Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation, something that many OpenID advocates have hoped would happen for some time. The two systems of logging in to distributed websites, OpenID and Facebook Connect, have been characterized as rivals – OpenID being the high-minded but socially awkward one who doesn’t get invited to parties despite being a really good person and Facebook Connect being the rich preppy popular kid from the 80’s movie who’s a bully but is good at sports.

Now they’ve joined forces, on some level. Cynics immediately said it would make no difference, that their cynicism remained unchanged, or that Facebook was likely to “pull a Microsoft” and try to destroy OpenID. We disagree. We think this is good news. Here is why.

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Both systems, OpenID and Facebook Connect, claim to offer a number of benefits:

1. Both make it easier to participate in new websites because you don’t need to create a new account.
2. Both carry payloads of user data that can yield immediate personalization for a richer experience.
3. Both offer authentication that you really are who you say you are. That opens up a whole world of possibilities technically and culturally.

That’s what this is all about, here’s why we think tonight’s news is important.

1. ID Systems Should Be Integrated

Users shouldn’t have to choose between logging in someplace with an OpenID log-in or with Facebook Connect. We should be given both options wherever possible, including on Facebook. Facebook could allow users to associate another account with a Facebook account and just log in using that other account. No big deal. As OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina told me in a recent interview, user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors.

We hope that today’s announcement will be a step in that direction.

Image above: JanRain’s RPX product, as seen on over 200 Universal Music artists’ web pages.

2. OpenID’s Momentum is Incredible, Really

A lot of people complain that OpenID is moving too slowly; they see the problems with it and don’t understand why it’s taking the rest of the web to hurry up and solve those problems.

In reality, OpenID has gone from a LiveJournal technical project, to being a mailing list for freaks and dreamers to becoming a global phenomenon that huge companies are contributing their time, money and brand names in order to help develop – all in just 3 years.

In the past 18 months these companies have lined up to perform the easy part of OpenID, acting as an authentication party at other websites, and now the pressure is building for someone to break the dam and turn OpenID into a big two way phenomenon, allowing people to log in to Facebook with another OpenID, for example.

Just for context – OpenID is younger than YouTube and Facebook, neither of which have quite figured out how to monetize changing the world yet. So give OpenID a break, it’s doing really well. Getting Facebook on board the OpenID Foundation is a big win and just the latest of many recent victories.

3. The User Experience Help Will Be Invaluable

Everybody knows that the User Experience with OpenID is difficult for people unfamiliar with it, and sometimes for people who are familiar with it. Facebook is often offered as an example of how it can be done, but as a grumpy OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina put it tonight – “Facebook Connect is simple because there is no choice: you click a button. Of course, that button only works for the growing subset of the web who have Facebook accounts and want to share their Facebook identity with the web site displaying the button, but that’s why their experience trumps that of OpenID’s. If you take away user choice, everything becomes simple.”

OpenID is a complicated thing. Who better to help work on the user experience, though, than Facebook? Their designers have done a great job and everyone says that the UX will be priority #1 now that Facebook is on board. Throw enough designers at the problem, from a wide variety of companies, and there should be several good solutions at least.

It’s probably not going to be that hard to fix, either. Check out this proposed solution, for example. That’s getting closer is it not?

4. Compromises Will Be Made, Both Ways

How are standards created? Through compromise, negotiation and collaboration. The legal work is one of the hardest parts and the OpenID Foundation completed most of that a year ago, ensuring that no one is going to sue anyone else over using OpenID on a website. Things might get a little more complicated with Facebook’s entry, but this capable and now larger community should be able to figure it out.

Will the option to log in with Facebook Connect have to be included on other sites that prefer OpenID? Will OpenID have to be an option on Facebook at some level? Neither of those would be the end of the world and the benefits should far outweigh the costs.

5. Facebook is Not Entirely Evil

Readers sympathetic to open standards and critical of proprietary technology may have a picture in their minds eye of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rubbing his hands together and cackling about how the famous $1 billion offer he turned down to buy the company was not enough money. In reality, Zuckerberg is a big dork – a brilliant, lucky, too-powerful dork, but he doesn’t seem like that bad a person. There are, we’re sure, power hungry and distasteful people working in the organization – but there are lots and lots of people who are genuinely focused largely on innovation and improving the world. The OpenID Foundation assured us of that in their announcement today and that’s been our experience in dealing with Facebook as press as well. (Trust me, this author in particular generally doesn’t like almost anyone in an executive position at these huge internet companies.)

Especially among the Facebook engineers there is hope. Just like we’re very skeptical of Google’s frightening power over the world we live in but really like a lot of individual Google engineers, so too with Facebook come a lot of people who will be great to have working along side the existing OpenID community.

So, cynics, that’s why we think tonight’s announcement is good news.

Discuss

Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.

So far it’s just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

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“Distributed Social Networking” (DiSO) is what a growing number of people are calling the move to aggregate and integrate our activities, data and social connections built up on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and our personal blogs. (See also the DiSO Project.) Much of the conversation concerns technical standards to make it possible, but once it’s technically doable – how should it look for users? Canter offers the following proposal and we think it’s a good one.

Marc Canter believes that the “dashboard” is the best metaphor to manage all this activity through. Millions of people are already familiar with this basic idea, having used My.Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Jive Software or other services like this. (We like dashboards here at ReadWriteWeb a lot and recommend checking out this post on traits of a successful dashboard for tips on setting one up for yourself.)

Your DiSO dashboard might serve as a new interface for your blog, your social networking account, or be a stand alone service itself. The parts of your dashboard that you made public would be discoverable and viewable by other people. What would it bring together for you to access all in one place? This is the meat of Canter’s proposal. (Update: Actually, Canter stopped by in comments below to clarify that it’s the outline structure of these data collected in a dashboard that’s really the meat of his proposal. He says he’s working on an editor to edit such outlines, in fact. See his comment below for clarification.)

• Your status and availability, see and change these from your dashboard.
• Widgets and gadgets for doing various things, just like people add to dashboards now.
• Your incoming subscriptions (RSS, friends’ new media published, perhaps some email).
• Your published media and content going out, manageable in the dashboard. Not just blog posts, microblogging messages and media – this could include your comments from around the web, reviews you’ve posted of products, testimonials people have written about you, music playlists – you name it.
• Access controls to all your content, determine what’s public, what’s private, what’s viewable by friends, family, co-workers or members of another group. This is a very important part of the distributed social networking vision.
• Your various accounts and identification. Think of this as a virtual wallet, though Canter makes no mention of commercial activities we can assume that payment methods like your PayPal balance or online banking updates would ideally be included in your private dashboard.
• Your “social graph” aggregated. See all your contact lists in one place, including links to the dashboards and various social networking accounts that each contact has given you permission to view. Ask from your dashboard for permission to connect with those contacts in new places.

DiSo Dashboard Outline

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: outline diso)

The idea is that the DiSO Dashboard would be a place to read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalize the data for all your activities around the web. The data standards aren’t figured out yet, but major social networking vendors are meeting now to work them out.

How would it look? What would be surfaced to users at various levels of the interface? We hope that vendors make that highly customizable but default settings are something that needs to be figured out.

What do you think? Would you like a dashboard like this? What else would you like in it? Speak up now, these services could be a big part of your experience on the web soon and they are being planned and built as we speak.

Discuss

Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as “Facebook on sites all around the web,” enters general availability today and we’ve got one big question – should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to authenticate and learn about their users? Will Facebook become a dominant identifier online? Will the OpenID community lose out to the company’s proprietary system or will this challenge breathe new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity?

Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn’t just about desktop software anymore – now it’s about our identities and social connections, all around the web. We’ve published a mind map below displaying our understanding of the contrasts between these two identity systems. If you’d like to add our thoughts to that map, you can.

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This battle isn’t about “single sign-on” – it’s about the payload that comes with it (friend networks, personal data, maybe more), it’s about the developer communities, usability and ownership. It’s very important to the future of our user experience online and it’s a fascinating study in contrasts.

The mind map above illustrates our understanding of the relative merits of these two leading identity solutions. We thought it was an effective way of discussing a complex situation succinctly. We created it collaboratively using MindMeister. (disclosure: Mindmeister is a recent RWW sponsor)

We haven’t drawn a conclusion yet about who we think will win. We like Facebook Connect, but we like OpenID better. We’re cheering for both, but louder for the open source, open standard solution. We think Facebook’s odds are better, but perhaps the OpenID community will rise to the challenge now that it has such a formidable competitor.

Do you think we’ve missed anything really important? If so, feel free to edit the mind map on this page: Identity: FB Connect vs. OpenID (You’ll need a MindMeister account to do so.) Below you can see a click and drag embedded display of the latest state of this map that our readers have updated with their thoughts. You can see it full screen here. Update: A big thank you to the several of you who have gone in and made changes! That’s awesome!

Facebook Connect vs. OpenID is going to be a big decision that every website owner should consider. What do you think the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two systems are?

Thanks to the Vidoop crew for the conversation this morning that inspired this post.

See also: What if Amazon and iTunes Implemented Facebook Connect?

Discuss

In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well – a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.

Now we’re going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We’ve reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list – so if we haven’t mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

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BooRah

BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year. One of BooRah’s most interesting aspects is that it uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.

BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah’s data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.

Swotti

Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. We reviewed the product back in March. Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Dapper MashupAds

Earlier this month we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that’s related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations – anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.

How this works: in the back end, Dapper will be analyzing the fields that publishers identify and will apply a layer of semantic classification on top of them. The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. Dapper also has a product called Semantify, for SEO – see our review of that.

For more on Semantic advertising, see our write-up of a panel on this topic from the Web 3.0 Conference.

Inform.com

Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher’s own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published. We reviewed it in January, when at the time the company had more than 100 clients – including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist.

Inform says its technology determines the semantic meaning of key words in millions of news stories around the web every day in order to recommend related content. The theory is that by automating the process of relevant link discovery and inclusion, Inform can easily add substantial value to a publisher’s content. Inform also builds out automatic topic pages, something you can see around WashingtonPost and CNN.com.

Siri

We have met our share of secretive startups over the years, but few have been as secretive about their plans as Siri, which was founded in December 2007 and did not even have an official name until October this year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project.

In our October post on Siri, we discovered that Siri is working on a "personalized assistant that learns." We expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas. Based on our discussion with founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer in October, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri plans to launch in the first half of 2009.

Evri

Evri is a Paul Allen (of Microsoft fame) backed semantic search engine that launched into a limited beta in June. Evri is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms. It especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. You can check out a tour of Evri here.

UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities – over 400,000 of them – from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

Imindi

Imindi is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine". Imindi was recommended to us in the comments to our previous post by Yihong Ding, who called it "an untraditional Semantic Web service". Yihong said that traditionally Semantic Web services employ machines to understand humans, however Imindi's approach is to encourage humans to better understand each other via machines.

Imindi has met with a fair amount of skepticism so far – and indeed it appears to be reaching big with its AI associations. However we think it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to see if it can live up to the description on its About page: "By capturing the free form associations of user's logic and intuition, IMINDI is building a global mind index which is an entirely new resource for building collective intelligence and leveraging human creativity and subjectivity on the web."

See also: Thinkbase: Mapping the World’s Brain

Juice

We’ve all been there. You started reading something on the Web, saw something interesting in the article, searched for it, wound up somewhere else, and after about 12 hops you’ve forgotten exactly what it was you were looking for. If only there were some way to select that topic midstream and have the information automagically appear for you, without disrupting your workflow or sending you traipsing off into the wilds of the Web.

If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag. In our review of Juice, we concluded that it avoids some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set.

Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool which we reviewed back in May. It offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us and Diigo do not – semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

Conclusion

The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round.

Discuss

Often people start a company without any clear idea of what
a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code.
While the modern tech world could not exist without obsession, artistic inspiration and crazy engineers,
there’s more to a startup than passion.

In this post, we explore the basics
behind corporate entities, stock, financing, and the key non-technical infrastructure
every company
should have.

To make an idea really powerful, a startup needs
to become a real company. In former days, this might have meant bureaucracy, and
lots of financial and legal infrastructure. Today’s
tech companies are simpler, but still require a set of rules, and you need a rudimentary
understanding of business law when forming a corporation.

Business Entities

There are several ways of conducting business in
the United States. The most basic is a
Sole proprietorship,
which is essentially self-employment. A sole proprietor, such as a grocery store or
restaurant, assumes full legal liability for the
business, but all income is direct personal income
and is taxed once.

Another form of business is a Partnership. This is a venture between several
individuals who share in the profits. Partnerships, and particularly Limited Liability Partnerships (LLP),
are created to address the personal liability issue with proprietorship. With LLP only one or a couple
of partners assumes the legal liability.

Corporations are a separate legal entity. When a corporation is sued, in
general the individuals
behind it (shareholders, directors, management) are not impacted. This legal protection
comes at a price – double taxation. Companies have to pay tax and only then can pay salaries and dividends to the shareholders.

In recent years, people have been incorporating in two principal ways – LLC and Inc. LLC is a limited liability corporation,
a hybrid between corporation and a partnership.

LLC enjoys the legal status of a corporation, but has partnership-like taxation. It is a great way to incorporate before you know how big your company
will become. The caveat
with LLC is that you can’t have more than a certain number of shareholders (typically around 70). For this reason, Venture Capitalists
would normally not fund an LLC because it’s impossible to take such a company through an IPO (Initial Public Offering).

Most tech startups end up being C-Corp or a corporation
(often,
you can start with LLC, then convert to a C-Corp right before raising substantial funding). A corporation
is the most sophisticated business entity. It is a powerful but complex vehicle,
with flexibility. 

Shareholders, Directors and Management

A company starts with incorporation – a process of forming. These days
it’s cheap (around $300) and straightforward.
You can either incorporate on your own or, better, utilise your accountant or lawyer.

You incorporate in a particular state, usually Delaware with its liberal laws and taxation policies.
You don’t need to live in Delaware to incorporate there, but you do need to also declare your existence to whatever state(s)
you plan to operate in. The corporate laws vary substantially, so ask your lawyer and
accountant about regulations in your state.

After incorporation, you issue a stock – a unit of ownership in the company. In startups before funding,
there is little reason to spend time on issuing shares, because when financing
comes you'll need to reissue.
Easiest is to declare that you have 100 shares of common stock and divide it between the founders as
agreed prior to
starting a company. 

There are three principal types of participants in every company – shareholders,
directors and management. Shareholders,
or the owners, vote and elect the board of directors, who set long-term strategic direction
and appoint executive management. The management (CEO, CTO, etc) is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the company.

While you might find this 3-tier structure initially confusing, it does make sense.
In large companies directors are mostly
outsiders. Directors represent the interest of shareholders and hold management accountable for the performance
of the company. In a large corporation, typically the CEO is also a President or Chairman of the board, but the rest
are directors outside the company. For small startups, the situation is simpler.
You are a shareholder, a director and a manager of your own company.

Key Documents

In a startup, you need to understand when to wear
the hat of a shareholder, director or a manager. Looking at a company from the perspective
of key legal documents helps you do that.

The first document is Articles of Incorporation,
which declares the kind of entity, state of operation, classes of stock, and number of shares.
The next is a Shareholders
Agreement, which typically discusses the rights and obligations shareholders have in
situations like sale of the company, sale of stock, or death of a shareholder.
And Corporate Bylaws is the guide by which
the board operates;
it specifies who can be a director, how often meetings are held, how voting is
done.

The employees of the company – e.g. CEO, VP of Design and Software Engineers – all sign
an agreement.
These days, employment agreements typically consist of a short offer letter and a lengthy non-competition agreement.
The letter outlines the position, salary, vacation, and other benefits. The letter
asks the employee
to obey standard corporate rules and regulations. In addition, a lot of startups offer employees stock options – a way
to earn the right to buy a stock in a company.

Legal and Finance

A first-time entrepreneur will find the
legal complexity and accounting for a corporation overwhelming.
It is essential to hire lawyers and financial professionals. There is a saying amoung startups
and VCs that a good lawyer pays for him or herself, despite the fact that hourly fees are
whopping.

There are three kinds
of lawyers needed in a tech startup. A corporate lawyer drafts the basic documents and
will advise on daily matters. A deal lawyer specializes in financing and sales transactions.
And
if you have intellectual property to protect, then you’ll need an IP lawyer.

Financials of a startup can be split into daily simple things and annual complex
matters.
For a startup, it is ideal to get a bookkeeper – a person to take care of payroll, monthly profit and loss,
and basic financial documents. You need an accounting firm for annual taxes and larger issues.

Accountants
are more expensive than bookkeepers, but since you don’t need to use them for daily operations, it makes
sense to have an accounting firm do your annual finances. In addition to taxes
the accountant
will product a compilation – a summary of annual activities. After you get funding, the board of directors
will ask for an audited financial statement – a full, certified financial review.

Venture Financing

To turn your idea into a big company, you will likely need to raise money.
This is essentially a sale of
shares to investors. A typical company goes through several financings – angel investment and then
a few rounds of venture capital. The angel round is typically small, traditionally less than a million dollars
and lately substantially less (thanks to YCombinator and TechStars).
In the angel (or seed) round, the founders may offer 10-15% of the company in exchange for a convertible loan.
Technically, this is not a direct sale of shares, but instead a right to buy shares in the next round of financing
at a discount, while accruing interest.

Traditional angels are wealthy individuals, often former successful
enterpreneurs and executives at
large companies. Each angel might be willing to put down between 10-100K, with 25-50K being typical.
So if looking to raise 500K, you would need to line up 10 or more angel investors. You can simplify
it if you find a local group, for example New York Angels.

The next round of funding, called Series A, involves Venture Capitalists (VC). A venture firm is essentially
a partnership that manages an investment fund. The fund raises money and invests
into startups and later stage companies.

The VC world is complex and it’s important to know how to navigate it.

The first rule – know what firms are right for you at what stage. The right firm will be the one that’s interested in the sector you’re in
as well as the size of the investment. VC firms manage anywhere between $150M – $1B, with
a typical
tech fund being around $300M. Since the time of each partner in the firm is limited, there
are only so many investments the fund can make. So, if looking for 500K, it doesn’t make sense to approach VCs.

A typical Venture Firm will look to own 20 – 30% of your company over its
lifetime. When the investors put money into your company, they will protect themselves in cases when the company
might not do well. They will ask to create a class of preferred shares (preferred stock) that will
be subject to different rules than the common stock (those you own). Preferred stock is paid first
in case of an exit, and it enjoys veto rights such as precluding you to sell the company, or the
opposite – forcing a sale.

It is common for a venture firm to elect a director on your board.
This is the partner you are essentially working with. In early stage companies,
a VC plays an instrumental role in mentoring the CEO and shaping the course of the
company. As the company grows and perhaps even goes public, the VC director steps down from the board.

More Funding

Each round of funding expands the number of Venture firms at the table and results in
dilution.
To understand dilution, one needs to understand the mechanism by which startups raise money. Each round of
funding
results in additional shares being issued by the company and sold to the investors.
Typically, investors are not buying
shares that you already have, they are buying newly issued shares.

The money raised is not going into
your pocket, it goes to the company. In some cases, when you’re doing stellar, investors would be
willing to
buy your shares – but this is atypical. As a result of each raise, founders and employees own less percentage of the company
(their number of shares remains the same, but the total number of shares increases). Prior investors are able to
maintain their respective ownership by buying additional shares (this right is given
via preferred stock).

Despite the fact that startups are reluctant to give up ownership to VCs, the economics actually make sense.
Even though your percentage of ownership goes down, the total value of the stock is higher after the financing, because
the value of each share rises. As long as the company is doing well, fund-raising makes sense and is beneficial to its employees.

Conclusion

There is a considerable amount of complexity surrounding building a company. Way more than just
a great idea
and elegant code is involved. But building a company, learning the intricacies, understanding the law and venture
world, is fun.

Instead of being afraid of this complexity, startups need to appreciate it and embrace it.
Most lawyers, accountants and investors are smart people whom you will
learn from. They will help you make your startup into a real company.

As a start point, you should create an LLC and not worry about much paperwork. Once you
get into investment, you’ll need to change to an Inc, get a lawyer, bookkeeper and accountant, and start diving
into the details discussed in this post.

There are two excellent resources to get additional material: Ask The VC -
a blog maintained by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson; and Ask The Wizard -
a blog by former CEO of Feedburner, Dick Costolo.

As always we look forward to your questions and we also ask you to share your tips on the essentials
you picked up during your startup life. Join the conversation!

A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.

Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players – Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project – will play out the future of Data Portability.

To remind you of the background to the game. Recently three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all of these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone’s guess. So we created an interactive app from Impact Games that lets you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement, as well as share your opinions about what they should do.

The Results

A reminder that the ‘opinion’ category is what you hope will happen and ‘prediction’ is what you think will happen.

Two points were consistent with our expectations:

• The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won’t.
• The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.

One result that surprised us was that many people didn’t expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.

For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina’s post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure’s response.

What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?

Ten years ago today Jason Kottke launched his influential blog Kottke.org. The site is a fascinating collection of…whatever Kottke cares to post there.

So prescient was his vision of the future of publishing though that today he’s married to the co-founder of Blogger.com and can be counted among the earliest pioneers in the present era of online bricolage – the art of assembling diverse found objects.

Bricolage has become one of the most dominant themes of the new online world. The word may be French and unfamiliar, but you see the concept in action every time you read BoingBoing, for example. There are few blogs more widely read than BoingBoing – but it’s in tribute to Kottke’s 10 year anniversary that we offer the following collection of some our favorite places to discover marvelous things online. All are curated by the careful eyes and hands of one or a few editors, making these sites a different experience than places like Digg, Del.icio.us Popular, PopURLs or elsewhere.

Not only are these types of sites widely read, they are also inspiring a cultural renaissance of bricolage on sites like Tumblr and FFFFound.

Great Sites to Find Fantastic Things

Note: If you are reading this story by RSS, you may not be able to see the dynamic list of recent popular stories from each source. You can click through to the live site to see them. Speaking of RSS, reader Víctor Hernández created a spliced feed of all the blogs below into one at this URL.

BoingBoing

BoingBoing is the biggest mover and shaker here. It’s a group blog with an art and politics slant. It’s a great place to discover “wonderful things” in large quantities. You probably already knew that, though, because you probably already read BoingBoing.

Recent Popular Posts from BoingBoing

Waxy Links

Waxy Links is the link blog that rides beside Upcoming.org co-founder Andy Baio’s blog Waxy.org. Baio has taken to doing investigative blogging on various topics on his main site, but his link blog is a widely loved river of weird. When your link blog is hot enough to have an ad from the uber-boutique ad network The Deck on it, then you know you’re a monster.

Recent Popular Items from Waxy Links

Neatorama

Neatorama is a lot like BoingBoing, but a lot less high-brow and a little more fun. Regular games of “What Is It?” challenge readers to identify photographs of old and unusual objects. The whole site is almost a clearinghouse of weird and it’s a much quicker read than BoingBoing. The long list of authors is lead by Biochemist Alex Santoso, who started the blog as a hobby in 2005.

Recent Popular Posts from Neatorama

Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid is a great place to find cool art, projects and photography from San Francisco and elsewhere. It’s the work of web-hosting company owner and aficionado of cool Scott Beale.

Beale’s posts regularly hit the front page of Digg and his excellent photos are regularly ripped off without attribution by mainstream media outlets.

Recent Popular Posts from Laughing Squid

JoshSpear.com

JoshSpear.com is run by “one of the youngest brand strategists in the world,” Josh Spear, and has a long list of regular contributors. Spear and crew regularly find some of the coolest art, music, craft, design and marketing projects on the web. In addition to speaking and writing around the world, Spear runs SpearCollective, an artist management collective.

Recent Popular Posts from JoshSpear.com

Fresh Creation

FreshCreation is run by Dutch creative Martijn van Osch. The site collects oddly creative works from around the world and almost always includes a video for every post. FreshCreation was the inspiration for our recent post here on the future of interface design.

Recent Popular Posts from Fresh Creation

PicoCool

PicoCool says it “is dedicated to bringing you tiny bytes and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Cool content from real people.” Lots of great finds from Etsy and other beautiful, small things. The site is run by web designer Emily Chang, whose company did the new design for RWW.

Recent Popular Posts from Fresh Creation

Swiss Miss

SwissMiss is a widely read design blog written by Swiss transplant to NY Tina Roth Eisenberg. Lots of physical objects here but not exclusively. Eisenberg’s discoveries are regularly reblogged by other cool-hunting blogs.

Recent Popular Posts from SwissMiss

NotCot

NotCot is a beautiful site that collects image-based links to projects around the web. The site was founded by UX designer Jean Aw and Web 2.0 loving Cognitive Scientist Danial Frysinger. The site’s organization is remarkable as well. Entries are navigable by time, popularity or by random selection.

Recent Popular Posts from NotCot

We Make Money Not Art

we make money not art is a phenomenon that simply must be seen to be believed. Run by an international trio of curators, the site’s aesthetic is oddly fascinating. When the word “bricolage” comes up, we make money not art is the first blog that many people think of.

Recent Popular Posts from We Make Money Not Art

Those are some of our favorites. What are yours?

We’d love to know.

A month ago we wrote about Reuters launching an API called Open Calais, a technology that "does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents – recognizing people, places, companies, and events." I mentioned Calais in my Media08 presentation last week entitled Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It generated interest in the media-focused audience I presented to, so in this post we follow up with Reuters and ask what progress is being made. Specifically we look at what apps have been built so far on Calais and get feedback from Reuters’ Tom Tague.

Quick Recap of Open Calais

Open Calais is a Semantic Web technology – and in this case the next generation of the Clear Forest product, which Reuters acquired in April ‘07 (see our Dec ‘06 review). Alex Iskold’s post last month is ‘must read’ to understand what Open Calais is and why Reuters bought it. This diagram summarizes:

The API is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and Reuters told us last month that it is prepared to scale for a massive concurrent demand. The API is great for third party developers, because it gives them access to Reuters data. And it benefits Reuters, because it enables Reuters to aggregate metadata for its own uses.

Alex listed some possible uses: intelligent search engines that look for related content, automatically inserting links into raw text, structured alerts, on-the-fly text analysis within your browser.

Example Apps?

So it sounds great in theory, but are there any examples of Open Calais apps so far? Reuters has a “bounty” program set up, whereby developers are invited to create Open Calais applications and Reuters will pay for that. However, it seems there has been little – if any – takeup of the bounties.

Top of the list of wanted apps was a Wordpress plugin. Tom Tague, who is leading the Calais initiative at Reuters, noted in the forum that "unfortunately – and unexpectedly – we haven't seen any reasonable applications for the bounty process so we'll most likely be contracting for the development of the WordPress plugin." Perhaps the amount of the bounty in this case was an issue – Reuters only offered $5000 for the Wordpress plugin, which doesn't seem like much of an incentive.

So Reuters has been forced to take the initiative and release some apps of their own. One is a new web based document submission tool and viewer. There is some sign of action in the Open Calais forum, on a page where developers can list what they’re working on. A developer named Craig has built an example of Calais semantics using pure PHP and Abhay Kumar has a similar service. These are all ‘data input’ tools. For an ‘output’ example, check out Mark Choate’s RSS implementation of Calais data (example below).

Interview with Reuters’ Tom Tague

Clearly, it's early days. I asked Open Calais lead Tom Tague how the initiative is progressing? Tom replied that "we’re about where we expected to be in terms of applications for Calais." He told us that the service is "just a little over 45 days old and much of the effort we’re seeing is in building tools to explore the capabilities themselves."

At this time Open Calais has just over 1,500 developers signed up; with about 30% of those developers actually making calls to and experimenting with the service. "One of the more exciting things that’s going on," Tom Tague told us, "are several community-led efforts to build Calais libraries for Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET and others. These will provide a great accelerant for developers to gain access to the service."

How is Reuters using Calais In-house?

So, at this point there is nothing to see for non-developers – the apps that have come out so far are developer-focused and not something the rest of us can use. So my next question to Tom was: how is Reuters itself using the Calais technology?

Tom replied that Reuters has several things underway:

"We're in the process of adding rich metadata to over 20 years of historical news archives (many millions of articles) to improve searchability and organization. We’re doing a lot of work in automating and generally improving the efficiency of a massive real time content ingestion process. We’re working with one of the community platforms deployed for Reuters customers to improve the tagging and classification of user generated content. And, of course, we have significant efforts under way to generate “machine readable news” to drive low-latency algorithmic trading. All of these efforts are based on the same technology platform driving the Calais initiative."

Conclusion: Show Us The Apps!

I must admit that I was expecting to see some working apps by now. Perhaps it is a similar case to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s experience of Twine (published earlier today), the Semantic knowledge management service that received much early hype. Marshall thinks that Twine is underdone at this time and that the ‘consumer’ experience is lacking. Calais is much newer of course and, as Tom Tague said, it has only been out in the open for 45 days. So it would be unfair to compare the two efforts. Nevertheless, it would be great to see some compelling consumer-facing apps for Open Calais; even better would be to see something from Reuters that shows the public the benefits of semantic technologies.

Alex Iskold listed a number of consumer apps that could be built using Calais, by Reuters or external parties. I think people need to see at least one of those pretty soon – in order to translate the interest that Open Calais is generating from media and other people, into something non-geeks can see working on the Web and producing noticeably better information results. To paraphrase the famous Jerry Maguire quote, ‘Show me the apps!’.

Yahoo! announced this morning that the company will authenticate the identities of its 248 million users if they chose to login to OpenID supporting sites with their Yahoo! ID.

Like the AOL announcement of roughly the same thing in February of last year, the key question is whether Yahoo! will do anything substantive with OpenID or whether, like the AOL announcement, this will just be window dressing to legitimize advocates of OpenID. AOL’s support for OpenID appears to have resulted in little more.

Though there’s every reason to hope that today’s Yahoo! announcement will lead to ongoing, meaningful advocacy of OpenID by the company and then a future wherein Yahoo! sites accept OpenID from other providers – there’s also plenty of reason to be concerned that neither will occur and that Yahoo! interests are really only served by spreading the use of Yahoo! ID further around the web.

Nothing but a few information pages are live at Yahoo! yet, though the announcement went out a few hours ago. Those pages say that users will need to enable OpenID for their Yahoo! accounts; there’s no info I can find on how to do that and other sites say they can’t find an OpenID server when I try to use my Yahoo! ID that way. Silly me, nothing will be live until the last day of January it turns out.

Far more is possible

There’s no information about what a Yahoo! OpenID will look like, either. Will it just be a dumb login or will the company offer important functionality like multiple personas (for privacy and user control), search friendly microformats and anti-phishing technology? There’s a wide variety of ways to implement OpenID. I’d recommend you check out the site SpreadOpenID for a feature comparison of a large number of OpenID providers. Just authenticating OpenID is only the beginning, there’s a wide range of features offered by various vendors too.

Public legitimacy and user numbers are great for the OpenID movement to receive from Yahoo! but I hope they will also contribute a significant amount of money. It sure seems to me that the whole thing could use some dedicated staff in order to put some meat on the bones.

What are Yahoo’s interests?

One way to look at today’s announcement is that Yahoo! will now know what other services its users use around the web and big yellow and purple buttons will be spread hither and yon. Sounds great for Yahoo! but if you’ve chosen another OpenID provider who better satisfies your needs – that doesn’t mean much to Yahoo! right now.

What incentive does Yahoo! have to take the next step and offer full support to OpenID in general? Not much right now. In theory that could lead to access to user information from a wider number of users from other communities but when you’re at the top of the hill with 248 million users that might not seem so important.

In theory if Google were to start accepting OpenID logins from Yahoo! users then the floodgates would open and Yahoo! would have to return the favor – but I don’t know if we should hold our breath. Google has opened up to any OpenID login on commenting for Blogger but we’ll see how much further that goes.

What’s needed next

As a peripheral observer of the OpenID movement I probably ought not be so bold as to offer my suggestions for what steps should be taken next – today’s announcement really is a big win for the OpenID community – but I’m an impatient blogger so I am going to do just that.

There needs to be a comprehensive campaign of public education about the value of OpenID in general. If Yahoo! would communicate with its users about these matters in a high-profile way that would be great. How many AOL users know they have an OpenID? Not very many.

Yahoo! should accept inbound OpenID from other providers. Have you seen the way that Basecamp and Ma.gnolia allow users to associate an OpenID with their in-house accounts? That could be a good model for Yahoo! to follow. If OpenID is about openness and not just about extending your own brand elsewhere, something like that has to happen.

Some of these major vendors need to put some money on the table. Presumably there are Yahoo! staff focused on OpenID and related matters, but neutral third parties need to be funded to move the entire agenda forward. I’m sure this is in the works but it’s very important.

The pace of OpenID’s advance is encouraging by some standards – 3 years ago effectively no one had heard of it, two years ago it was a pipe dream and one year ago the ball started rolling. This is the internet, though, and three years ago YouTube didn’t exist. No one would cheer for the progress of online video today if it were crawling forward the way OpenID has. The benefits of online video are clearly communicated and there is money on the table, though.

OpenID is a matter of usability, data portability, user rights and will someday be a competitive necessity for vendors if implemented right. Today’s announcement is good news, but let’s not throw too big a party yet.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick’s influential post earlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold’s analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on to position the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph – which Sir Tim labeled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!

Note that Berners-Lee wasn’t specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):

1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents — "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.

The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:

"So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."

Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "…at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected – for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.

What’s more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term "thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system." The following scenario sums it up very nicely:

"Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Conclusion

I’m very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I’m not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term ‘Graph’ or ‘Social Graph’. It really doesn’t matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this ‘next level’ of the Web. That’s what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.

Incidentally, it’s great to see Tim Berners-Lee ‘re-using’ concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it’s fantastic he is reaching out to the ‘web 2.0′ community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.

Related: check out Alex Iskold’s Social Graph: Concepts and Issues for an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex’s latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).