MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability

Yesterday MySpace, Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket (also owned by News Corp), and Twitter announced the Data Availability Initiative. While I could write at length about how this shows the big companies have already realized how to diminish the DataPortability group's brand by linking anything they do "data portability," that isn't the point of this post. The crux of the announcement yesterday was that shortly MySpace would begin allowing third-parties to embed MySpace profile information within their own services in the name of "data portability". Unfortunately, the details around this remain buzzword-laden at best.

Their press release yesterday stated:

Additionally, rather than updating information across the Web (e.g. default photo, favorite movies or music) for each site where a user spends time, now a user can update their profile in one place and dynamically share that information with the other sites they care about. MySpace will be rolling out a centralized location within the site that allows users to manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to engage with.

At first glance this seems like a great thing. MySpace is partnering with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter to solve a pain point on the web; the inability to keep parts of your profile in sync around the web where you'd like them to be. The announcement didn't however offer any insight into how this would work beyond that, "the MySpace Data Availability initiative uses OAUTH [sic] and Restful APIs as its core technology underpinnings." After this announcement I had the pleasure of speaking with a reporter who was on the briefing call. He explained that MySpace said that due to their terms of service the participating sites (e.g. Twitter) would not be allowed to cache or store any of the profile information. In my mind this led to the Data Availability API being structured in one of two ways: 1) on each page load Twitter makes a request to MySpace fetching the protected profile information via OAuth to then display on their site or 2) Twitter includes JavaScript which the browser then uses to fill in the corresponding profile information when it renders the page. Either case is not an example of data portability no matter how you define the term!

To make this worse one of the pieces of profile information made available is a list of a MySpace user's friends. Once again there are two reasonable ways to do this: 1) MySpace provides a user's friends as a list of hashed email addresses to Twitter or 2) MySpace provides a user's friends as a list of MySpace usernames. While the hashed email route would certainly be simpler and easier for sites like Twitter to match against their own user database, I highly doubt this will be the implementation due to concerns around undesired account linking. Rather I think MySpace will choose to provide a list of other MySpace usernames. What this means is that in order for Twitter to make use of the information they must encourage all of their users to fill in their MySpace account on Twitter so that they can map a MySpace username to a Twitter username. Obviously in the best interests of MySpace to have more of their profiles linked to from around the web thus increasing page rank, visitors, and thus ad revenue.

At the end of the day it seems that MySpace is trying to become a large centralized profile repository on the internet. One where information might be available but certainly not allowed to be actually moved outside the network's walls. A good try, but just as no one would like Microsoft own identity for the entire web with Passport I fail to see how others will let MySpace own all of the profiles.

Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

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Ignite Sf Slidecasts Available

| View | Upload your own

Two weeks we had an Ignite at the DNA Lounge where 17 great speakers shared their thoughts. Rashmi Sinha, one of the founders of the newly funded Slideshare (congrats!), kindly synced the audio to the slides for all of them.

The embedded slidecast is an informative talk by Yahoo's Christian Crumlish on antisocial design patterns. io9's Annalee Newitz talkd about how you to can get into Giant Monsters and John Adams spoke about how he created a digital message board for our SF venue, the DNA Lounge. For something more on the humorous side click-thru for Ted Rheingold's 2009 Report About the Online Activity of Cats and Dogs.

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Tomtom-Tele Atlas Deal To Go Through; Nokia-NAVTEQ Next

Last summer GPS manufacturer Tomtom successfully fought off rival Garmin to acquire mapping data provider Tele Atlas (alternately some would say that Garmin successfully raised the cost of purchasing Tele Atlas)(Radar post). Now according to Bloomberg the deal has gotten approval from the EU, but not without wrangling.

The commission staff had said that it wanted TomTom to address worries that the pricing for maps might become prohibitive after the takeover. The commission's solution was to create a new map supplier by compelling TomTom to sell rights to its database.

The Dutch company instead promised in December in a letter that the relationship between Tele Atlas and its customers ``will remain exactly the same.''

And why wouldn't Tomtom promise this? In my opinion the whole point of the merger was to create a new revenue stream for Tomtom by selling mapping data to its competitors (and other customers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). I am sure that another major goal behind the merger is to cut costs and improve the process of collecting mapping data by taking advantage of all of its car navigation systems (like the Dash does).

The next major deal waiting to go through in the geo space is Nokia's acquisition of mapping data provider NAVTEQ (which Nokia is doing for similar reasons). Will the EU make the same demands of Nokia?

Nokia, NAVTEQ, and Tele Atlas will all be speaking at Where 2.0 next week at the SFO Marriott.

Where Week in the Bay Area (May 10th- 17th)

Where 2.0 starts next week on May 12th, but that's not evening the beginning of the geo-related activities that some people are calling "Where Week". Here are the events that I am aware of so far.

Saturday, May 10th: Make your own map of San Francisco at an OSM Mapping party. Details TBD. No GPS required. More info.

Sunday, May 11th: Fly UAVs with Chris Anderson and the folks from PictEarth at an "airfield available at the former Alameda Naval Air Station nearly Oakland (right across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco) and could fly on the afternoons of Sunday, May 11th or Monday, May 12." Post-flight drinks are on Chris. More Info.

Monday, May 12th: Where 2.0 starts this morning with workshops. That evening Where Ignite & Launchpad will be at the SFO Marriott and is open to the public (as are the bars). It will feature a mix of 14 launching companies and short-form presentations. More Info.

Tuesday - Wednesday, May 13th & 14th: Where 2.0 keynotes start each morning at 9AM. The first morning kicks off with Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock and John Hanke of Google. Throughout the following days we'll hear from Microsoft, Yahoo, Loopt, Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ, The conference ends with a talk on mapping activists from Erik Hersman.

Thursday, May 15th: Also today there will be meetings on the Burning Earth project. Contact bman.deletethis at burningman.com for details. Finally, there is also a Data Sharing Summit this day at the Computer History Museum. Any discussion about user data eventually turns to location. More info.

Friday, May 16th: Rest. Make your own map of Sunnyvale at an OSM Mapping party. It starts at Yahoo! No GPS required. More info.

Saturday - Sunday, May 17th & 18th: The second WhereCamp, an independent unconference, will be held at the Googleplex both days. Last years was a great time to talk about the impact of all of the Where 2.0's announcements. More info.

If there anymore geo-hacker events leave them in the comments.

Brady: Sorry for the re-posting. We recently upgraded to MT4 and have been having problems posting from clients; re-posting through the web interface.

Brady: The second OSM party is Friday, not Thursday.

Macs in the Enterprise

In every O’Reilly conference and event I've been to, the number of Mac laptops is disproportionately high: I would say at least around a quarter (if not more) in most of our conferences. The most common answer I hear is that the Mac combines an elegant UI, a suite of useful software, and a Unix command line. O'Reilly does tilt towards the “alpha geek” crowd, but one wonders if mainstream companies are beginning to allow Apple products (including iPhones) in their networks.

Business Week’s most recent cover story is on the growing interest in Apple computers among corporate users. I was expecting the article to include some estimates for the corporate market, or at least the results of a recent survey. It was after all the cover story of the U.S. edition.

I do recognize that estimating Apple’s share of the corporate market is difficult. Apple itself does not provide corporate sales estimates and according to the article, it doesn't even have much of a sales force dedicated to the space. What Apple provides are sales for Desktops and Portable PC’s:

Starting Q3-2006, the share of portables jumped to 60% and has remained slightly above that number. Apple began moving to Intel processors in Q1-2006 and by August 2006 the entire line of Apple PC's had switched over. The graph for revenues (Desktops vs. Portables) is essentially the same. In Q2-2008, portables grew 61%, compared to the prior year, and now account for close to 2 in 3 units sold.

As the author points out, Apple’s secrecy and large margins may hamper it in the corporate market, where buyers prefer transparency and bargains. Overseas, particularly in the developing world, Macs are too expensive for most. With the introduction of expensive models (e.g. MacBook Air) the article estimates that the average price for a Mac is now about $1,526: too pricey even for large American companies, unless of course Apple is willing to forgo their fat margins and negotiate. Why would Apple want that when consumers seem willing to pay for their products? With more and more tasks moving to the cloud, expensive Macs will be even harder to justify. So while more companies might be willing to allow Macs, I would be surprised if Apple makes inroads in the corporate space.

My pet peeve: MS-Excel 2008 for the Mac is quite unstable, and I think the 2004 version is superior. In the corporate market a stable and easy-to-use spreadsheet is a must.

If you work for a large company they probably tightly limit what machines you can use. Luckily for me, O’Reilly allows the use of any (Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, …) computer.

Ignite Boston 3

The third Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, May 29, from 6 to 10pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. This time, we're using two floors at Tommy Doyle's, so the acoustics will be better than our first event there. From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we'll have a couple of special keynote presentations by Jonathan Zdziarski of iPhone notoriety and John Viega of Security notoriety to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto guest speakers who'll catch you up on the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. Don’t blink or you’ll miss their lightning-fast, five-minute presentations. During intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and O’Reilly’s own editors. Join us Thursday, May 29, for a fun, energetic evening of talking, learning, collaborating and drinking!

Check out the events and activities of previous our Ignite events.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend.

Presentation Guidelines

Ignite is a user-generated event. If you’re interested in speaking, then submit a proposal for consideration.

Presentations must:

• Be no longer than 5 minutes
• Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!)
• Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint and Keynote, and PDF] with standard AV equipment
• Did we mention, no Sales Pitches.

We hope to see you there.

The battle for the cloud

Andy Kessler has a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, The War for the Web:

Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It's never good to overpay. But the software giant - whose stock has flatlined for eight years - was onto the right strategy in looking to the Web for growth....

With the Microsoft/Yahoo deal breakdown, everyone assumes Google walks away with the prize. Not so fast. This contest is just starting. For Microsoft or Google or anyone else to win, they need four key elements of an end-to-end strategy:

- The Cloud. The desktop computer isn't going away. But as bandwidth speeds increase, more and more computing can be done in the network of computers sitting in data centers - aka the "cloud."...

- The Edge. The cloud is nothing without devices, browsers and users to feed it....

- Speed. - Speed. Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations....

- Platform. ...Having a fast cloud is nothing if you keep it closed. The trick is to open it up as a platform for every new business idea to run on, charging appropriate fees as necessary....

Andy's analysis is all in those ellipses. Succinct, on-point, and refreshingly insightful about the true drivers of Web 2.0. And I can't help pointing out that the Wall Street Journal has now noticed the fundamental premise of our Velocity conference: "Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations."

If Velocity were a movie, don't you think that quote might be on the movie poster?

The Corporation's Two Bodies

The New York Times quotes Laura Martin of Soleil Securities, as saying "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest." The sense of horror here--that management could actually put the interests of employees ahead of the interests of investors--is interesting, to say the least. It raises an important question that's really almost theological in nature. It is most certainly theological in, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "the promised land where every coin is marked In God We Trust, but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. ("Autobiography," A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958, New Directions)

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Fermi's Paradox and the End of Cheap Oil

I've been thinking of Fermi's Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail.

What if the answer to Fermi's paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource -- and one that won't last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie's contentions are correct, we're truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

The idea that peak oil is far from a fringe idea was brought home by a recent NY Times story, For Exxon Mobil, $10.9 Billion Profit Disappoints:

...even as it posted the second-most profitable quarter in its history, Exxon’s earnings managed to disappoint investors because of a drop in oil production. Shares closed down $3.37, to $89.70, on a day the Dow industrial average rose 189.87 points.... Record oil prices have lifted corporate profits to new heights throughout the industry but they are also masking an increasingly tough business environment for international oil companies, marked chiefly by rising development costs and stagnating hydrocarbon production.

The connection between the idea of Peak Oil and Fermi's paradox came back to mind after I read Nick Bostrom's piece in Technology Review, Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

...the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come.

Bostrom's provocative thesis is this: once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we've narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come:

The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some technology--perhaps some very powerful weapons tech nology--that causes its extinction.

Bostrom speculates about everything from nuclear war to gray goo to germ warfare to asteroid strikes as the locus of possible Great Filters. While diminished access to readily available natural resources after a crash of civilization is, like all of these other scenarios, merely food for thought, it seems to be a thought worth sharing. In any event, I recommend the movie.

Maker Faire mimesis and open speculation

O'Reilly's Make magazine and the Maker Faire that we're hosting today and tomorrow in San Mateo, California have been described in many ways, ranging from a revival of the mid-20th-century love for Popular Mechanics magazine to an exciting new impetus for teaching children about science. During my six hours there today, I noted its strong connections to powerful and fundamental human urges toward creation, mastery, and the reproduction of our own culture.

Some of the Maker Faire centers are devoted to the kind of do-it-yourself projects shown in our magazine. Anyone from a four-year-old to a mechanically adept adult can find challenge and satisfaction at these tables. Projects in another building took a big step up, showcasing the brain children of engineers who devoted their spare time to building games and toys or aiding their communities with research projects. A number of the booths seemed to be run by Renaissance men and women who were making a living from their creative combinations of art and technology.

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Mondrian, Just the First Internal Google Tool Be Released Via App Engine?

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python and Google employee, has released a version of the internal Google code-checking tool Mondrian via the Python mailing list (text after the jump). The new app is called Code Review and was built with almost all new code on the Django framework. Code Review uses a lot of the same concepts and infrastructure that Mondrian does including Big Table.

There are differences. Code Review uses the open source software control system Subversion (also the backend of Google Code) whereas Mondrian works with Perforce, the commercial tool used internally at Google. Code Review will eventually be made open source.

Mondrian first became public at a Google Tech Talk. At the time Niall Kennedy wrote up a great summary of the talk.

It's great that Guido is releasing this and that Google is letting him. I am impressed. Could AppEngine be the way that Google releases its most useful internal tools? I've talked to several Google employees about the amount of code Google open sources and it's always less than they would like. The problem they face is that the code is tied to Google infrastructure and the hours required to de-couple it make the projects a non-starter.

Previous to the release of App Engine (and thus the exposure of Big Table) Code Review would have been one of those non-starters. Since he was able to rely on the Big Table implementation in App Engine the job became a lot easier. What other tools of Google's would you want (any of these)? I wonder if anything new will come out in time for Google I/O.

(via Reddit Programming)

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