Keynote: Our Online Identity (Chris Messina)

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