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me trim key fj_comixology 10 comments on comixology and the future of connected commerce google profiles namespace lock in social search i d originally intended to respond to joshua schacter s post about url shorteners and how they re merely the tip of the data iceberg but since i missed that debate google has fortuitously plied me with an even better example by releasing custom profile urls today my point is to reiterate one of tim o reilly s ever prescient admonishments about web 2 0 lock in can be achieved through owning a namespace in full 5 chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data whether through increasing returns from user generated data ebay amazon reviews audioscrobbler info in last fm email im phone traffic data as soon as someone who owns a lot of that data figures out that s how to use it to enable social networking apps gps and other location data through owning a namespace gracenote cddb network solutions or through proprietary file formats microsoft office itunes data is the intel inside i ll note that the process of getting advantage from data isn t necessary a case of companies being evil it s a natural outcome of network effects applied to user contribution being first or best you will attract the most users and if your application truly harnesses network effects to get better the more people use it you will eventually build barriers to entry based purely on the difficulty of building another such database from the ground up when there s already so much value somewhere else this is why no one has yet succeeded in displacing ebay once someone is at critical mass it s really hard to get people to try something else even if the software is better the question of don t be evil will come up when it s clear that someone who has amassed this kind of market position has to decide what to do with it and whether or not they stay open at that point consider two things google s mission is to organize the world s information and make it universally accessible and useful facebook s mission is to make it easier for people to share and connect owning the people namespace will determine whether people see the web through google s technicolor glasses or facebook s more nuanced and monochrome blue hues curiously it has been correctly argued that google doesn t get social a criticism that i generally support and yet with their move to more convenient profile urls that point to profiles that aggregate content from across the web beating facebook to the punch a bigger albeit incomplete picture begins to emerge when i blogged that my name is not a url i wasn t so much arguing against vanity or custom profile urls but instead making the point that such things really should go away over time from a usability perspective let me put it this way at one point if you weren t in the yellow pages you basically didn t exist now imagine there being several competitors to the yellow pages the red green and blue pages each maintaining overlapping but incomplete listings of people you re going to want to use the one that has the most complete exhaustive and easy to use list of names right and i bet beyond that if one of them was able to make the people that you know and actually care about more accessible to you you d pick that one over all the others and this is where owning and getting people to live in a namespace begins to reveal its significance so it s telling thing to look at google and facebook s respective approaches to their people search engines and indexes indeed having a readily accessible index of living persons structured by their connections to one another will become a necessary precondition to getting social search right see aardvark for a related approach which connects to the facebook and im portions of your social graph to facilitate question answering as social search and living through your social graph becomes the norm i e with increasing reliance on social filtering google and facebook s ability to create compelling experiences on top of data about you and who you know will come to define and differentiate them to date google s profile search has been rather unloved and passed over but with the new more convenient profile urls and the location of profile search at google com profiles i suspect that google is finally getting serious about social compare facebook and google s search results for my buddy dave morin facebook logged out facebook logged in google results there s no difference between logged in and logged out views notice the difference see how much better facebook s search is because it knows which dave morin is my friend now consider the profile result when you click through dave s facebook profile logged out facebook s logged in profile view is as you d expect a typical facebook profile with stream and wall now here s the clincher take a look at google s profile for dave google is able to provide a much richer and simpler profile that s much more accessible without requiring any kind of sign in because they ve radically simplified their privacy model on this page show what you want and nothing more indeed google s made it easier for people to be open at least with static information than facebook so much for facebook s claim to openness of course default google profiles are pretty sparse but this is just the beginning bonus both facebook and google public profiles support the hcard microformat and the point is where will you build your online identity under whose namespace do you want to exist personally i choose my own clearly the battle for the future of the social web is heating up in subtle but significant ways and google s move today shouldn t be thought of anything less than the opening salvo in moving the battle back to its turf search author chris messina posted on apr 15th categories citizen centric web digital identity life online microformats technology tags facebook google google profiles 18 comments on google profiles namespace lock in social search portable profiles preferences on the citizen centric web let me state the problem plainly in order to provide better service it helps to know more about your customer so that you can more effectively anticipate and meet her needs but pray tell how do you learn about or solicit such information over the course of your first interaction moreover how do you go about learning as much as you can as quickly as you can without making the request itself burdensome and off putting well as obvious as it seems the answer is to let her tell you the less obvious thing is how and that s where user centric or citizen centric technologies offer the most promise it s like this if you let someone use an account or id that they already use regularly elsewhere you will save them the hassle of having to create yet another account that works solely with your service following on that an account that is reusable is more valuable and its value can be further increased by attaching certain types of profile attributes to it that are commonly requested the more common it becomes to reuse an account the more people will expect this convenience during new sign up experiences ideally to the point of knowing how to ask for support for their preferred sign in mechanism from the services that they use presuming that service providers desire for profile information and preferences will not decrease it will become an added byproduct of user centric authentication to be able to import such data from identity providers as it is available as customers realize the convenience of portable profile and preference data savvy identity providers will make it easier to store and express a wider array of this data and will subsequently work with relying parties to develop interoperable sign up flows and on ramps see google and plaxo for this to work the individual must be motivated to manage her profile information and preferences which shouldn t be hard as her data becomes increasingly reusable sort once reuse everywhere additionally organizing maintaining and accruing this information becomes less onerous when it s all in one place or conveniently accessible through one central customer picked source as opposed to sharded across many accounts and unaffiliated services you can get similar functionality with form filling software like 1password except in the model i m describing the data travels with you beyond the browser and off the desktop to wherever you need it because it is stored in the cloud as it becomes easier to store and share this information i think more people will do this as a happenstance of using more social software and will become acclimated to providing their friends and service providers with varying degrees of access to increasing amounts of personally describing data companies that jump on this and make it easier for people to manage their profile and preference data will benefit having access to more accurate timely and better maintained information leading to more personalized user experiences and accelerating the path to satisfaction companies that do get this right will benefit from what is emerging as a new social contract as a citizen of the web if you let me manage my relationship with you and make it easy for me to do so giving me the choice of how and where i store my profile and preference data i ll be more likely more willing and more able to share it with you in an ongoing fashion increasingly as you use it to improve my experiences with you author chris messina posted on apr 8th categories citizen centric web digital identity life online usability tags marketing vrm 10 comments on portable profiles preferences on the citizen centric web does openid need to be hard prompted by posts by randy reddig and tony stubblebine and a conversation with elliott kember i wanted to address yet again the big fat stinking elephant in the room openid usability and the paradox of choice elliott proposed a pretty clear picture of what he thinks openid should look like on stackoverflow given the relative value of each provider to him compare that to how it actually looks today i m with him i get it we re at this crossroads where it really doesn t matter which openid provider you use because while it might save you the hassle of creating yet another password there s little else that you can do with an openid beyond that and if you ve already got more than one openid not much exists to help you decide which openid provider you should use many people tell me i hate openid i ve got like 15 openids and i never know which one to use so on the one hand we ve done a poor job of building out the value of using an openid and on the other have failed to explain what it means to have an openid or several or how to go about deciding which one to use and why hat tip to openid explained for taking a crack at it meanwhile there s a tension between the convenience of having one reusable and durable identity against the desire to express many aspects of one s identity with many separate ids resulting in complex user interfaces fortunately openid as a technology can serve both needs but communicating and demonstrating that effectively has remained a challenge putting openid in context for my part i ve used the metaphor of credit cards to try to explain openid online identity is moving from its cash and check era to the era of credit cards before the advent of charge cards payment systems were decentralized inefficient cumbersome and prone to fraud there were a number of different non interoperable payment mechanisms that took 30 years to get straightened out indeed the credit card system that we take for granted today so much so that airlines have moved to relying on them as the sole form of in flight payment only came about in the late 90s a good 70 years after western union began issuing the first credit cards imagine openid taking 70 years to get mass adoption taking this metaphor at face value it s clear that we re in the neonatal stages of the build out of the openid network and still have much work ahead of us fortunately adoption cycles have also accelerated i don t have the actual numbers off hand but i can tell you that it took longer than four years to get the first 500 million credit card users as with credit cards you can have as many openids as you like for different purposes i presume that common divisions will fall along work personal and affinity lines and of course there are cases i ve not even considered yet to close out this metaphor picking an identity provider should be like picking a bank or credit card provider as a fourth party service provider that advocates for your interest since you re their customer today to elliott s point there are not many obvious differences between providers over time i expect this to change and for this relationship to become core to one s experience on and enjoyment of the web instead of agreeing to terms of service that disclaim all responsibility to you the customer i hope that competition in the identity space will lead providers to actually take responsibility for their services charging good money for doing so if your account gets hacked no problem your identity provider can put back the pieces and make things right again you could even take out online identity insurance in case your identity is ever stolen so you can always get back to your life and recover your data without the hassle and interruption when it happens today which credit card company would you give your business to the one that automatically credits back false charges on your account and investigates them or the one that harasses you when you travel and presumes the worst of you i know which one i d pick and i d apply the same decision heuristics to whoever provides my online identity the openid nascar apart from confusion over having multiple openids the user interface that has resulted from having many top tier providers in the space also causes confusion elliott s criticism of the stackoverflow openid interface is really aimed at the noise of the brand logos displayed as buttons intended to help people sign in using an account they already have this kind of interface is what daniel burka refers to as the openid nascar because all the logos look like a nascar racecar covered with brand stickers all jockeying for your attention he s got a point since he s logging in with his google account he really only wants a google button for all he cares it could look like this and the result would be the same thing indeed it is this kind of lack of choice that makes facebook connect so seductively compelling and dangerous it s a frigging button you can t mistake it if you argued that reducing choice increases the likelihood that the user will get it right and be able to sign in to your site you d be correct but that kind of restriction of freedom of choice impairs healthy competition in the marketplace and lack of competition is ...