Open identity systems: what will succeed?
Dave discusses the challenges of open identity systems, noting that while many systems allow the use of open IDs, few actually accept them. He suggests this is due to the incentives for system operators to control user identities and data, as this is how they generate value. OpenID and similar approaches are unlikely to gain widespread adoption, he says, as dominant tech companies like Google and Facebook have little incentive to support open standards that could reduce their control. Instead, he believes a more lightweight, user-driven approach like Twitter may have a better chance of succeeding, as it allows for open development of client applications without requiring user migration from existing platforms.
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Hey Dave Winer here. It’s um,
what is it the 18th of August?
2007 you know, it’s been a
while since I did a podcast and
I thought hmm. Maybe today’s a
good day to do one
lots of thoughts on my mind
been quite interesting week
and
They don’t want to talk about
first was
I’d ID systems. Oh, there goes
Skype. Hold on. See somebody I
’m waiting for a call
Maybe it’s not the best time.
Well, I’m waiting for a call from somebody. So if the call comes in Well, I think I’m gonna have to turn this off, but anyway, open ID systems and there was an interesting piece posted by Brad Fitzpatrick who was formerly a guy working on live journal at Six Part and then he’s now taken a job at Google and His one of his claims to fame is having done the initial work on open ID I think I think open ID was first supported in live journal and it’s spread pretty far from there But then there’s a big caveat on that it is while there are lots of systems that will allow you to Use open ID meaning that they ’ll your ID on their system is an open ID There aren’t that many systems that will accept an open ID in other words and this is very consistent with the sort of selfish interests of software or system operators is they want to host your information and because that’s That’s how they get value. That ’s how they get Whether they actually get dollar value from it. That’s how dollar value is assessed in the technology world So, you know, it’s it’s a function of how many users you control I think is the way they look at it and then they you know when they’re praising the value they look at well how easy is it for you to sell stuff to them and Then how high are the switching costs for the user? So if they’re if you’re in a position to sell them something very valuable Meaning they’ll pay you a lot of money for it and the switching costs are quite high and You’ve got a lot of users then You’re worth a lot of money if you just have a lot of users, but you can’t sell people anything That’s like Facebook your value is still very high their value, you know, and nobody really knows but it’s in the billions of dollars That’s for sure. I think they ’ve turned down offers in the billions of dollars. So there’s a disincentive real strong economic disincent ive for a system operator to Accept somebody else’s ID as an ID on their system unless they think there’s a way that they can divert you to having an ID on their System and fundamentally there ’s so much invested in the system working the way it works now That it’s going to be hard to get wholesale change In how it works because it’s going to involve coming up with a new way of appraising these service operators and And and if you’re the management of a company whose value is in the billions of dollars And you start doing things that make the value go way down, you know, what’s going to happen? You’re gonna get fired So there’s limits about what these guys can do because they know that they will get fired And from the stockholders point of view, it’s makes perfect sense that they would be fired if they did something that Decreased radically decrease the value of their stock then they get fired So while Google is supporting Brad’s work because you just got a job at Google and he’s writing this paper and everybody Is looking at it and they’re all thinking about it because well because there’s it’s got a really cute title and but No real new information or I no real new ideas in there I don’t see them if they’re there and a nice illustration But I think the real reason why people are paying attention to this because he works for Google and because people think ah well This must be the way Google is going to enter the Social Network world. Well, I wouldn’t be so sure about that A company Google size can afford to hire a lot of Brad Fitzpatrick’s and They can try out a lot of different ideas and they could even try some ideas out I’m sure they’re not thinking this deviously, but Sometimes net effect has that effect anyway enough Godboy got to put the preambles out here, but they could be just thinking well Let’s just get all the all of our competitors thinking about The Google is going to go this route and in fact they’re gonna go on another route don’t forget the Google has a fair number of users that are already on a social network called Google I Mean there are lots of ways for Google readers you Google users to relate to each other You know, they can send mail to each other gmail very popular mail application They can use the mapping feature and I think there must be some way to relate to it Maybe there isn’t another way to relate to a user through maps Calendar certainly are collaborative. You can do collaboration on calendars and Look around I’m sure you’ll find lots of them, but they certainly have an identity system. They’ve got lots of users there Not as many as Yahoo not because that’s not been their focus their focus Long-term over the years although it’s broadening a lot in the last couple of years Their long-term focus has been searched, of course and while they have cookies out there They don’t have a lot of their users maybe even the vast majority of their users don’t have IDs on the Google network however Don’t forget that Google can acquire companies and Overnight they could have like Friendster for example. I’ve heard that Friendster has half as many users as Facebook does it’s a lot of users How much? How much of Google’s cash would it take to buy Friendster not a whole lot of it and all of a sudden boom They could also buy a LinkedIn.
They’ve got a lot of users I also have this permission that Google’s gonna buy Yahoo It’s it’s kind of it it kind of looks right to me that that you know that that Yahoo Needs to have an exit strategy and Yahoo does not seem very energized For a new direction Yahoo seems to be if they haven ’t arrived at the spot yet. It feels like they’re going to get acquired and it’s And I and if they get acquired it’s got to be Microsoft or Google and I think it’s gonna be Google That’s just a gut feel there But let’s just suppose for the sake of argument they did buy out who then all of a sudden Yahoo now Yahoo has a lot of users with IDs because they’ve had a mail system for ages They made a big deal out of having mail and they’ve got a lot more mail users than Google does So my point being is that Google could quickly catch up in that area They could have lots of IDs and start offering services to those people the question is what services would they offer? And I don’t see Google as being first of all, I don’t see Brad ’s Approach is having a whole lot of chance of working as much as sad to say I don’t see open ID having much of a chance of working because Because that’s not how these things happen you know in the years leading up to The web which I would say the starting year for the web 1992 I Think that’s actually the year that the Tim Berners-Lee did his work and So I think that was the first year if I’m off by a year. It’s then it’s 1991, but I think it was 1992 however for many years up to that point there was a lot of talk in the software industry about hypertext and That goes back to hypercard if you remember that that was 1980 My guess would be 86 on that one So good six years before and then before that there was all the Ted Nelson Writing and not a whole lot of work there and lots of experimental systems and lots of theorizing and conferences and you know Ability stuff and and people worrying about back pointers two-way pointers. How are you going to keep the integrity of the network? And all these kinds of very elaborate issues and how we get let’s make all these different things compatible with each other Saw that in a bigger way in the various networking protocols and OpenDoc The computer industry has a tendency to want to be fair to everybody okay, because what they want is they want the support of every Technology vendor that they can get their support. Maybe not everyone some very often these Consortia are formed to exclude specifically to exclude one vendor. So in the early 90s late 80s and early 90s There were a lot of consortiums Consortia sorry that were formed for the purpose of excluding Microsoft because there was a lot of people who were really scared of Microsoft not so many people scared of Microsoft these days because I’m drifting a little bit the reason why nobody’s scared of Microsoft is because Microsoft doesn’t have the ability to force rim standards down anybody’s throat because Because the new software that people are using isn’t coming from Microsoft anymore it’s coming from Google and Google definitely is a threat there and a very scary entity because They can take control of almost everything. We do with computers nowadays They’re getting close to dominance in almost every area that users care about and Or that where there’s a chance to change things you can’t change the way email works so dominance and email for example means nothing You can’t change the way HTML and HTTP work again Just too many people use different operating systems and in those places. It isn’t even Google it has a say about that That’s more Apple and Microsoft but they could never change it. It’s just as it is unthinkable There’s just too much deployment too many different ways of getting on to those those platforms No one vendor has enough dominance in it to be able to move it and there’s just too way to deploy to even think about it But in all the areas where there’s a movement possible Google is just way way way strong and getting stronger all the time So it’s scary Google would not be the kind of company the only time they would ever come in and present a Swiss army knife approach like what Brad is proposing here is when they’re way behind and they want to catch up That was the kind of tactic that Microsoft used to use all the time You know, they’d come into a market, you know, they had no presence in and Then they would be very into like oh, well, let’s make everything open and fair and then as soon as they reached dominance Surprise surprise. They’re not interested in that anymore. It ’s even nature a classic example that of that was the web and you know they When Netscape was the dominant force and they were out there making nice with everybody talking open standards You know, they were very interested in compatibility and interop and they said all the right things and they invested accordingly They put a lot of money behind there that that those words and they hired a lot of really good people Who were very much committed to those concepts. So the individuals at Microsoft were perfectly genuine about it and sincere Gates on the other hand probably was very cynical about it and said well, you know As soon as we get dominance here We’re just going to move those people onto other projects where they want to quit they can quit if they don’t like what we’re doing But the money stock flowing in that direction as soon as Microsoft as soon as Netscape dissolved and Microsoft just totally took over that aspect of the industry That was the end of their whole push to be open Google is very much the same way and You know, you’d argue that there really is no way they can avoid being that way because they just They are the dominant player now and they’re getting more of that all the time The only thing is is that in this social network area. They are it’s just way Way behind now. They also have orchid which is I’ve been told Actually fairly successful social network. It’s just not very successful in the United States It’s successful in Brazil and in India and in Brazil. It’s apparently it’s market dominating It’s more much more so than in the United States. There’s far More people in Brazil on social networks Then even in the United States where there’s pretty high penetration now Brazil that I’m told That it’s 90% of the people in Brazil I have so hard to believe this that 90% of the people in Brazil have orchid accounts in it They think of orchid as the national address book You know Maybe it’s true. I don’t know but they but they’re not not there and they’re not not Having experience running this those servers are running and presumed they’re running in Oregon or California or somewhere in the United States and people that write the software in the United States and the support people and Whatever, you know that they’re getting experience doing this stuff. It’s not like they’re coming from an absolute stand still in this area but my bet is that you know that What’s gonna happen is gonna be very much like the other Sort of juggernauts that came along when you know go back to I didn’t ever finish the story about hypertext So while the industry was fuss ing around with all these complicated Issues about hypertext when it comes to Berners-Lee and just often his corner Does something that’s really lightweight and low-tech? It’s the kind of thing one guy can do, you know And you know, I made an editor that can generate this stuff Hey, it’s just a plain text editor after all and beautiful beautiful thing really this really stood the test of time and And where and it just blew right by all the problems that the industry was so Sure, it needed to be solved before you could actually deploy into this network and boom. It’s like it’s a juggerna ut it just goes crazy and This is one of the big principles of it is that it was not fair to the legacy there were all kinds of people that had been doing work in hypertext and If they had been going to a conference to try to work out their differences Sorry, but their interests were totally not represented. They were completely blown by Not only were they blown by but but Apple this is something I have first-hand experience with Apple was blown by too because it’s not a whizzy environment They had networking down but all of the great things that were accomplished with making computers easy to use the web wasn’t that and So there were some compromises to be made there and for that reason a lot of people remain on the sidelines in the web For a lot longer than they should have Maintain on the sidelines. They should have gotten right in the middle of it and eventually they knew that they realized they couldn’t fight it And so they you know got on board, but they should have gotten on board earlier. It would have done them well to do that But so they learned that lesson So why would anybody think that it’s so they sort of like let’s be fair to all the legacy which is what Brad is proposing Let’s let’s you know not Look the the whole thing about the let’s do it this way thing is Pardon me, but it’s bullshit.
It isn’t the way it’s going to happen what the way it’s gonna happen It’s gonna be some idiot that nobody’s ever heard of sorry not idiot, but some person people will call it an idiot for sure Often left field a dark horse who happens to develop a system that a lot of people really like and It’ll have a lot of the properties that the web had initially and that anybody can deploy a server if they want to and However, there may be one main server that a lot of people use Again, that would be like WordPress. com, you know WordPress very successful blog ging system doubt if it would have been as successful as it is if the only way you could have created a WordPress site was to go to Matt’s you know WordPress. com site you the fact that you can You know just download the software and install it on one of your machines blogging itself wouldn’t have worked if You had to go to one place to do it the fact that there were lots of ways to do bloying help blogging enormously to gain traction So there’ll be there’ll be a lot of ways of doing it and the way these things connect up Will not in any way address all the problems that people think need to be addressed in order for to work but it will have marvelous ability to scale and and get very complex without being very difficult to operate and it will it’ll inspire users and And it will take advantage of things the users know today that they didn’t know two or three years ago So it won’t seem fair to people who think that users will always fill in the blank you know The assumption three or four years before You know html and htp came out was that users couldn’t set up their own servers well, those protocols were so simple that people could set up their own servers and Partially because they’re so simple and partially because the users got familiar with the networking Technology and so it wasn’t so mysterious anymore. You have to take into account that users are not standing still They’re moving and they’re gaining skills and where they needed their hands held before Five years later. They don’t need their hands held there anymore and software will have opera. There’ll be opportunities and software At one point in time that a few years before weren’t opportunities at all So you have to keep your thinking sort of fluid in that dimension because time does change things things change over time The users don’t stand still just remember that one So I Think that when we finally get a solution to this a lot of us will wake up and realize that the solution has been there for a couple of years and And the users figured it out before we did I think in a lot of cases. That ’s the way it works and If your mind is empty and you ’re not too preoccupied with a lot of other things You may be there with the users and spot it yourself at that moment in time So But it never comes never ever ever comes from the consortium approach people Getting together to settle their differences to work get out so that everybody can be happy That’s never the way new technology layers come on just doesn’t work that way Well, there must be about a billion other things to talk about today. Let me just think for a second. Oh, right So what are some possibilities for this? Well, there are two out there right now that I’m aware of that there may be others that I ’m not aware of But there’s two out there that I am One I’m very familiar with the other one. I’m not so familiar with the one I’m familiar with is Twitter Well, I’m not from so familiar with his Facebook And I just intuitively think that Twitter may be or it or something like Twitter or The open-source version of Twitter should want to merge might be it what you need is a very lightweight very lightweight in the functionality Area in other words it the network Itself should just be a network more or less not anything more than that and it should be very open to people building applications in that network and Twitter certainly qualifies it doesn’t have a lot of functionality and it does have an identity system and its API is just Delightfully simple. It’s very quick to get up an implementation of client interface to Twitter I know I’ve done it myself and it works great Haven’t had to go back and fix things. They don’t break stuff Give them up in a very high grade for the design and for the keeping it stable so far so good Got a lot of users, but nothing like what Facebook has and that ’s that’s the other side now Facebook is not open Like Twitter is but it could be opened. It could be It’s not clear that the users would support it They’re sort of reluctant to Every time they open that thing up We all want them and in the tech industry we talk about it would be great if they opened up But they have a lot of users that wouldn’t go along with them. That’s another part of the bread document that It doesn’t ring true. He talks about people with networks with users that want to join his His effort they got a problem if those users signed up without their information being out there And they’re gonna have to migrate those users and give them the opt-in because it’s gonna freak a lot of them out Find out that their ID is available on other systems when it wasn’t available on other systems before That we saw that freak out happened when they added the news feature to Facebook I think it was a year ago or so maybe a little bit more The users were not happy about it and they pulled back they pulled back from that and now they’re adding it back and and Denise howl was the one that sort of in my world that tuned into the fact that it has the R SS fees means that information that used to be private or restricted access is now not restricted at all and So that’s a change and when that change happens. It’s not so easy for them to make the change so Facebook as a company seems to be They seem to be liking to take risks and gambles and they don ’t feel they have a lot to lose Which is very nice. It’s very refreshing. It’s very welcome However, their users may not be so You know, they they aren’t as rock and roll into rock and roll as the the guys running the place are so There’s gonna be some resistance there That may suggest that either something like Twitter or Twitter itself or open source Twitter May have a better shot at it because it had this openness from day one so every user coming in there knew that Presumably knew that you could go download software that would latch on to Twitter and Would use their identity system and could actually be used instead of their user interface As a result you get a rich set of clients and they support new devices Very quickly because the users take take responsibility for doing that. So That’s why Twitter has an advantage. They don’t have you know, it’s Facebook’s advantages They got a lot of users Facebook’s disadvantages. They got a lot of users those users have to come along with them And they may not want to and it may create an uproar and there ’s confusion and that confusion may stop them from moving so So that’s why I’m excited about Twitter because it seems to have You know sort of a good combination. I’m certainly studying it because even if it ’s not the one The one that eventually galvan izes this market Our activity whatever it turns out to be called Is I think is going to be a lot like Twitter. So that’s why I study it because I want to understand it and it’s a fascinating It’s a fascinating thing. It’s for something so simple. It’s wonderful that it has so many facets to it And again, that was one of the beautiful things about the web It’s also one of the beautiful things about RSS very simple, but yet when it looks different when you look at it from every angle It’s kind of wow. How did that happen, you know? So a lot of more a lot more things going on right now, but I think that that’s a nice little unit You know the identity world in August of 2007 and we’re getting pretty close to To 30 minutes, which is not my normal 40-minute podcast, but you know 30 minutes is kind of nice round amount of time I’m trying to think if there’s some song that I’d love to play for you something that I’m listening to a lot Let me just like get my tunes up here Play some Alice Cooper, maybe Probably not we’ll just leave it at that What did I do? No, we’ll just leave it at that so everybody thank you very much for listening This has been Dave wider and morning coffee notes and August 18th 2007 and See you again real soon. Okay.
Take care. Bye [BLANK_AUDIO]
Well, I’m waiting for a call from somebody. So if the call comes in Well, I think I’m gonna have to turn this off, but anyway, open ID systems and there was an interesting piece posted by Brad Fitzpatrick who was formerly a guy working on live journal at Six Part and then he’s now taken a job at Google and His one of his claims to fame is having done the initial work on open ID I think I think open ID was first supported in live journal and it’s spread pretty far from there But then there’s a big caveat on that it is while there are lots of systems that will allow you to Use open ID meaning that they ’ll your ID on their system is an open ID There aren’t that many systems that will accept an open ID in other words and this is very consistent with the sort of selfish interests of software or system operators is they want to host your information and because that’s That’s how they get value. That ’s how they get Whether they actually get dollar value from it. That’s how dollar value is assessed in the technology world So, you know, it’s it’s a function of how many users you control I think is the way they look at it and then they you know when they’re praising the value they look at well how easy is it for you to sell stuff to them and Then how high are the switching costs for the user? So if they’re if you’re in a position to sell them something very valuable Meaning they’ll pay you a lot of money for it and the switching costs are quite high and You’ve got a lot of users then You’re worth a lot of money if you just have a lot of users, but you can’t sell people anything That’s like Facebook your value is still very high their value, you know, and nobody really knows but it’s in the billions of dollars That’s for sure. I think they ’ve turned down offers in the billions of dollars. So there’s a disincentive real strong economic disincent ive for a system operator to Accept somebody else’s ID as an ID on their system unless they think there’s a way that they can divert you to having an ID on their System and fundamentally there ’s so much invested in the system working the way it works now That it’s going to be hard to get wholesale change In how it works because it’s going to involve coming up with a new way of appraising these service operators and And and if you’re the management of a company whose value is in the billions of dollars And you start doing things that make the value go way down, you know, what’s going to happen? You’re gonna get fired So there’s limits about what these guys can do because they know that they will get fired And from the stockholders point of view, it’s makes perfect sense that they would be fired if they did something that Decreased radically decrease the value of their stock then they get fired So while Google is supporting Brad’s work because you just got a job at Google and he’s writing this paper and everybody Is looking at it and they’re all thinking about it because well because there’s it’s got a really cute title and but No real new information or I no real new ideas in there I don’t see them if they’re there and a nice illustration But I think the real reason why people are paying attention to this because he works for Google and because people think ah well This must be the way Google is going to enter the Social Network world. Well, I wouldn’t be so sure about that A company Google size can afford to hire a lot of Brad Fitzpatrick’s and They can try out a lot of different ideas and they could even try some ideas out I’m sure they’re not thinking this deviously, but Sometimes net effect has that effect anyway enough Godboy got to put the preambles out here, but they could be just thinking well Let’s just get all the all of our competitors thinking about The Google is going to go this route and in fact they’re gonna go on another route don’t forget the Google has a fair number of users that are already on a social network called Google I Mean there are lots of ways for Google readers you Google users to relate to each other You know, they can send mail to each other gmail very popular mail application They can use the mapping feature and I think there must be some way to relate to it Maybe there isn’t another way to relate to a user through maps Calendar certainly are collaborative. You can do collaboration on calendars and Look around I’m sure you’ll find lots of them, but they certainly have an identity system. They’ve got lots of users there Not as many as Yahoo not because that’s not been their focus their focus Long-term over the years although it’s broadening a lot in the last couple of years Their long-term focus has been searched, of course and while they have cookies out there They don’t have a lot of their users maybe even the vast majority of their users don’t have IDs on the Google network however Don’t forget that Google can acquire companies and Overnight they could have like Friendster for example. I’ve heard that Friendster has half as many users as Facebook does it’s a lot of users How much? How much of Google’s cash would it take to buy Friendster not a whole lot of it and all of a sudden boom They could also buy a LinkedIn.
They’ve got a lot of users I also have this permission that Google’s gonna buy Yahoo It’s it’s kind of it it kind of looks right to me that that you know that that Yahoo Needs to have an exit strategy and Yahoo does not seem very energized For a new direction Yahoo seems to be if they haven ’t arrived at the spot yet. It feels like they’re going to get acquired and it’s And I and if they get acquired it’s got to be Microsoft or Google and I think it’s gonna be Google That’s just a gut feel there But let’s just suppose for the sake of argument they did buy out who then all of a sudden Yahoo now Yahoo has a lot of users with IDs because they’ve had a mail system for ages They made a big deal out of having mail and they’ve got a lot more mail users than Google does So my point being is that Google could quickly catch up in that area They could have lots of IDs and start offering services to those people the question is what services would they offer? And I don’t see Google as being first of all, I don’t see Brad ’s Approach is having a whole lot of chance of working as much as sad to say I don’t see open ID having much of a chance of working because Because that’s not how these things happen you know in the years leading up to The web which I would say the starting year for the web 1992 I Think that’s actually the year that the Tim Berners-Lee did his work and So I think that was the first year if I’m off by a year. It’s then it’s 1991, but I think it was 1992 however for many years up to that point there was a lot of talk in the software industry about hypertext and That goes back to hypercard if you remember that that was 1980 My guess would be 86 on that one So good six years before and then before that there was all the Ted Nelson Writing and not a whole lot of work there and lots of experimental systems and lots of theorizing and conferences and you know Ability stuff and and people worrying about back pointers two-way pointers. How are you going to keep the integrity of the network? And all these kinds of very elaborate issues and how we get let’s make all these different things compatible with each other Saw that in a bigger way in the various networking protocols and OpenDoc The computer industry has a tendency to want to be fair to everybody okay, because what they want is they want the support of every Technology vendor that they can get their support. Maybe not everyone some very often these Consortia are formed to exclude specifically to exclude one vendor. So in the early 90s late 80s and early 90s There were a lot of consortiums Consortia sorry that were formed for the purpose of excluding Microsoft because there was a lot of people who were really scared of Microsoft not so many people scared of Microsoft these days because I’m drifting a little bit the reason why nobody’s scared of Microsoft is because Microsoft doesn’t have the ability to force rim standards down anybody’s throat because Because the new software that people are using isn’t coming from Microsoft anymore it’s coming from Google and Google definitely is a threat there and a very scary entity because They can take control of almost everything. We do with computers nowadays They’re getting close to dominance in almost every area that users care about and Or that where there’s a chance to change things you can’t change the way email works so dominance and email for example means nothing You can’t change the way HTML and HTTP work again Just too many people use different operating systems and in those places. It isn’t even Google it has a say about that That’s more Apple and Microsoft but they could never change it. It’s just as it is unthinkable There’s just too much deployment too many different ways of getting on to those those platforms No one vendor has enough dominance in it to be able to move it and there’s just too way to deploy to even think about it But in all the areas where there’s a movement possible Google is just way way way strong and getting stronger all the time So it’s scary Google would not be the kind of company the only time they would ever come in and present a Swiss army knife approach like what Brad is proposing here is when they’re way behind and they want to catch up That was the kind of tactic that Microsoft used to use all the time You know, they’d come into a market, you know, they had no presence in and Then they would be very into like oh, well, let’s make everything open and fair and then as soon as they reached dominance Surprise surprise. They’re not interested in that anymore. It ’s even nature a classic example that of that was the web and you know they When Netscape was the dominant force and they were out there making nice with everybody talking open standards You know, they were very interested in compatibility and interop and they said all the right things and they invested accordingly They put a lot of money behind there that that those words and they hired a lot of really good people Who were very much committed to those concepts. So the individuals at Microsoft were perfectly genuine about it and sincere Gates on the other hand probably was very cynical about it and said well, you know As soon as we get dominance here We’re just going to move those people onto other projects where they want to quit they can quit if they don’t like what we’re doing But the money stock flowing in that direction as soon as Microsoft as soon as Netscape dissolved and Microsoft just totally took over that aspect of the industry That was the end of their whole push to be open Google is very much the same way and You know, you’d argue that there really is no way they can avoid being that way because they just They are the dominant player now and they’re getting more of that all the time The only thing is is that in this social network area. They are it’s just way Way behind now. They also have orchid which is I’ve been told Actually fairly successful social network. It’s just not very successful in the United States It’s successful in Brazil and in India and in Brazil. It’s apparently it’s market dominating It’s more much more so than in the United States. There’s far More people in Brazil on social networks Then even in the United States where there’s pretty high penetration now Brazil that I’m told That it’s 90% of the people in Brazil I have so hard to believe this that 90% of the people in Brazil have orchid accounts in it They think of orchid as the national address book You know Maybe it’s true. I don’t know but they but they’re not not there and they’re not not Having experience running this those servers are running and presumed they’re running in Oregon or California or somewhere in the United States and people that write the software in the United States and the support people and Whatever, you know that they’re getting experience doing this stuff. It’s not like they’re coming from an absolute stand still in this area but my bet is that you know that What’s gonna happen is gonna be very much like the other Sort of juggernauts that came along when you know go back to I didn’t ever finish the story about hypertext So while the industry was fuss ing around with all these complicated Issues about hypertext when it comes to Berners-Lee and just often his corner Does something that’s really lightweight and low-tech? It’s the kind of thing one guy can do, you know And you know, I made an editor that can generate this stuff Hey, it’s just a plain text editor after all and beautiful beautiful thing really this really stood the test of time and And where and it just blew right by all the problems that the industry was so Sure, it needed to be solved before you could actually deploy into this network and boom. It’s like it’s a juggerna ut it just goes crazy and This is one of the big principles of it is that it was not fair to the legacy there were all kinds of people that had been doing work in hypertext and If they had been going to a conference to try to work out their differences Sorry, but their interests were totally not represented. They were completely blown by Not only were they blown by but but Apple this is something I have first-hand experience with Apple was blown by too because it’s not a whizzy environment They had networking down but all of the great things that were accomplished with making computers easy to use the web wasn’t that and So there were some compromises to be made there and for that reason a lot of people remain on the sidelines in the web For a lot longer than they should have Maintain on the sidelines. They should have gotten right in the middle of it and eventually they knew that they realized they couldn’t fight it And so they you know got on board, but they should have gotten on board earlier. It would have done them well to do that But so they learned that lesson So why would anybody think that it’s so they sort of like let’s be fair to all the legacy which is what Brad is proposing Let’s let’s you know not Look the the whole thing about the let’s do it this way thing is Pardon me, but it’s bullshit.
It isn’t the way it’s going to happen what the way it’s gonna happen It’s gonna be some idiot that nobody’s ever heard of sorry not idiot, but some person people will call it an idiot for sure Often left field a dark horse who happens to develop a system that a lot of people really like and It’ll have a lot of the properties that the web had initially and that anybody can deploy a server if they want to and However, there may be one main server that a lot of people use Again, that would be like WordPress. com, you know WordPress very successful blog ging system doubt if it would have been as successful as it is if the only way you could have created a WordPress site was to go to Matt’s you know WordPress. com site you the fact that you can You know just download the software and install it on one of your machines blogging itself wouldn’t have worked if You had to go to one place to do it the fact that there were lots of ways to do bloying help blogging enormously to gain traction So there’ll be there’ll be a lot of ways of doing it and the way these things connect up Will not in any way address all the problems that people think need to be addressed in order for to work but it will have marvelous ability to scale and and get very complex without being very difficult to operate and it will it’ll inspire users and And it will take advantage of things the users know today that they didn’t know two or three years ago So it won’t seem fair to people who think that users will always fill in the blank you know The assumption three or four years before You know html and htp came out was that users couldn’t set up their own servers well, those protocols were so simple that people could set up their own servers and Partially because they’re so simple and partially because the users got familiar with the networking Technology and so it wasn’t so mysterious anymore. You have to take into account that users are not standing still They’re moving and they’re gaining skills and where they needed their hands held before Five years later. They don’t need their hands held there anymore and software will have opera. There’ll be opportunities and software At one point in time that a few years before weren’t opportunities at all So you have to keep your thinking sort of fluid in that dimension because time does change things things change over time The users don’t stand still just remember that one So I Think that when we finally get a solution to this a lot of us will wake up and realize that the solution has been there for a couple of years and And the users figured it out before we did I think in a lot of cases. That ’s the way it works and If your mind is empty and you ’re not too preoccupied with a lot of other things You may be there with the users and spot it yourself at that moment in time So But it never comes never ever ever comes from the consortium approach people Getting together to settle their differences to work get out so that everybody can be happy That’s never the way new technology layers come on just doesn’t work that way Well, there must be about a billion other things to talk about today. Let me just think for a second. Oh, right So what are some possibilities for this? Well, there are two out there right now that I’m aware of that there may be others that I ’m not aware of But there’s two out there that I am One I’m very familiar with the other one. I’m not so familiar with the one I’m familiar with is Twitter Well, I’m not from so familiar with his Facebook And I just intuitively think that Twitter may be or it or something like Twitter or The open-source version of Twitter should want to merge might be it what you need is a very lightweight very lightweight in the functionality Area in other words it the network Itself should just be a network more or less not anything more than that and it should be very open to people building applications in that network and Twitter certainly qualifies it doesn’t have a lot of functionality and it does have an identity system and its API is just Delightfully simple. It’s very quick to get up an implementation of client interface to Twitter I know I’ve done it myself and it works great Haven’t had to go back and fix things. They don’t break stuff Give them up in a very high grade for the design and for the keeping it stable so far so good Got a lot of users, but nothing like what Facebook has and that ’s that’s the other side now Facebook is not open Like Twitter is but it could be opened. It could be It’s not clear that the users would support it They’re sort of reluctant to Every time they open that thing up We all want them and in the tech industry we talk about it would be great if they opened up But they have a lot of users that wouldn’t go along with them. That’s another part of the bread document that It doesn’t ring true. He talks about people with networks with users that want to join his His effort they got a problem if those users signed up without their information being out there And they’re gonna have to migrate those users and give them the opt-in because it’s gonna freak a lot of them out Find out that their ID is available on other systems when it wasn’t available on other systems before That we saw that freak out happened when they added the news feature to Facebook I think it was a year ago or so maybe a little bit more The users were not happy about it and they pulled back they pulled back from that and now they’re adding it back and and Denise howl was the one that sort of in my world that tuned into the fact that it has the R SS fees means that information that used to be private or restricted access is now not restricted at all and So that’s a change and when that change happens. It’s not so easy for them to make the change so Facebook as a company seems to be They seem to be liking to take risks and gambles and they don ’t feel they have a lot to lose Which is very nice. It’s very refreshing. It’s very welcome However, their users may not be so You know, they they aren’t as rock and roll into rock and roll as the the guys running the place are so There’s gonna be some resistance there That may suggest that either something like Twitter or Twitter itself or open source Twitter May have a better shot at it because it had this openness from day one so every user coming in there knew that Presumably knew that you could go download software that would latch on to Twitter and Would use their identity system and could actually be used instead of their user interface As a result you get a rich set of clients and they support new devices Very quickly because the users take take responsibility for doing that. So That’s why Twitter has an advantage. They don’t have you know, it’s Facebook’s advantages They got a lot of users Facebook’s disadvantages. They got a lot of users those users have to come along with them And they may not want to and it may create an uproar and there ’s confusion and that confusion may stop them from moving so So that’s why I’m excited about Twitter because it seems to have You know sort of a good combination. I’m certainly studying it because even if it ’s not the one The one that eventually galvan izes this market Our activity whatever it turns out to be called Is I think is going to be a lot like Twitter. So that’s why I study it because I want to understand it and it’s a fascinating It’s a fascinating thing. It’s for something so simple. It’s wonderful that it has so many facets to it And again, that was one of the beautiful things about the web It’s also one of the beautiful things about RSS very simple, but yet when it looks different when you look at it from every angle It’s kind of wow. How did that happen, you know? So a lot of more a lot more things going on right now, but I think that that’s a nice little unit You know the identity world in August of 2007 and we’re getting pretty close to To 30 minutes, which is not my normal 40-minute podcast, but you know 30 minutes is kind of nice round amount of time I’m trying to think if there’s some song that I’d love to play for you something that I’m listening to a lot Let me just like get my tunes up here Play some Alice Cooper, maybe Probably not we’ll just leave it at that What did I do? No, we’ll just leave it at that so everybody thank you very much for listening This has been Dave wider and morning coffee notes and August 18th 2007 and See you again real soon. Okay.
Take care. Bye [BLANK_AUDIO]