Money For Nothing

I really think one of the fun things about the current state of the evolving web “platform” is how its a real life soap opera and you just never know how its going to twist and turn.

Right now, a lot of people are all hacking at said platform and all sorts of interesting and innovative things are happening. And its all good. Really, really, good. I think its interesting to take a look at where this Web Platform has been, what its done recently, and where it might go in terms of linked data and data portability. What about this so called “open social graph“? How does it change things? And isnt it simply a subset of a larger thing, the Giant Global Graph?

Groups like FOAF and XFN have been around for quite a while now, and they have done some really wonderful things in terms of being first movers in the world of linked friends list, etc. They have had some early adoption, but it seems like a lot of people “like” the concept of something like FOAF, yet they don’t know quite what to do with it even if their side expose its data in the FOAF format. RDF is another technology that is very powerful but seems to leave the general hacker at a loss in terms of “what exactly IS relational algebra and what am I going to do with this inferencing stuff?“.

With floe.tv we really want to link people’s data together in such a way that we would make the user experience feel natural for a first time user;

No signup, just accept openID. Discover their friends via FOAF. Use RDF and linked data to discover a user’s data stores so they dont have to re-upload anything.

We really want to like these technologies and employ them, well, everywhere, and be one of the so-called “semantic web applications”. Problem is, we quickly found out that there were some “glue” pieces missing when we tried to connect the dots in terms of making the user experience “turnkey” and seamless.

Around November of 2007, we had been hacking on some ways to link data up between sites beyond the normal “public API / SOAP / json” type of deal, and began to look at what else was going on in the openID world. We sorta wrote up a manifesto (http://cowbell.floe.tv/WRFS_11_20_2007.html) that was just a running thought-line of, well, where we thought linked web data could and would go. We started up with:

We are proposing a stack of abstraction layers that are intended to facilitate the concept of data portability, of open web data. Each layer is an abstraction of functionality based on recurring computer science patterns on how to model a system. In this document we take a look at current practices for data on the web, setup an argument for open web data, look into various scenarios where this model could come to fruition, and then look at practical considerations from a business standpoint as to the economics of open web data.

Since that point, a lot of things have happened. Scoble-gate. Dataportability becoming a media issue. Dataportability trying to establish an identity. Lots and lots of projects taking a hard look on how to make their data interoperable and portable (plone, drupal, DiSo). Lots of groups coming out of the wood works and screaming “we’ve been working on this already, and you should do it OUR way!”.

I think the funny thing about it all is that I think its ok that we have multiple lines of “research”, trying them all, seeing what works, and allowing the most fit propagate to the next generation. Thats how these sort of things fall out over time, and I’d say we’ll discover some pretty interesting things about where our current Web Platform is, and what else might be possible with it. Just because one group has a certain solution they like or have put a lot of work into doesn’t automatically make it the most fit for how the web has evolved.

So that leads me to where I think we are at now, and I think we’re at the end of the desktop era on the cusp of the linked data era. Some call it “The Cloud”, but really, I think The Cloud is really just The Internet itself, with all of these highly decentralized web apps, services, and agents creating one single Internet OS. I think its going to share some very core concepts with a traditional OS, but at the same time, it will be its own animal and have its own stripes. When we took a look at the Internet as a single logical OS, we said “well, then all of the storage is a single disk, right?” — and that was the basic premise of our concept of the WRFS stack, and that was what prompted our involvement in the early version of what became the Data Portability Workgroup.

The Data Portability Workgroup is a topic all its own, really. Some say its got no direction, no purpose, and is simply spinning its wheels. Others trump up its importance in giving a voice to hot topic that will only get hotter as the Web as a Platform evolves. The truth is probably somewhere in between. I’ve discussed a lot in this group, met a lot people, and learned a lot. I guess my biggest hope is that it can become a catalyst for work to emerge even if none of the concepts it promotes ever get widely adopted. And I really think it can do that.

Right now I feel like a mechanism for auto discovery of a user’s data is the biggest technical hurdle for wide spread adoption of linked and portable data. If you cannot find it at runtime, you cannot use it. And asking the user to signup for yet another service and re-enter all of their information yet again is simply, well, not going to scale well. We’re beginning to formulate some ways to do auto discovery, and we’re working with multiple groups on a way to get it done in some standardized way.

That’s where ‘m focusing my energies right now in the open source world, and I’m hoping that between our project, DiSo, Plone, and other entities in the Data Portability Workgroup, that we will find a common synergy in term of sharing and discovering data. If we can link our data together and create a “data-flotilla”, so-to-speak, where the sum of our data is greater than its parts, then I believe we may find some others with the same common interest willing to share their data as well.

I really think these small changes will come from the startups at the tip of the long tail, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Which brings me to the title of my first blog post, “Where do you think you’re going?” — and the answer is we think we’re heading towards some rendition of The Web as an OS, as a single FileSystem, as a Cloud, as an open platform, as a relational semantic something or other. I think its going to be a little of all of those things, and floe.tv is our project that we are experimenting with to see what works and what doesn’t. This blog is the sounding board for our adventures with floe.tv, as well as other tech (mis-) adventures.