ls The Hidden History of the “Like” Button

The Hidden History of the "Like" Button

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

Textorized Parthenon

The Hidden History of the “Like” Button

The World Wide Web Consortium

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.

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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

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.

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A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web (Halpin and Tuffield, 2010)

What is Your Identity?

Is it your Facebook Profile(Facebook)? Your URI(Tim Berners-Lee)? Your email address (Mozilla BrowserID)? Your government-mandated ID?

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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...

The Iran 2005 Social Networking Shutdown

In 2005, Orkut was shutdown by the Iranian government, followed later by other social networking sites.

Orkut As Dan Brickley writes, "There go 65,000+ Iranian blogs (per blogcensus) and 7%+ of Orkut's user base, in a flip of a switch." Hoder suggests some actions we can take, including having the EU and US demand an end to Net censorship during their negotiations with the government.

Friend-of-a-Friend Project

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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.

Resource Description Framework (RDF

arrow tail, body and head are l are subject, property and value.

<#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.

Thoughts on the Social Graph

Brad Fitzpatrick (ex-LiveJournal, now Google) and David Recordon (ex-SixApart, Facebook) then released the plan on their "Thoughts for the Social Graph" missive.

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Problem Statement:

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.

Goals:

  1. Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as "the" central graph owner.
    1. Establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users)
    2. While the non-profit's servers and databases will initially be centralized, ensure that the design is such that others can run their own instances, sharing data with each other. Think 'git', not 'svn'. Then whose APIs/servers you use is up to you, as a site owner. Or run your own instance.
  2. For developers who don't want to do their own graph analysis from the raw data, the following high-level APIs should be provided:
    1. Node Equivalence, given a single node, say "brad on LiveJournal", return all equivalent nodes: "brad" on LiveJournal, "bradfitz" on Vox, and 4caa1d6f6203d21705a00a7aca86203e82a9cf7a (my FOAF mbox_sha1sum). See the slides for more info.
    2. Edges out and in, by node. Find all outgoing edges (where edges are equivalence claims, equivalence truths, friends, recommendations, etc). Also find all incoming edges.
    3. Find all of a node's aggregate friends from all equivalent nodes, expand all those friends' equivalent nodes, and then filter on destination node type. This combines steps 1 and 2 and 1 in one call. For instance, 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.
    4. Find missing friends of a node. Given a node, expand all equivalent nodes, find aggregate friends, expand them, and then report any missing edges. This is the "let the user sync their social networking sites" API. It lets them know if they were friends with somebody on Friendster and they didn't know they were both friends on MySpace, they might want to be.

    But more generally, for developers, enabling new kinds of apps we haven't been able to think of yet.

  3. For end-users:
    1. A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like,
      "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.
    2. Deliver end-user tools (likely a browser add-on) to let users manage their social networks (whether the sites have cooperative APIs or not), syncing them with each other, or doing whatever they'd like, but according to the user's own policies. While the tools will most likely add the most value with uncooperative sites, it must always be clear to users what is happening so that no one is ever tricked. More on this later...
    3. Make graph data as portable as documents are on a personal computer. (though likely never using the word 'graph' to end-users)

David Recordon

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.

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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...

The "Like" Button

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!

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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.

Outrage as NHS allows Facebook tracking of website users

The Primitive Accumulation of the Lifeworld

Lifeworld The bee is seen in its environment, a blooming field, in which blossoming flowers alternate with buds. If we put ourselves in the bee's place and look at the field from the point of view of its Umwelt, the blossoms are changed to stars or crosses according to their form, and the buds assume the unbroken shape of circles. The biological significance of this newly discovered quality in bees is evident. Only blossoming flowers have a meaning for them; buds do not (1957: 350-1).

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...

The New Market for Personal Data

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"

Lifeworld Currently the U.S. government and various industry players (not Facebook, but being driven by Google and Verizon) are planning to create a new market, possibly the new financial market, for personal data based around the models of ICANN and Visa.

According to Alex "Sandy" Pentland at the World Economic Forum, "Personal data is the new oil" of the world economy.

The Cybernetic Form of Life

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.

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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?

The Web into the World

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...

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The Future of Trust on the Web

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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?