Keynote: Our Online Identity (Chris Messina)

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session details: Keynote: Our Online Identity

incidentally: Chris Messina founded BarCamp.

  • Why are we still using the awful term "Web 2.0"?
  • five rules:
    • the perpetual beta - a process for engaging customers
    • share and share alike
    • ignore the distinction between client and server
    • open APIs and standard protocols always win
    • "lock-in" comes from proprietary data and formats
  • question is not, "When does Web 3.0 come," it is "does open source still matter?"  Not like it used to.
  • technology is becoming humanized and humans are becoming technologized or "cyborganic" (example: iPhone)
  • identity: who are you?
    • logins have little to do with who you are, just provide secret information
    • Facebook is assertive in suggesting people you may know
    • Facebook is also adamant about using real names instead of aliases, and for the most part people are OK with that
  • The Social Web
    • "a social revolution in how people connect and share"
    • BarCamp and Coworking represent a desire of networked people to connect in person
  • activity streams
    • Twitter meets a need Blogger does not because you're joining an existing conversation instead of trying to get people to listen to you
    • Dunbar's Number: the number of monkeys in a group who can keep up social ties
    • "...we're addicted to our friends.  When the computer lets us access our friends, we look like we're addicted to the computer" (Danah Boyd)
    • how do you follow this content?  RSS and Atom are not adequate
  • anatomy of an activity: who did what to what where?
    • basic online activities to track: blog entries, notes, photos, videos, bookmarks
  • The OpenSocial Stack: decentralized framework for sharing personal data among sites
    • Facebook stack is simple: identity, friends, feed -- APIs to tie into each of the three
    • recent proposal: identity, discovery, authorization, profile, friends, streams
    • Facebook lets you control what info is public outside and inside your circle of friends
    • assertion: the more control you give people, the more they will trust & use your service
    • more than 90% of Twitter accounts have been voluntarily made public by their owners
  • performative identity
    • problem Facebook is having: shared content cannot easily be unshared or deleted -- sharing gives up control
    • Flickr problem: merging with Yahoo led to merging accounts (for legal terms-of-service reasons), which freaked people out
  • Copyright vs. Creative Commons for online info
  • Cloud computing
    • OpenID has the most potential in the cloud, where the desktop computer is not consistent
  • Government
    • new movement toward transparency motivated by failure of opacity
    • recovery.gov is the most visible sign of open-source acceptance
    • open source as a model for government -- participation and agency
    • trust+transparency make open source work
  • Work on stuff that matters!
    • work on stuff that matters more to you than money
    • create more value than you capture
    • take the long view