Gearing up the distributed, cached web

August 25th, 2008 Mark Szpakowski

Google Gears, SyncML, or something like it, is a huge winner. Why? It enables a web where information is cached wherever it is used. As you’re using a web page / visiting a node, you can choose to have the information there cached onto whatever client you happen to be using. If access to the web is interrupted, you can keep working locally, and then re-synch with the web when back online. The stuff on your client is up-to-date with the web whenever you use it online. 

Google Gears is currently available for Google Documents (as well as Reader and soon Mail and Calendar).

Overall, with such caching the web is asynchronously up-to-date. If you haven’t used a client for a while, that node’s cache gets old. But use it, and it’s back in synch.

Specifically, wherever you are the web synchronizes with you, just in time.

Overall again, this is very efficient. Unlike an application, which gets installed on the client just-in-case, your web cache (which includes your browser and its extensions) gets installed and updated when-needed, where-needed. 

Your local machine backs up to the web, and the web updates your local machine.

This could be very robust, and also feels a lot closer to something living.

As Buckaroo Banzai would have said, wherever you are, there’s the web.

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iPhone Remote and iUbiquity

July 29th, 2008 Mark Szpakowski

Apple’s Remote iPhone app is a true jewel: it does one thing really really well. In my case, I have an iMac upstairs in my home office, wirelessly connected over AirTunes to my downstairs speakers. Now I can be in the kitchen and, with the Remote iPhone app, see all the songs and podcasts on my iMac, including cover art, and select the piece I want to play, as well as setting the volume for it. Simple, brilliant, just right.

It does have one gotcha – you have to “pair” it with your iTunes library so it knows which library to connect to over WiFI, and to do that you have to be tethered (by USB cable) to its Mac (or PC). This is something the app does not make clear – it says to go to iTunes and find your iPhone listed under Devices: well, Devices doesn’t appear if the iPhone is not cabled to the machine, and, being in a wireless mindset, you may not expect to have to physically connect. Yeah, I know, magical thinking. But, design is also how to get it working.

But there’s a much bigger implication here. We’re entering a world where the desktop is disappearing, to be replaced with computing devices everywhere (ubiquitous computing), whether you can see them or not. The handheld device, the one that you carry with you or is part of you, has a huge role to play here: as the universal controller for all the devices in your immediate context. As you walk into a space, you should be able to have all the computing devices there adjust themselves to you, and be driven by you, so that you can make use of the limitless computing, communicating, and visualizing power they offer. Every room can be your situation/war room. And the device to bind them all? It’s the one you have on you. The iPhone is the first sign of that. 

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OpenID slays password antipatterns!

July 6th, 2008 Mark Szpakowski

Evan Prodromou’s open source Twitter-like site identi.ca supports OpenID for logging in. This basically means that if you have set up an OpenID with an OpenID Identity Provider, and you want to sign in to a site that supports OpenID login, that site sends you back to your Identity Provider site to authenticate with your password, waits for your Identity Provider’s secure handshake verifying that you really do own that OpenID, and then lets you in. The key: your Identity Provider is the only site where you enter the password for your ID. This is a huge win, and avoids some evil anti-patterns. A bonus is that you can use that same OpenID with multiple sites, and none of them needs to know your password. This also means that Single Sign On is really easy.

Here’s a walk-through of how OpenID login works on identi.ca (the process is similar on any site that allows logging in using an OpenID). First, the site gives you the option of using a conventional username/password Login, or of using an OpenID login:

Since I’m already registered on identi.ca with an OpenID, I choose that option, and am asked to enter my OpenID. In my case I’m using the iNames form of OpenID (=mark.szpakowski), which I type into the form.

Note that there is no password field!

When I click the Login button, I am taken to my Identity Provider, 2idi.com. That is the only site to which I ever present my password!

I enter my password there (if I need to – if I’d previously authenticated here, and my session here was still alive for my current browser, 2idi would not need this step to know who I am!), and then 2idi and identi.ca perform some handshaking in the background which assures identi.ca that I am indeed =mark.szpakowski, and identi.ca logs me in.

Why is this important? Well, consider the hellotxt site, which offers to aggregate and display status updates from any site I belong to. However, to do this it asks me to login to each of those sites, using the Username and Password for each of those sites. For example, for the Brightkite site:

This is scary! As Earle Martin says, “hello.txt is also full of password antipattern. I don’t think so…”. Do I really want to enter all my usernames/passwords for all the sites I belong to on some other site’s page?

If my sites supported OpenID, this could be deftly avoided: I simply enter the OpenID I use for each site, but I only type in my password on my trusted OpenID provider site. And in fact after the first time I do so, I don’t need to re-authenticate with my password as long as I don’t close down my browser session.

The preceding has been a public service announcement….

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Friend Connect Enables Inter-Site Wormholes and Creates Life!

May 15th, 2008 admin

The OpenSocial blog has a good summary of  Google’s recently announced Friend Connect in the context of OpenSocial:

… up until now, becoming a container – adding new social applications for your users – has meant having to provide your own source of personal and social information. By using securely authenticated APIs from existing social sites, Friend Connect means any website can host OpenSocial apps. 

In the future, Friend Connect will call the RESTful API for containers that support OpenSocial v0.8, helping their users share their web-wide experiences with each other on their favorite social site.

Friend Connect uses three open standards to connect to other websites. It uses OpenID for identity and logging in, it uses OAuth to authorize access to friend and profile data on existing sites that host it, and it uses OpenSocial to embed the applications within your site.

Abstractioneer puts it like this: 

In a nutshell, the OpenSocial RESTful API is a catalyst that enables participation in a much larger and more complex ecosystem.

What are the implications of this?

I think it punches wormholes to connect previously isolated sites into a network. That network is highly mediated by social identities and by contracts and permissions for social graph nodes, independent of the silos hosting such nodes. And it allows embedding of socially created artifacts into arbitrary hosts. 

Such embedded social graph node representations can be said to be transcluded, so that their distributions across the network give it some sense of life.

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Money, Scarcity, Interest, and the Web of Wealth

April 24th, 2008 admin

Bernard Lietaer and Stephen Belgin have a fascinating article, In Whose Interest? in the latest issue of Fieldnotes. They examine the nature of interest:

According to Stephen Zarlenga, Director of the American Monetary Institute, “Loans were made in seed grains, animals, and tools to farmers. Since one grain of seed could generate a plant with over 100 new grain seeds, after the harvest farmers could easily repay the grain with ‘interest’ in grain.” However, what will an ounce of silver give rise to? Once interest was applied to money, debate and confusion arose that has continued to this very day. One of the central issues of this debate was how much interest should be applied.

Two observations arise from this. First, the conventional interest meme values scarcity: when money enters the system, there is only so much of it, and the interest due on repayment of the money needs to come from the existing money pool, which means that it becomes scarcer in one part so that it can be more plentiful in another. A graph of distribution of net interest transfers across ten income categories in Germany makes this visible.

There’s a net transfer of interest from the poor and middle classes to the wealthiest income brackets, and “This transfer of wealth occurs independently of the cleverness or industriousness of the participants—a classical argument presented to justify differences in income.”

Elsewhere Lietaer has noted that money is not value neutral – it has profound effects on society. The flip side of that is that money has enormous leverage for social change – but this is rarely understood or taken advantage of.

The second observation is that on the web, giving or sharing information does not remove it from the giver. Tina Turner once said that she did not like computer music tools because all computers are good at is copying. How profoundly true! So an item on the web is like that seed that can give rise to more seeds, and not just not disappear but, to the extent that it stays connected to its children, be enriched by the info ecosystem, web mycelium, that is generated. This is close to Buckminster Fuller’s definition of wealth as forward days of survival. I don’t fully grok this, but re-visioning and re-implementing money’s mediation of wealth seems to be part of our exploration of web society.

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Facebook App Spam

April 9th, 2008 admin

This is gonna devalue the Facebook, and particularly the Facebook apps, experience.

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Thoughts on Twitter

April 2nd, 2008 admin

With Twitter, the starting point is that you can write. Posting is as short and simple as it can possibly get.

After that you read (follow), and after that, with sufficient density of your twittersphere, you interact, and eventually experience interacting twitterspheres. This is the reverse of how the web has actually evolved. Tim Berners-Lee’s intention was that it be a two-way, or multi-way, medium, but in fact it quickly devolved to a publishing medium, and is only now returning to becoming truly two-way (and so it’s being called Web 2.0).

With Twitter every thought is a node, an addressable information resource capable of being richly annotated. This has the highest potential yet to create true web-mycelium – not just presence but enriching presence. Because each tweet is a node, harvesting is possible, which is what we’re seeing with the growth of Twitter utilities of all kinds.

Very exciting – these are the good old days!

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Weblogging as well as twittering

April 1st, 2008 admin

This is my fourth weblog. Its predecessors, in chron order, are

• memerising
• This Dew-Drop Bardo
• schmoozy szpace

Part of the experiment is to see how twitters co-exist with blog entries. I can also post items to Facebook, but that’s still a walled garden. Ditto for Twine (although it may make its public twines world-public this summer!) which with its semantic smarts has very interesting potential. Note once, be available everywhere.

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