Krishwords

Emre Sokullu visualizes an open source search engine that can kill Google. Interesting take.

Briefly, Google@Home is an open source, distributed clone of Google. We already have many open source search engine projects - Apache Lucene (which is composed of Nutch and Hadoop distributed file system sub-projects) being the most credible one. So this Google@Home concept can be based on one of those open source search engines. Of course it will have a long way to go before reaching Google’s utility and reach. But more importantly, Google@Home will be a distributed, decentralized system. What this means is that our desktop computers’ idle time will become a part of this new search engine’s computational power. In effect this allows it to compete with Google’s beefy data centers.

When talking about the Amazon-Statsaholic standoff, O’Reilly Radar > Tim O’Reilly says the following

Meanwhile, Ron should have been more flexible and respectful. It is, after all, Alexa’s data that he’s using — and only that data. He’s trading off their name and the service that they built. The value that he added was in user interface and usability (the ability to compare multiple sites, rather than the simple pairwise comparison that Alexa itself provided.) When they made him a nice offer, he should have taken it. And he should have worked harder to build out differentiated value in the site, so it isn’t just direct competition for Alexa’s own offerings.

This explanation puzzles me. I may be missing something here but I would like to have a reasonable explanation to a question that arises in my mind after reading Tim’s post. He says Statsaholic is wrong because it is feeding off Alexa’s data. Isn’t Alexa taking the data of every other website in the world to build their business. If Alexa can do it, why not Statsaholic? Alexa didn’t ask my permission before acquiring data about my website. If I have to take a stance like Amazon, I would consider Alexa’s action as a clear violation of my privacy. I could even consider Alexa to be a stalker. When they have their business model based on the data of other’s website, I find the Amazon’s lawsuit just greedy. Can someone explain me if I am missing something here?

There is a new initiative to solve the vendor lock-in issues in the web services industry (Should I say Web 2.0 industry?).

What is Open Web?

Open Web is a collection of technologies and standards that enable individuals to disclose their identity, feeds, activities, friends, and social networks, while preserving their ownership over this information and enabling them to keep their privacy.

What is NOT Open Web?

Anything that is proprietary, locked in in format or provider is NOT Open Web. Open Web is about open, extensible, and license free standards.

In short this is a collection of technologies and open standards that enable individuals to disclose their identity, feeds, activities, friends, and social networks, while preserving their ownership over this information and enabling them to keep their privacy.

The goals are to enable you to:

1. Claim who you are without being locked into a proprietary stack (i.e. you own your identity)
2. Reveal as much or as little about your identity as you like
3. Associate feeds with your identity
4. Associate other identities with your identity
5. Claim membership of social networks, associations, groups, and other collective structures
6. Act as a repository of your activities, attention, and content

This will all be built on existing, open standards. The following lists technologies that are being considered as building blocks for Open Web.

* OpenID for identity
* Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) for activities
* FOAF for personal information and information about relations
* OPML for feeds

You can think of this as the nexus of your identity. You own it. You can take it with you in a simple XML file and anyone could write a client that will give you some very cool benefits based on this. I’ll not get into too much wand waving about what this will/can enable just yet, but just use your imagination for a moment. The social network becomes implicit to the Internet itself. No need for these walled garden social networks. Your identity isn’t being sprinkled about countless buckets in which you have no control. Content is mobile, Identity is mobile. Later we’ll talk about how behavior can be mobile too. The user is in control. Ok, enough wand waving for now.

Talking at Future of Web Apps conference, Kevin Rose announced that Digg is going to support OpenID. He seems to have claimed that they are thinking about it for quite sometime now. It is pretty exciting to see OpenID taking off in such a big way.

A OpenID promoter, JanRain has joined with global name registry to offer .name based openID. The intiative called freeyourid.com offers you .name based openID. You can register firstname.lastname.name as your openID. For example, I have registered krishnan.subramanian.name. They are now offering 90 days free trial. If you think this is convenient, you can then continue using this id for $10.95 per year (which is the usual cost for a .name domain but, here, you only get a subdomain here because another person with the same last name but different first name can still use your part of lastname.name). For more info, read this post by CEO of JanRain. I am not sure if I want to pay $11 for just a subdomain when I can buy a domain name for the same cost and activate openID with just a 2 line code in my website. If it is around five bucks a year, I might consider continuing after the trial period.

Update: Check out Dmitry’s post on this topic.

Jon Udell talks about social network fatigue and argues in favor of a common identity system

Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal with?

I’m sure everyone will agree that sign-in protocols should be extracted and made common. What else can and should be refactored? What can’t and shouldn’t?

I strongly favor openID as the standard for a common identity system.

Update: Tim O’ Reilly has a followup post to Jon Udell’s post. I liked the following quote from Tim’s post.

To use Ben Smith’s analogy about the internet as mother ship: if you were a proprietary LAN vendor trying to fight the internet, it was game over. But if you were a LAN vendor who was on the right bandwagon, you became Cisco.

Symantec Press Release reports that

Symantec is taking a user-centric approach, making the identity service protocol-independent. The service will interact with websites supported by different identity exchange protocols, such as CardSpace and OpenID.

This is a good news for OpenID and a big step in convincing other companies to support OpenID. I am waiting for a day when companies like Google, Yahoo, Zoho, etc support OpenID based authentication. I would prefer a scenario where I select and choose different office applications without the worry of using different logins. I should be able to use Gmail, Google Calendar, Flickr, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Writer, Jotspot Wiki, etc with the same login id. These different web applications, from different companies, should be like “modules” in my own personalized “web desktop” and openID being my authentication mechanism. The way these companies are adopting to open standards, I feel a bit confident that we will have a scenario like this in the near future.

I am going to write a few posts on OpenID and the need to have open standards in authentication systems. Before I do that, I should implement openID in my blog. I have implemented it and I strongly urge you to use your openID to leave comments in this blog.

I am an advocate of anything open (open source, open media, open standards, open access, etc). I was happy when the scientific journal Nature announced that it will use an open peer review model. But Wall Street Journal reports that Nature has given up on this approach. The reason? Lack of participation. it is sad that scientific community is not supportive of such an “open effort”.

But Nature, which is published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said in an editorial in Thursday’s issue that it was ending the experiment due to lack of participation. The journal found that in the competitive world of scientific publishing, the vast majority of authors were unwilling to post their papers and few scientists were willing to criticize their peers’ work publicly by posting comments on Nature’s Web site.

Ryan Stewart correctly points out one important requirement for the success of Rich Internet Applications

I think cross platform RIAs are important, I think they’re in the spirit of the web and I think reaching the widest possible user base that you can is important.