Such imposed order in a networked environment can succeed, but only if it achieves instant, widespread adoption, and is itself superficial (that is, it doesn’t require deep knowledge to understand or use the new order). In contrast, simpler, smaller and emergent structures tend to fare better over time, but developing them is not easy (see also: slashtags).

Successful structures should also aim for minimal cognitive burden — by being easy to remember and recall in practice. I’ve frequently seen people tweet about how they “forget to use hashtags” in posts — which is not surprising, since most people don’t think about the metadata of what they say. Hashtags and slashtags are most useful, therefore, when you want to provide additional context that is harder to express otherwise.

Learning from previous efforts

The Tweak the Tweet project introduces a “new order” for using Twitter. Though the words it calls out are mostly common, the use of the hashmark seems gratuitous, given the limited length of the medium (something that Stowe Boyd points out) and that the hashed words comprise the meat of the message, rather than the meta. To give you an example, this is Tweak-the-Tweet formatted post (77 characters):

#haiti #offering #volunteers #translators #loc Florida #contact @FranceGlobal

The same message could be reformatted to be human-readable without any loss of meaning (72 characters):

Offering volunteer translators in Florida. Contact @FranceGlobal. #haiti

While the message may not be as machine-friendly, it may reach a wider (human) audience available to respond to this offer.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss this effort, but instead provide a word of caution on focus. Tweak the Tweet is not the first hashtag pidgin language I’ve seen — and previous efforts struggled to gain adoption and awareness. Perhaps by minimizing the metadata and maximizing the meat, the effort poured into this might achieve a greater effect.

Paving the cowpaths and bulldozing fields

#sandiegofire

Hashtags may never have taken off if it weren’t for Nate Ritter tweeting about the San Diego forest fire in 2007. In fact, his use of the hashtag was the first dedicated use of a hashtag to help coordinate a response to a natural disaster:

What’s important about his use of hashtags in this case was that he was using them to communicate critical information to people in natural language. His use of the hashtag provided additional context to his followers who weren’t in San Diego, and also modeled a behavior that others could easily emulate when reporting their own news.

When I proposed using #sandiegofire as the hashtag for Nate to use, I first looked at what people were already using the tag their photos of the event on Flickr. At the time, the sandiegofire was one of the trending tags, and that’s how I chose it:

Had I tried to come up with my own new phrase for the event, Nate’s use of the tag may not have been picked up. #sandiegofire was also better than the alternatives, which were more localized and therefore more obscure to the broader audience. Using “SanDiego” in the tag itself helped bring clarity and context to Nate’s tweets.

Using hashtags effectively means considering the audience and their familiarity with the issue being tweeted about. While tagging lets you be as esoteric as you want, it may limit the reach of your effort, whereas paving the cowpaths means that you build on the familiar and connect with what people already know, reducing friction and inviting contribution.

iList with #ihave and #iwant

iList is an interesting service that originally aimed to take on eBay and Craigslist by leveraging social media. More recently they decided to narrow their efforts to focus on hashtag-based listings and Twitter search. Nonetheless, what I think is interesting about their approach is that it is, on the surface, quite simple.

To use the service, you just tag your tweet with #ihave or #iwant. If you want to get more detailed, you can add your zip code or categories like #forsale or #electronics. But the core service relies on using just two tags which seem to be have moderate usage — proving that getting adoption is always the hard part of any metadata-based communication strategy.

Twitter Vote Report#votereport

The last example is very similar to Tweak the Tweet and was launched by some friends of mine. The Twitter Vote Report project was designed to enable citizens to report on their local voting situation by using a series of hashtags:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345?
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #early if you’re voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

All tags were optional except the #votereport tag.

They also went through painstaking effort to mobilize people and provide alternative means to participate. They also did a good deal of work to report back their findings in real time (most visualizations appear to be offline) and open sourced their codebase.

They also made sure to make it possible to participate without using Twitter — the hashtags were just a mechanism for getting data into the system.

Design for adoption, stay focused

Around the time it launched, Ethan Zuckerman expressed skepticism about whether Twitter was the appropriate tool for the vote report project, in much the same way I’m wondering whether Tweak the Tweet could take a more focused approach in exchange for wider participation to achieve its goals.

My greatest concern is that there won’t be enough people who can “speak” the “tweaked” syntax, leading to a lot of effort spent building parsers that will be data-starved. While trained volunteers might be able to use this syntax effectively, I wonder if there aren’t alternative approaches that could use the existing corpus of text messages and tweets coming out of Haiti (which probably aren’t geo-coded, unfortunately) to discern the typing patterns that people use naturally in order to facilitate adoption? Perhaps by focusing on fewer tags that are self-evident in their meaning and use, it is possible that this effort could be used to model the proper usage of the tags, making a more direct difference while there’s still time? Unless the audience of this effort is expert users, I’d suggest steering towards simplicity and ease of adoption — and being mindful that typing out a complicated machine-friendly syntax might be the last thing on someone’s mind who’s trying to find or offer help in such a disaster.

Yes friends, I’m turning 29 and I’ve decided to go work for The Man.

In all actuality, I’ve been mulling over such a move for some time, considering a number of compelling opportunities for my next step. After reviewing my options — in light of the progress I’ve made so far and my familiarity and existing relationships with the new team at Google that I’ll be working with — I came to the conclusion that Google offers me the best possible opportunity to continue my work in an environment and culture that is compatible with my outlook, goals, and work habits.

I was trained as a designer, but I’ve been involved with the tech scene since I arrived in Silicon Valley just over five years ago. In some ways, technology has reshaped the way I approach and solve problems — forcing me to think in terms of adoption strategies first, rather than always trying to find the simplest, cleanest design, because of the disadvantaged position I occupied as a non-coder. I can see the consequences of these effects on my approaches first to OAuth, and then to Activity Streams, as well as with OpenID, with positive and negative results. In some ways I’ve had to temper my designer training and put technology first in order to grow an audience. But now I’m ready for new challenges that will expand my ideas and tactics, force me to attack problems from new perspectives, and dip into my design thinking repertoire to operate at a whole new level.

Though I consistently aim high, I want more success in turning my ideas into tangible outcomes, and in doing so, prove the power that I see in open, interoperable standards that can make the web a richer and more intricately spun space.

In some ways, I’m still just getting started with my work.  In joining Google, I see the chance to have a greater impact than I might otherwise on my own. That said, I won’t lose track of what intrinsically motivates me — that I’ve always been about spreading the benefits of the web by creating technology that  fosters innovation and choice. And there’s where I see alignment with what I’ve been doing, and what Google needs to succeed. In fact, my new title at Google? The same one I independently gave myself a year ago: “Open Web Advocate”.

In this role, I’ll still be an active community board member of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations; I hope to help push the Activity Streams project forward with a 1.0 release of the spec soon. And I’m still hopeful about the future of my our semi-neglected and half dormant Diso Project! I’ll also soon be publishing the results of my collaboration with Mozilla Labs, which will provide some insight into what social networking in the browser might look like, and how OpenID Connect might play a role in it.

For good measure, I should also point out that my good friend and colleague Joseph Smarr also made a similar decision recently  — unbeknownst to me at the time! —  and announced that he’ll be joining Google later this month as well.

So, net-net, I’m stoked to be joining The Man Google, and very thankful to have had as much support from the many, many people with whom I’ve connected through the synapses of the social web over these past several years. This is of course a very happy birthday present for me, and I’m eagerly anticipating what’s next for the open social web in 2010…! This can all still be made better. Ready? Begin.

Feel free to leave a comment here, or get in touch via email.

Update: here’s the latest theSocialWeb.tv episode where I make my announcement:

I’ve been thinking about how we make OpenID both easier and sexier for quite a while now. As frustrating as the answer may be to technologists, the problem is not necessarily one that can be solved with more technology. Instead, at some point, you have to move beyond the original constituents of a solution and start to package up the thing in a way that is less alienating, and less “insider baseball”.

“OpenID Connect”, therefore, is what I’m starting to use in casual conversation as my answer to Twitter and Facebook Connect.

It’s really creative, I know. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Seriously though, from a marketing perspective — it’s what I want the OpenID Foundation (and our new board) to offer the world in 2010. Essentially I think it’s time we ditched the “Open Stack” concept and put something out there that can stand up in conversation alongside the likes of Facebook Connect, in all its rich and specific expressiveness.

At some point, I want OpenID Connect to be what Facebook and Google and others implement that becomes the interoperable identity interchange protocol for the social web. But we’re not quite there yet, though all the technology is on the verge of being… ready.

Speaking of, from a technical perspective — I’m really just talking about repackaging OpenID as a profile of OAuth WRAP (credit: Recordon). It would provide relying parties with profile data, relationships, access to content, and activity streams — based on Recordon’s anatomy of connect.

Unlike the current incarnation, it would work in real-time, distributed systems, on the desktop as well as in mobile devices. Huzzah!

We’re not even that far away from such a solution. Since OpenID really just bootstraps identity — we need a way to provide relying parties with all the other stuff they’ve come to expect from the Twitter and Facebook Connect APIs… and that’s where the “connect” in “OpenID Connect” comes in.

So, to summarize:

• for the non-tech, uninitiated audiences: OpenID Connect is a technology that lets you use an account that you already have to sign up, sign in, and bring your profile, contacts, data, and activities with you to any compatible site on the web.
• for techies: OpenID Connect is OpenID rewritten on top of OAuth WRAP using service discovery to advertise Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and any other well known API endpoints, and a means to automatically bootstrap consumer registration and token issuance.

I suppose that realization was just as potent as the high school realization that I’d be entering college one year before 2000, and that a decade after that (i.e. this year), we’d supposedly have made contact with aliens by now.

In any case, it got me thinking that, in all likelihood, I’m going to make it to 2050. I’ll be 69 years old, and imagine by then, will have much more perspective, knowledge, and wisdom than I have now.

Still though, life never ceases to amaze (as the expression goes) and so I’m curious what you think: picture yourself waking up 40 years from now and saying to yourself, “Y’know, in 2050, I never would have imagined…” and then complete the sentence.

You can either leave your response here, or tweet it with the tag #in2050.

First: Stowe Boyd deserves credit for Microsyntax. I just pitched in in the beginning and use the wiki to document some ideas I’ve had. I didn’t start the project, though I do think it’s a useful convening spot.

As well, Stowe and I have different ideas about microsyntax, and it’s worth taking the time to grok his perspective.

Second: when I wrote my post on what are now called slashtags, I was just documenting what I was doing… not necessarily intending to tell other people what to do. Hey, if people copied me, I figured, they might as well “get” what I was up to. Hence my blog post.

As with hashtags, I just started using them and didn’t wait for anyone to agree with me! Now, I did look at what people were doing, or what conventions already existed, which is a point that Karl made:

My suggestion to anyone looking to build tools that tease out meaning from the conversation that is happening on twitter should look carefully at the communication and social norms that are emerging and leverage that.

And that Aral also makes:

There is no centralized authority that approves Twitterformat proposals – Twitterformats are contributed and implemented by the community and they live or die based on whether Twitter client developers adopt them or not.

When I originally proposed hashtags, they imitated IRC, Jaiku, Delicious, and Flickr. In that way, they were derived and codified rather than invented — though I suppose they were somewhat novel, as no one had really been thinking about “Twitter Typography” in 2007.

As with slashtags, the whole point is to make a tweet more readable — or, as I like to say, to “separate the meta from the meat“. Each slashtag, thus, doesn’t need its own slash, and you can daisy-chain them together:

[tweet content] /cc @username1 via @username2

The slash, therefore, is a way of saying: “hey, here’s some meta data for this post — you can ignore it if you want — the good stuff is to the left!”.

So, even though it may not seem like it at first, all these formats that I’ve proposed and use are really intended for people first, and machines second (something I learned from microformats). I don’t think that people will use them if they’re not fairly easy to use, remember, and aren’t more convenient than what they’re doing already. And by “convenient”, I mean that they make it easy to communicate over a constrained channel clearer and more effectively than not using them.

Just as typographic markup (i.e. punctuation like periods, exclamation points, commas, semi-colons) makes prose more readable, slashtags and hashtags are designed to make communicating over Twitter better and more efficiently reflect the intentional message of the author. If the format succeeds at enhancing expression, then they will be adopted; if not, they will likely wither on the vine.

Perhaps it’s useful to remember that my background is in communication design and typography, rather than format or data design. If you think about from that perspective, hashtags and slashtags will probably make a lot more sense!