A lot has been said about Facebook’s new location feature, which is available via its iPhone client or HTML5 mobile web app. It’s a shrewd move, to be sure, and by now it’s clear that the company has ambitions to be the next decade’s tech behemoth. While Microsoft has a grip over stand-alone computing, Apple over mobile devices, and Google over search, Facebook has managed to become the de facto gateway for social information.

One indication of how powerful it is comes from the following article:

Places allows your friends to tag you when they check in somewhere, and Facebook makes it very easy to say “yes” to allowing your friends to check in for you. But when it comes to opting out of that feature, you  are only given a “not now” option (aka ask me again later). “No” isn’t one of the easy options.

This warning doesn’t come from a computer security forum, the EFF, or a group of interested hackers. It comes from the ACLU, the groundbreaking organization that aims to protect Americans’ civil rights. In other words, Facebook privacy is now being watched by the same group pushing for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. A powerful place to be – but perhaps an indication that Zuckerberg needs to re-assess his take on privacy?

In some ways, it doesn’t matter. Software projects like Status.net and Cliqset (Youtube link) are establishing a resilient, decentralized network where privacy is in users’ hands by default. These new applications are easy to use, accessible and ready for both private individuals and enterprises to pick up – and as such, represent the real future of social data on the web.

I’ve submitted a talk for South By Southwest 2011:

Building the User-centered Web

By establishing a general standard for social application interactions, the services and technologies used to make connections become less relevant; the Internet is people, one big social network, and users no longer have to worry about how they connect. We can all get on with communicating and collaborating in contextually appropriate ways. In this talk, I’ll discuss how to build a decentralized, user-centered web using existing and emerging technologies. I hope you’ll join me.

If you’d like to see this at the next SXSW, please visit this page to vote.

Paul Adrian also has submitted a talk, this time about the future of journalism, and how technology can help:

Technology Can Create a Press for the People

I believe it is time for a “news” revolution. A new press should produce comprehensive streams of rigorously non-partisan original reporting on the issues that are most important to our lives. Once informed, we the people should have a space where we can discuss the important issues of our times without having to submit to intolerance, deceptive campaigning and fear-mongering. Through the use of technology and new business models, news innovators can provide more credible information and space for civil discussions. The goal is to empower citizens by providing access to superior reporting and the platform for community organization necessary for the People once again to become powerful participants in democracy.

As well as being an award-winning journalist and technology entrepreneur, Paul is an inspiring speaker who is worth listening to. You can vote for his talk over here.

Banning sublets

Last week, the State of New York passed a bill that bans short-term rentals: specifically, no homeowner or renter may sublet their home for less than a month. The target is sites like AirBNB, an up and coming website that allows travelers to eschew pricey hotels – and their accompanying hotel room occupancy tax – in favor of private homes.

If the governor chooses to pass the legislation (as opposed to veto it), AirBNB will effectively be outlawed, and with it, a grassroots marketplace economy for short-term accommodation. New York State will have cemented hotels and bed & breakfasts as gatekeepers to the city for travelers who can’t stay with friends or relatives.

To me, this is an interesting reaction: it shows, once again, that established gatekeepers are terrified of the Internet. We’re used to that by now in the context of media content – we already know that newspapers, publishers, record companies and movie distributors aren’t as important as they were – but this is a scarcity-driven marketplace. It used to be that finding a safe, clean room in a strange city was a hard problem, so we turned to hotels as a trusted source. Running a hotel is in itself an expensive, tough business, and as a result there were a limited number in any given city, and the price went up according to demand. Although the hotel business is a ruthless game, it’s always been hotels competing with other hotels.

Now, though, we can visit websites like AirBNB and Couchsurfing, where private citizens can offer their homes to travelers, and the site will let us know who we can trust based on other peoples’ experiences. The marketplace has been blown wide open, and it turns out that a lot of us would rather go for a cheaper, friendlier option. I wouldn’t put money on New York blotting out short sublets for long.

Power to the people

We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this, in all kinds of market sectors. We’re already seeing ridesharing sites become popular, for example, blowing up the market previously owned by taxicabs and making it available to anyone who happens to be driving somewhere. Effectively this formalizes hitchhiking, making it both safer and more efficient.

It all comes down to one simple rule: People want to be free.

The Internet is opinionated: as a medium, it inherently works to empower people and eliminate hierarchies in society. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the most popular Internet companies hail from California; their philosophies are direct descendents of the civil rights activism that took place there in the sixties and seventies. In many cases, it’s even the same people. (Or – and here I put up my hand as the son of Berkeley “radicals” – their children.)

Gatekeepers – companies, structures or processes that act as exclusive barriers or filters – are not long for this world. Where gatekeepers exist, they do so because the alternative was inconvenient at the time when the gatekeeper became established – not because they’re inherently better than an empowered population. Those organizations, companies, and even governments, need to look at themselves very carefully and figure out what needs to be changed, before those things are changed for them.

Monday: “The plan is A! We’ll market it at A!”

Tuesday: “Actually, I was thinking B. A is stupid. Who would want to do that?”

Wednesday: “Goddamnit, we need to be working towards C. Why does no-one see that?”

Thursday: “Maybe A was right …”

Friday: “This team sucks.”

Hint: pick a direction and run. And make sure – just as your tech team does – that your management team has measurable metrics for success.

I’ve written a tutorial for writing XMPP-based web applications over at IBM DeveloperWorks:

Real-time web applications are networked applications, with web-based user interfaces, that display Internet information as soon as it’s published. Examples include social news aggregators and monitoring tools that continually update themselves with data from an external source. In this tutorial, you will create Pingstream, a small notification tool that uses PHP and JavaScript to communicate over the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), a set of XML technologies designed to support presence and real-time-communications functionality.

You can read the whole tutorial here. IBM have made it a featured article, commenting, “bet you have it up and running before lunch.” I hope you find it useful. (And don’t forget to check out my introduction to Activity Streams, also written for IBM.)

Photo: IBM by antonfortunato, released under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve written an introduction to the Activity Streams standard for IBM DeveloperWorks:

Enter Activity Streams, an evolving standard that extends Atom for expressing social objects. Although it is a young standard, Activity Streams is fast becoming the de facto method for syndicating activity between web applications. For example, MySpace, Facebook, and TypePad all now produce Activity Streams XML feeds. But this technology isn’t just for the consumer web environment. As corporate intranets and internal software become more social, solid business reasons support implementing Activity Streams as a feature. This article describes Activity Streams in detail, considers its potential uses in enterprise environments, and provides some examples for interpreting Activity Streams feeds using PHP.

The full article is over here.

I thought I’d list the third-party web applications I use on a daily basis to do my job. There are plenty more that I use for fun (Flickr) or find useful (Twitter) – but these are the things that have become integral to how I make money. I’d be interested to hear yours: if you post them to Twitter with the hashtag #myprowebapps, or leave them in the comments, I’ll do an update in a future post.

My apps, then:

• Gmail (email). I used to be a die-hard Mozilla Thunderbird user, but during my Elgg days I switched over. There are probably better email web apps to be using these days; ideally I’d like one that runs on my own infrastructure rather than in Google’s cloud. But with one tweak (I have a separate pane that keeps all starred messages at the top of the screen, so I know what to reply to imminently), the default interface is all I really need.
• Google Calendar (scheduling). I didn’t get into Google Calendar until I figured out how to sync it to my iPhone – and then it became invaluable. I get a reminder of imminent tasks wherever I am. Interoperability with Gmail for event invitations means I have an integrated system for keeping on top of calls and conferencing.
• Producteev (task management). Until I found this, I’d been using Remember the Milk for tasks, which I never really got into, despite buying a pro account. Integration with Google Calendar is perfect, and the iPhone app has its own push notifications. And for my purposes, it’s free, which is even better.
• Freckle (time management) has dramatically simplified the way I bill for my time. The integrated timer means I can effortlessly keep track of how many hours I’m spending on what project, and I get to export unbilled hours to a nicely-formatted automatic invoice. Offline access and the ability to mark invoices as paid would make me even happier.
• Beanstalk (source code management) is by far the best hosted subversion repository provider I’ve found. (Projects can also be hosted using Git.) It integrates with a bunch of different applications, including Basecamp and Zendesk, but so far I’ve only needed to tie it to Lighthouse.
• Lighthouse (issue management) is low on features compared to Trac (which I’ve used for years), and it’s true that I’d prefer an easy-to-use bug tracker that managed to incorporate things like Mylyn integration and bug priority levels. But when it comes to interacting with clients, given the choice between feature-packed and non-developer-friendly, I’ll pick the latter every time. Lighthouse is simple, well-designed and light years less painful to use than a tool like Bugzilla. It’s also proven pretty useful inside teams of developers, although there are usually complaints about missing features.

It should go without saying that I’m not involved with any of these companies, and none of them have paid me for this post. In fact, in the case of Freckle, Beantalk and Lighthouse, I happily pay them. I think subscription or one-off license charges are probably a better way for smaller software houses to fund their web applications, and I’m really glad to see these kinds of premium models become more popular.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and the apps you find useful in your work. Leave a comment or write your own post and tweet it with the hashtag #myprowebapps.

Here are some distributed social networking platforms and technologies designed to facilitate distributed social networking:

• Status.net
• DiSo
• 6D
• Kopal
• DSNP
• Noserub
• Appleseed
• OneSocialWeb
• Diaspora (included for completeness, but there isn’t any code yet)

Wow, that’s a lot! And following Diaspora’s flurry of both coverage and cash, you can bet there’ll be plenty more to come. But of all the projects listed above, I’d argue that only Status.net is orientated around consumer need. As a result, it’s the one most likely to survive, become self-sufficient and prosper. Several more – including DiSo and DSNP – are seeking to build out technologies that can support such products, rather than the products themselves. DiSo is certainly working with other vendors and projects, is full of super-smart people, and should do very well.

However, the others are basing their product on ideology and technology rather than a human use case. I worry that a lot of these projects will disappear – which is a shame, because they’re all doing great work.

Here’s a use case distinction I’ve been thinking about:

• A social networking platform allows you to communicate and share with a specific group or community.
• Distributed social networking software allows you to store and organize your own content and – optionally – share it with whoever you like.

Or to put it another way, in social networking platforms, sharing is the feature. In distributed social software, sharing is a feature. The two use cases are genuinely different: rather than being a competition between “monolithic” social communities and distributed social software, they’re used for different things. There is a place for both in the ecosystem – and there’s no real reason why they can’t work together.

As I pointed out in The Internet is People, in order to be successful, any social software you build either has to plug into an existing community, or be useful for the first user who joins. In distributed social software, you only ever have one user: distributed sharing, then, should be a piece of infrastructure that can be plugged into any kind of software.

A little pre-history

When I was a kid, I had an Atari 130XE. You’ve probably never heard of it. It was an 8-bit, all-in-one box that booted straight into BASIC; a flexible, well-built, sturdy computer.

There was just one problem: it wasn’t a ZX Spectrum or a Commodore Amiga.

At the time, Britain was undergoing a low-budget computing renaissance. Bedrooms up and down the country were filled with skinny boys (and yes, it was mostly boys) noisily loading games from cassette tapes and dutifully copying down source code listings from specialist magazines. The two engines of this renaissance were the Spectrum and the Amiga, and as such, the games, the tutorials and the social infrastructure were built for these two machines. Perhaps this helped me become more of a creative self-starter: I wrote my own games and stories instead of consuming other peoples’.

Later on, 16 bit computers became popular, and everyone upgraded to the Atari ST: a home machine powerful enough for creatives and musicians, but cool enough for game-playing kids. Except, perhaps inevitably, we had a PC. Running DOS. With a black-and-white Hercules display. Great if you wanted to plug economic figures through a spreadsheet, but lousy if you were a twelve-year-old who was mostly interested in playing The Secret of Monkey Island. Not only was the wholly PC incompatible with the Atari ST, but the PC was actually incompatible with itself: a game that worked on PCs with an EGA or VGA screen wouldn’t work with CGA or Hercules. Back then, the parts inside your computer were at least as important as the operating system you ran or the software you bought.

Plug and Play

Through heavy force and heavy lifting, Microsoft changed all that. Windows 95 was the first widely-accessible operating system that unified hardware platforms. Sure, you had to have an Intel-compatible processor, and it took them a while to get it right (for a while the system was redubbed “plug and pray”), but you didn’t have to mess with configuration files to get your computer working. This was a Big Deal.

Today, we’re used to not having to tinker with our machines. Windows will adapt to just about any hardware you throw it at, and even Linux has become an easy-to-use operating system (relatively speaking).

Better yet, we have data portability: in my house we’re running Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu, and I can move my documents between them interchangeably. Thanks to the web, and Java before it, we even have applications that don’t care what kind of operating system they run on. For an end user, things just work. That’s exactly how it should be.

Finally, computing is simple, data is interoperable and consumers are in control.

Uh oh: enter the portables

So just as we get a unified computing platform that’s easy to use and relatively simple for consumers to navigate, in comes a new device market that’s as fragmented and consumer-unfriendly as the computing market was in the eighties.

Android. iPhone OS. Windows 7 tablet edition. Windows Embedded Compact. Windows Phone. WebOS. ChromeOS. Kindle OS. Whew! It’s like 1986 all over again.

As a publisher or developer, figuring out which device to build for is a headache. Each one has a different operating system, possibly a different app store (something nobody had to worry about in the eighties), and a different set of underlying technologies. Do you exploit the iPad’s current success and develop for the locked-down Apple platform? Do you take advantage of Amazon’s huge built-in market and write a Kindle app? Do you hold out and wait for HP’s exciting-looking WebOS-powered tablet (which caused a storm recently by publicly moving away from Windows)?

Plug and Play (again)

The truth is, market forces are going to apply the same pressures to the mobile market that the personal computing sector felt in the early nineties. This story has played itself out several times now: one platform will emerge victorious. Judging by the lessons learned by IBM with their Personal Computer architecture, and both Microsoft and Linux for operating systems, it’s likely to be one which is:

• Open: anyone can add it to their system for little cost, allowing hardware manufacturers to maximize profits by concentrating on the device itself rather than the ecosystem around it
• Sustainable: it’s powered by a solid business ecosystem that will ensure the longevity of the platform
• Friendly: it’s a system for everyone, not just hobbyists or developers
• Flexible: it can be used in multiple contexts, from living rooms to science labs

By this measure, Apple is condemned to be a niche player, operating at the premium end of the market. Sure, right now technophiles everywhere are salivating over the iPad, but that will last until someone comes out with something nicer. In any event, Apple’s grasp is limited to the wealthier western nations – there are far more people seeking more affordable devices waiting in the wings in other places. The third world computer revolution is very much underway.

My bet, of course, is on web technologies. But it isn’t necessarily on the Internet: it’s time we separated web technologies from the World Wide Web. Indeed, connectivity isn’t ubiquitous, and isn’t likely to become ubiquitous world-wide for a very long time. Therefore, the ability to download, install and run apps offline, as we always have with software applications, is incredibly important.

With its Chrome Web App Store, Google is leading the way, and showing that it understands what it takes to create a next-generation application platform. It’s also shown leadership over HTML 5, which it is clearly investing in as a genuine method for powering both content and software. The genius is this: anyone can build using web technologies, and web technologies can run on virtually any hardware. Google makes its money through value-added services, like advertising (to allow both device manufacturers and software developers to supplement their incomes), its app store and underlying logic via some powerful APIs. It’s not an operating system, but for most end-users, they’re making the operating system irrelevant: it’s simply the thing that runs the web browser.

My advice: ignore the hardware

Computers as we know them today will always exist, but they won’t be for everybody. If you’re developing for non-technical end users, the plethora of hardware devices available to you is a red herring. You should be thinking of the web as the platform your products will be based on. Make no mistake: you need to become an expert in web technologies now – or, of course, find someone who is.

Images:

• My ‘new’ Atari 130 XE by qnr, released under a Creative Commons license.
• HTC Tablet PC – evolve by nDevilTV, released under a Creative Commons license.
• Amazon Kindle & Sony eBook by jblyberg, released under a Creative Commons license.
• iPad & Friends by Yutaka Tsutano, released under a Creative Commons license
• Web browsers by smemon87, released under a Creative Commons license

Enough people have asked me about this over the last year, that I thought I’d write a little more about why I don’t do social networking work.

Most regular readers will be aware that I co-founded Elgg, the open source social networking framework. If you weren’t, it’s not hard to work out: my last name is Werdmuller von Elgg, and my work centers around the open web. In fact, Elgg is so named because I had bought the domain name elgg.net for my personal email, and didn’t have anything to put there. When Dave Tosh and I conceived of the project, it seemed easier to put it there than anywhere else. (It’s a great domain name: short, memorable and not immediately definable.)

I also co-founded Curverider, the company created to provide commercial Elgg support, which allowed us to build it into the project it is today: an enormously popular social networking platform used by organizations like the WWF and the World Bank.

For various reasons, I chose to leave Elgg and Curverider last year to go freelance and work on some of my own projects. (The last version I was involved with in any way was 1.5 – since then I haven’t been privy to development decisions or involved in the process.) Because of this prior association, however, people still ask me about working on social networking projects all the time – whether that’s a distributed social network, a new platform, or an Elgg-based site.

My answer is always the same: I’d love to, but I can’t.

As you’d expect for a founder, I’m a shareholder in Curverider. As part of this, I am forbidden from competing with the company’s business (which, of course, is social networking – a rapidly growing portion of the entire software market, but that’s a conversation for another time). As a result, I don’t work on social networking platforms, and I’m unable to provide Elgg services, despite it being an open source framework. A process exists for me to obtain an exception for potentially competing products, but this would involve divulging the project and business model, which I don’t believe is an ethical way to treat a consultancy client’s information. So I don’t do it.

Of course, I’m available for web strategy advice, writing opportunities and development services in a range of other areas, including publishing, e-learning and mobile content. I’m also developing a few new ideas that you should see in action soon. As ever, if you’d like my feedback, please feel free to get in touch.