ls
Harry Halpin - Researcher at IRI (Institut d'Recherche et al Innovation) - MARIE CURIE Project PHILOWEB exchange with World Wide Web Consortium/MIT CSAIL,
harry@w3.org
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994, acclaimed as the inventor of the Web (author of HTTP, HTML, and URI/URL specifications at IETF) "... to lead the Web to its full potential" and prevent fragmentation (the browser wars) via the creation of open standards.
W3C's role is similar to the United Nations of the Web. Has a well-defined role: where any organization can join to develop standards and then ensure they do not have any patents (royalty-free). Liaisons with other standards bodies like IETF.
Goals and Principles: Accessibility, Meaning, Trust, Interoperability,Evolvability, Decentralization, Multimedia,
Close to 500 Members (including Google and Microsoft), worldwide Advisory Board and Technical Architecture Group with a Team of vendor neutral, technical staff and offices around the world.
However, is not Facebook building a parallel non-open Web. This is the story of how the W3C got Facebook to join...
The Social Web is a set of relationships that link together people over the Web. The Web is an universal and open space of information where every item of interest can be identified with a URI. While the best known current social networking sites on the Web limit themselves to relationships between people with accounts on a single site, the Social Web should extend across the entire Web.
A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web (Halpin and Tuffield, 2010)
Is it your Facebook Profile(Facebook)? Your URI(Tim Berners-Lee)? Your email address (Mozilla BrowserID)? Your government-mandated ID?
Or could your identity simply be the sum of all your social relationships
And thus your relationships not only with people, but links with properties (such as your name, photos, address, etc.), things (products, cinema, books, etc.) and places (employer, home, restaurants...) over time...
In 2005, Orkut was shutdown by the Iranian government, followed later by other social networking sites.
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do; it is a contribution to the linked information system known as the Web. FOAF defines an open, decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.
Dan Brickley, at the time an employee of the W3C, created the Vocabulary using RDF (Resource Description Framework), a standard for describing metadata created by Tim Berners-Lee at the W3C.
<#p> foaf:name "PeterS"; <#p> foaf:homepage <http://peter.example.org>.
Note the relationship to HTML links, especially with the re-discovery of the rel attribute.
Brad Fitzpatrick (ex-LiveJournal, now Google) and David Recordon (ex-SixApart, Facebook) then released the plan on their "Thoughts for the Social Graph" missive.
There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.
Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It's a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.
Given 'brad' on LJ, return me all of Brad's friends, from all of his equivalent nodes, if those [friend] nodes are either 'mbox_sha1sum' or 'Twitter' nodes.
But more generally, for developers, enabling new kinds of apps we haven't been able to think of yet.
"Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we're recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click 'select-all'."Also every so often while you're using the site dopplr lets you know if friends that you're friends with elsewhere start using the site and prompts you to be friends with them. All without either of you re-inviting/re-adding each other on dopplr... just because you two already declared your relationship publicly somewhere else. Note: some sites have started to do things like this, in ad-hoc hacky ways (entering your LJ username to get your other LJ friends from FOAF, or entering your email username/password to get your address book), but none in a beautiful, comprehensive way.¶
David Recordon, who originally worked at SixApart, left and became the first standards manager at Facebook, in part at least to his original work around Open Authorization (OAuth), OpenID, and his work on the decentralized social graph. He became interested in the W3C and in using the Resource Description Framework, and so invited myself and Pat Hayes (the AI researcher that invented the semantics for RDF) over to Facebook.
The next week the "Like" Button was released. Facebook cleverly used the open standards of RDF in the meta header of each web-page to describe the kind of commodity (movie, person, book, place, etc.) and then combined that with Javascript to ship that data off to Facebook...
Called the "Open Graph Protocol", the "Like" Button uses a mixture of the Semantic Web (RDFa) and Javascript to determine the relationships between people and other sites outside of Facebook - and ship them back to Facebook!
When you are "only" visit on a site with the "Like" button (without clicking), the site sends that data back to Facebook, who can then capture that data and sell it to advertisers or use it in their own advertising operations.
Jacob von Uexkull's (1934/1957) A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds
In a world where all of our social interactions are mediated by Facebook, could it not be said that our lifeworld is now mediated/blocked - and thus captured - by Facebook? As the current unregulated capture of social data continues in a totally unregulated fashion with most users unaware, then the "reality-mining" of this data is being captured by corporations responsible only to their shareholders...Given the numbers given by Facebook's recent IPO, it was guessed that the IPO for Facebook had each user worth 120 dollars. Then on January 2011, as Facebook was preparing to announce it would go public, Mark Zuckerberg's profile was hacked and it was suggested that Facebook be replaced by a "social business"
According to Alex "Sandy" Pentland at the World Economic Forum, "Personal data is the new oil" of the world economy.
The life-world of the cybernetic form of life is increasingly defined by their personal data, which unbeknownst to the individual is being trafficked in a largely unregulated global market.
However, is it not that the form of life of the Internet is ultimately collective? Can any single person or corporation take credit for the amount of shared content of the internet on Facebook, Google, or any other service that builds off user-generated content?
What we are seeing now is the movement of this collective intelligence into the world: ranging from to the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests to the Egyptian Revolution.
While not responsible for political change per se, collective intelligence is the spark that brought these movements together...
Would you trust the Internet as your collective intelligence if it was not controlled by you but instead controlled those (see SOPA/PIPA and ACTA debates) that may not have your own best interest in mind?
How can there be any way to trust the collective intelligence on the Web except via the self-organization of itself?